Specialist solar panels for schools in St Austell
A school roof in St Austell makes 5.9 times as much in June 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.
25.3% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 936 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 240 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 St Austell- 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 Cornwall
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in St Austell models at 936 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,193 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is around 6 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, which is about as strong as a UK school roof gets.
Scaled up, a 240 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 13 miles away at Truro, models at about 224,600 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 713 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 56,800 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 11,200 kWh across December and January. National Grid Electricity Distribution 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.
St Austell ranks 5 of 8 towns we cover in Cornwall on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 921 to 979, a spread of 58 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 29,000 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.
What the planning record shows around St Austell
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the PL25 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 nearest education scheme on the record is 13 miles from St Austell, at Truro: 240 kWp at Sir Ben Ainslie Sports Centre, Trennick Lane, applicant Truro School, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Cornwall planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a St Austell school
25.3 percent of the annual output modelled for St Austell 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. June is the strongest single month here at 13.8 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 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 5.9 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 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 St Austell 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 St Austell 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 | 25 | 16 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 42 | 23 | 20 |
| Mar | 21 | 76 | 51 | 25 |
| Apr | 12 | 110 | 44 | 66 |
| May | 17 | 127 | 70 | 57 |
| Jun | 21 | 130 | 91 | 39 |
| Jul | 11 | 127 | 45 | 82 |
| Aug | 0 | 111 | 0 | 111 |
| Sep | 20 | 86 | 57 | 29 |
| Oct | 17 | 53 | 29 | 24 |
| Nov | 21 | 30 | 21 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 939 | 458 | 481 |
How many schools Cornwall has
Cornwall has 277 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 71,014 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 238 primary, 31 secondary, 5 special and 3 further education, at an average of 256 pupils a site. 7.7 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 31 secondaries and the 3 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.
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
National Grid Electricity Distribution operates the distribution network across Cornwall, 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 Cornwall the planning database records 174 solar schemes totalling 1116 MW, of which 88 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Start with the St Austell roof
Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges roof surveys for schools across Cornwall. Send the school postcode and a rough idea of the roof area, and the last twelve months of half hourly meter data if the school holds it. We come back with what the roofs can carry, what they would generate against your own consumption, and the funding routes open to a school.
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 St Austell schools
- What would a 240 kWp array produce at a St Austell school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 936 kWh per kWp a year puts a 240 kWp array at around 224,600 kWh, on roughly 713 square metres of roof. The value of that depends on your term time load. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
- What happens to the electricity during the summer holidays in St Austell?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.3 percent of the year is modelled to arrive in July and August here (EU PVGIS v5.2), against a site running on holiday base load. Lettings, holiday clubs and summer works take some of it, storage takes more, and the rest is an export question for National Grid Electricity Distribution.
- Who do we apply to for export near St Austell?
- Only National Grid Electricity Distribution can answer it for your connection. What we can say is that a capped export limit rarely breaks a school scheme, because the array that suits a school is sized to the term time load rather than to the roof.
- Do we need planning permission in Cornwall?
- Often not, because panels on the roof of a school building usually sit within permitted development for non-domestic buildings. The exceptions are listed buildings, conservation areas and arrays that project too far above the roof plane, and larger schemes still need prior approval from Cornwall. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around St Austell?
- Cornwall has 277 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 71,014 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.