How much would a school roof near Christchurch generate?

Modelled at 981 kWh per kWp a year, a 590 kWp array on a Christchurch school models at about 578,800 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 Christchurch?

It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.8 percent of the Christchurch 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 Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.

Which network operator handles the connection at a Christchurch school?

Applications go to Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, who run the network across Dorset. 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 Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole 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 Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole before a design is finalised.

How many schools are there around Christchurch?

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 Christchurch

A kilowatt-peak on a Christchurch school roof models at 981 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 981 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 Christchurch

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 338,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / BH23

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.

Christchurch / 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 Christchurch models at 981 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,247 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 11 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, 31 miles away at Dorchester, models at about 578,800 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 149,300 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 28,400 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 Christchurch against the rest of Dorset

Weymouth1006
Dorchester985
Christchurch981
Bournemouth971
Bridport971
Poole965
Wimborne964
Sherborne924

Christchurch ranks 3 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 Christchurch schools

No school or college solar scheme appears in the BH23 postcode district in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. That is a reporting threshold rather than a verdict. The database records generating stations from one megawatt upward reliably and smaller ones patchily, and almost every school array is a fraction of that, so a roof full of panels on a Christchurch secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.

The closest recorded one is about 31 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 Christchurch falls as the roof peaks

The generating year and the school year are out of step in Christchurch. 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. June 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 4.9 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Christchurch school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.3 times as much in June 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.

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 Christchurch 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 Christchurch 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 Christchurch 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 Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks to earn its keep.

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 Christchurch 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 Christchurch, 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	80	54	26
Apr	12	114	46	68
May	17	132	72	60
Jun	21	138	97	41
Jul	11	138	49	89
Aug	0	115	0	115
Sep	20	88	59	29
Oct	17	54	30	24
Nov	21	32	22	10
Dec	15	22	11	11
Year	190	981	480	501

Each bar is one month's output per kWp, divided at the school gate. The June bar is 6.3 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. Read 2.8 primaries per secondary as a sequencing hint rather than a statistic. A primary is a single survey visit and a modest array; a secondary is several roofs of different ages on one site, and that is where both the area and the complications are.

A trust holding more than one of these sites should look at them together. Grouping the surveys turns the grid question, the funding question and the procurement route into one exercise rather than four, and it usually changes which roof goes first.

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

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks 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 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

We survey school and college roofs throughout Dorset. We need the postcode, a rough roof area and your half hourly meter data if the trust has it. From that we model what the roof carries, what it generates against the timetable, and which of the funding routes actually suits a school of your size.

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 Christchurch trusts ask before a survey

How much would a school roof near Christchurch generate?: Modelled at 981 kWh per kWp a year, a 590 kWp array on a Christchurch school models at about 578,800 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 Christchurch?: It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.8 percent of the Christchurch 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 Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
Which network operator handles the connection at a Christchurch school?: Applications go to Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, who run the network across Dorset. 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 Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole 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 Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole before a design is finalised.
How many schools are there around Christchurch?: 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

All Dorset locations