What would a 590 kWp array produce at a Bournemouth school?

Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 971 kWh per kWp a year puts a 590 kWp array at around 572,900 kWh, on roughly 1,752 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 Bournemouth?

Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.8 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 Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks.

Who do we apply to for export near Bournemouth?

Only Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks 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 Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole?

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 Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. We confirm it either way.

How many schools are there around Bournemouth?

Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole has 96 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 51,798 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 Bournemouth

A kilowatt-peak on a Bournemouth school roof models at 971 kWh a year, above 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.

25.8% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 971 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 590 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 Bournemouth

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

Drawing Illustrative Dorset estate

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 335,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / BH9

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.

Bournemouth / Dorset

A school on the edge of a South West market town, solar arrays on its roofs and rolling farmland beyond — School buildings of the kind we survey across South West. Not a named school and not our work.

Solar PV for academy trusts across Dorset

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Bournemouth models at 971 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,236 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 10 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, which is about as strong as a UK school roof gets.

Scaled up, a 590 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 25 miles away at Dorchester, models at about 572,900 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,752 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 147,800 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 28,100 kWh across December and January. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks 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 Bournemouth against the rest of Dorset

Weymouth1006
Dorchester985
Christchurch981
Bournemouth971
Bridport971
Poole965
Wimborne964
Sherborne924

Bournemouth ranks 4 of 8 towns we cover in Dorset on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 924 to 1006, a spread of 82 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 41,000 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 Bournemouth schools

Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the BH9 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 25 miles away at Dorchester: Damers First School, a 190 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Solar Options for Schools Limited, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. We were not involved in it. We cite it because it is a public record of what has cleared planning in this part of Dorset. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

Why demand in Bournemouth falls as the roof peaks

The generating year and the school year are out of step in Bournemouth. 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. July is the single strongest month here at 14.1 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.

At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 4.9 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Bournemouth school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.2 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.2 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 Bournemouth changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.

And the week has the same hole in it. Two days in seven the site is closed altogether, at no cost to the generation, which is part of why the session day share sits where it does. Weekend lettings are the one lever a Bournemouth school has over that, and they are worth counting properly.

A Bournemouth 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.

FIG. 2 A Bournemouth 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 Bournemouth, 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	26	17	9
Feb	15	42	23	20
Mar	21	79	54	25
Apr	12	113	45	68
May	17	131	72	59
Jun	21	136	95	41
Jul	11	137	49	88
Aug	0	114	0	114
Sep	20	88	59	29
Oct	17	53	29	24
Nov	21	32	22	10
Dec	15	22	11	11
Year	190	973	476	497

Each bar is one month's output per kWp, divided at the school gate. The July bar is 6.2 times the December one and the timetable runs the other way round. We apportion a month's generation evenly over its days, having no half hourly data for your meter. 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 Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole

Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole has 96 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 51,798 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 66 primary, 24 secondary, 5 special and 1 further education, at an average of 540 pupils a site. 2.8 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 24 secondaries and the 1 further education site.

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 Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks

Connections around Bournemouth are handled by Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, which sets the export limit for the site. Above 3.68 kW per phase the connection runs under G99, so the export limit is agreed in advance rather than assumed. Where the local network is constrained, an export-limited connection usually still makes the scheme work, because a school uses most of what the roof makes during the working day.

Across Dorset the planning database records 149 solar schemes totalling 1078 MW, of which 47 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

Book the survey

Send us the school postcode

A survey in Bournemouth 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 Bournemouth 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 Bournemouth trusts ask before a survey

What would a 590 kWp array produce at a Bournemouth school?: Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 971 kWh per kWp a year puts a 590 kWp array at around 572,900 kWh, on roughly 1,752 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 Bournemouth?: Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.8 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 Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks.
Who do we apply to for export near Bournemouth?: Only Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks 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 Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole?: 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 Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. We confirm it either way.
How many schools are there around Bournemouth?: Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole has 96 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 51,798 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

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