Specialist solar panels for schools in Nantwich
A school roof in Nantwich makes 6.5 times as much in May as it does in December, and the school year runs against that curve rather than with it. What we come back with is the usable roof area, the modelled output against your meter data, and the routes schools use to pay for it.
25.6% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 840 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 160 kWp, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Nantwich- 1 teaching block
- 2 hall and kitchen
- 3 sports hall
- 4 1960s block, no array
- first phase
- later phase
Illustrative layout for an estate of this size. The array is drawn at about 345 kWp, roughly 53 percent of the 650 kWp these three roofs would hold, because a school sizes to the load it can use in term time rather than to the roof it has: generation it cannot use is exported at a much lower rate than it pays to import. The hatched block carries no array because its structure has not been assessed, which on a school of that era is the usual starting point rather than an exception. Your own figures, and which of your blocks can take an array, come from the roof survey.
School rooftop solar across Cheshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Nantwich models at 840 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,077 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is about 5 percent below the mean across the towns we cover, so the case at this latitude rests almost entirely on using the output on site rather than exporting it.
Scaled up, a 160 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 16 miles away at Stoke-on-Trent, models at about 134,400 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 475 square metres of clear roof. We take the size from the nearest real application rather than a round number, so the example is anchored to something a planning officer has already seen.
Spread across the year that is about 34,400 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 6,000 kWh across December and January. SP Energy Networks / Electricity North West sets what may go back onto the network here, so the July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.
Nantwich ranks 1 of 8 towns we cover in Cheshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 790 to 840, a spread of 50 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 25,000 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.
What the planning record shows around Nantwich
There is no school entry for the CW5 postcode district in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. The register is dependable for anything from a megawatt upward and incomplete below it, and a school array is usually nearer a fifth of a megawatt, so this says more about the threshold than about Nantwich.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 16 miles from Nantwich, at Stoke-on-Trent: 160 kWp at Ormiston Meridian Academy, Sandon Road, applicant EEnergy Group plc, which is with the planning authority. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Staffordshire planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Nantwich school
25.6 percent of the annual output modelled for Nantwich arrives in the two months a school uses least (EU PVGIS v5.2). Term ends in the third week of July and the buildings stay largely empty until September. May is the strongest single month here at 13.9 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.
The inverse holds at the other end. December and January together return only 4.5 percent of the year, and those are the months with the heating, the lighting and the full timetable all running at once. The roof makes 6.5 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.5 to one. 74 percent of the year arrives between April and September, and the point of that figure is not that the summer half goes unused, because April, May and June are full teaching months that draw hard. It is that the concentration peaks in the few weeks at the end of it when the building is shut.
Summed over the year, about 49 percent of what a school roof makes arrives while the school is open. For a business trading every weekday the equivalent is roughly 71 percent. Nothing about Nantwich changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
The daily curve does the same thing in miniature. Load drops sharply after about three o'clock, generation does not, so the last three hours of a summer afternoon are pushing into an empty building unless something absorbs them. Half hourly meter data is the only way to see how much.
A Nantwich governing body should read that as a sizing constraint, not a reason to stop. The base load that runs through the holidays, servers, comms, refrigeration, ventilation and hot water, is the floor the array should be built up from, and everything above it has to be justified by storage, export or summer occupancy.
We set out the full treatment of the school year against the generation curve on the home page, and what it does to a payback figure under costs.
- generated while the school is open
- generated at a weekend or in the holidays
The same figures as a table
| Month | Session days | Output, kWh per kWp | School open | School closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | 20 | 20 | 13 | 7 |
| Feb | 15 | 36 | 19 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 69 | 47 | 22 |
| Apr | 12 | 100 | 40 | 60 |
| May | 17 | 117 | 64 | 53 |
| Jun | 21 | 117 | 82 | 35 |
| Jul | 11 | 116 | 41 | 75 |
| Aug | 0 | 99 | 0 | 99 |
| Sep | 20 | 76 | 51 | 25 |
| Oct | 17 | 46 | 25 | 21 |
| Nov | 21 | 26 | 18 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 18 | 9 | 9 |
| Year | 190 | 840 | 409 | 431 |
How many schools Cheshire East has
Cheshire East has 157 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 57,006 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 126 primary, 23 secondary, 6 special and 2 further education, at an average of 363 pupils a site. A ratio of 5.5 to one tells you where the roof area is. It is not with the 126 primaries, which mostly offer a hall and a teaching block each, but with the larger sites that were built with a sports hall and a dining block attached.
Where a multi-academy trust holds several of those sites, surveying the estate in one pass beats taking a roof at a time. The design work, the connection applications and the procurement paperwork are the same job repeated, and a trust that runs them together gets a better answer on all three.
Grid connection through SP Energy Networks / Electricity North West
SP Energy Networks / Electricity North West is the network operator here, and their answer on export capacity shapes the design. Any commercial array above 3.68 kW per phase connects under G99 rather than G98, and the application fixes what you are allowed to push back onto the network. If the local network is tight, limiting export rarely breaks the case here: most of the generation is consumed on site while the building is working.
Across Cheshire the planning database records 157 solar schemes totalling 582 MW, of which 13 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Start with the Nantwich roof
A survey in Nantwich starts with three things from you. Give us the postcode, the approximate roof area and, if you can get it from your supplier, twelve months of half hourly readings. What comes back is a usable area figure per block, output modelled against your own load rather than an average, and the ways a Nantwich school can pay for it.
Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges the survey and passes your details to an MCS-certified installation partner so they can quote. We do not carry out the installation ourselves.
Questions governors ask us about Nantwich schools
- How much would a school roof near Nantwich generate?
- Modelled at 840 kWh per kWp a year, a 160 kWp array on a Nantwich school models at about 134,400 kWh. What decides whether that is worth doing is how much of it the school uses itself, not the total. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
- How does the school year affect a solar scheme in Nantwich?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.6 percent of the Nantwich generating year lands in July and August (EU PVGIS v5.2), and a closed school still runs servers, comms, refrigeration and ventilation. What that base load does not absorb is either stored, exported under an agreement with SP Energy Networks / Electricity North West, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
- Which network operator handles the connection at a Nantwich school?
- Applications go to SP Energy Networks / Electricity North West, who run the network across Cheshire. An export-limited offer usually still works for a school, because the summer surplus is the part you were least likely to be paid much for anyway.
- What does Cheshire East require for solar on a school building?
- Roof-mounted solar on a non-domestic building often falls within permitted development under Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order, subject to limits on how far the panels stand proud of the roof plane and, above a threshold, to prior approval from Cheshire East on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Cheshire East before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Nantwich?
- Cheshire East has 157 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 57,006 pupils on roll. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools. We survey across the whole of that area, and where a trust holds several sites we look at them in one pass.