How much would a school roof near Wilmslow generate?

Modelled at 801 kWh per kWp a year, a 160 kWp array on a Wilmslow school models at about 128,200 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 Wilmslow?

It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.8 percent of the Wilmslow 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 Wilmslow 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 Wilmslow?

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.

Specialist solar panels for schools in Wilmslow

A kilowatt-peak on a Wilmslow school roof models at 801 kWh a year, below the mean across the towns we cover, and the roofs it applies to are mostly carrying nothing. The survey records sheet type, remaining life, purlin spacing and the state of the incoming supply, and the model runs off your own meter data rather than an average.

128,200 kWh a year, modelled for a 160 kWp array on roughly 475 sqm of clear roof. That is 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 Wilmslow

1 teaching block
2 hall and kitchen
3 sports hall
4 1960s block, no array
first phase
later phase

Drawing Illustrative estate, not a Wilmslow school

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 276,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / SK9

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.

Wilmslow / Cheshire

A school on the edge of a Greater Manchester town, solar arrays on its roofs and low Pennine hills beyond — School buildings of the kind we survey across North West. Not a named school and not our work.

Solar PV for academy trusts across Cheshire

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Wilmslow models at 801 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,026 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 10 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, 10 miles away at Manchester, models at about 128,200 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 33,100 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 5,300 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.

FIG. 1 Wilmslow against the rest of Cheshire

Nantwich840
Chester836
Crewe835
Ellesmere Port835
Northwich832
Warrington828
Wilmslow801
Macclesfield790

Wilmslow ranks 7 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.

Bars are zero based, so length is proportional to the figure. Where a county is flat, that is the finding: latitude is not the lever, the timetable is. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, modelled per town

The planning position for Wilmslow schools

Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the SK9 postcode district and nothing comes back under education. That is worth stating plainly and then setting aside: the register is built around generating stations, a school array is a fraction of the size it captures reliably, and plenty of school roofs never appear in any national record at all.

The closest recorded one is about 10 miles away at Manchester: Co Op Academy Belle Vue, Hyde Road, a 160 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Co-op Academy Trust, which is with the planning authority. We were not involved in it. We cite it because it is a public record of what has cleared planning in this part of Greater Manchester. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

Why demand in Wilmslow falls as the roof peaks

The generating year and the school year are out of step in Wilmslow. July and August carry 25.8 percent of the modelled output (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the site is closed for most of those nine weeks. May is the strongest single month here at 14.1 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.

At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 4.1 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Wilmslow school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 7.1 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.9 to one. 75 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.

Nationally this comes out at about 49 percent of annual generation falling on a session day. A business open every weekday sees roughly 71 percent. The 22 point gap is what a school appraisal has to absorb, and it is much the same in Wilmslow as anywhere else.

Inside the day it happens again. The roof is still at three quarters of its peak at four in the afternoon, by which time a Wilmslow school is largely empty, so the hours that look best on a generation chart are the worst on a consumption one.

The conclusion is not that a Wilmslow school should do nothing. It is that the array should be sized to the load that survives the holidays, which is usually the server room, the catering refrigeration, the ventilation and the hot water, plus whatever the site lets out over the summer. Anything above that line needs storage or an export agreement with SP Energy Networks / Electricity North West to earn its keep.

We set out the whole argument about term dates and the generation curve on the home page, and what it does to a payback figure under costs.

FIG. 2 A Wilmslow roof against the English school year

generated while the school is open
generated at a weekend or in the holidays

The same figures as a table

Monthly output for a 1 kWp array in Wilmslow, split by whether the day is a school session day. Across the year 49 percent of generation lands while the school is open.
Month	Session days	Output, kWh per kWp	School open	School closed
Jan	20	17	11	6
Feb	15	34	18	16
Mar	21	66	45	21
Apr	12	96	38	58
May	17	113	62	51
Jun	21	112	78	34
Jul	11	111	39	72
Aug	0	95	0	95
Sep	20	72	48	24
Oct	17	43	24	19
Nov	21	25	18	8
Dec	15	16	8	8
Year	190	800	389	411

Per kWp installed, month by month, separating generation while the school is open from generation at a weekend or in the holidays. 75 percent of the Wilmslow year sits between April and September, most of which is term time; it is the tail of that period, the last week of July and all of August, that the school is not there for. The daily split is a flat apportionment of each month, not a metered one. Session days follow a typical English school year of 190 days. Your own trust or authority may differ by a few days either way. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, session days from a typical school calendar

The school estate in Cheshire East

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. 5.5 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 23 secondaries and the 2 further education sites.

Across an estate of that size the roofs will not be in the same condition, and that is the point of surveying them together: the block with the best orientation is often not the block whose covering has twenty years left in it.

Aerial view of a school site with teaching blocks of several different ages, a sports hall and a playing field, solar arrays on two of the flat roofs — A school site with blocks of several ages, which is the usual starting point for a trust estate survey.

Grid connection through SP Energy Networks / Electricity North West

SP Energy Networks / Electricity North West operates the distribution network across Cheshire, so the export application goes to them. Anything larger than 3.68 kW per phase falls under G99, which means an application before commissioning rather than a notification afterwards. A constrained network is not the end of a scheme. Capping export costs little when the building already absorbs most of what the roof produces.

Across Cheshire the planning database records 157 solar schemes totalling 582 MW, of which 13 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

Book the survey

Send us the school postcode

A survey in Wilmslow 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 Wilmslow 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.

What Wilmslow trusts ask before a survey

How much would a school roof near Wilmslow generate?: Modelled at 801 kWh per kWp a year, a 160 kWp array on a Wilmslow school models at about 128,200 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 Wilmslow?: It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.8 percent of the Wilmslow 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 Wilmslow 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 Wilmslow?: 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.

Nearby

All Cheshire locations