Specialist solar panels for schools in Hull
26 percent of what a Hull school roof makes arrives in July and August, which is when the buildings are shut. A survey here starts with the covering and the structure, then the incoming supply, then what the timetable actually draws.
867 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 440 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 381,500 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Hull- 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.
Solar PV for academy trusts across East Riding of Yorkshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Hull models at 867 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,105 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Hull sits 2 percent under our mean. Worth knowing, but not decisive: how well the array matches the timetable moves the answer further than the latitude does.
Scaled up, a 440 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 50 miles away at Ripon, models at about 381,500 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,307 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 99,200 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 17,200 kWh across December and January. Northern Powergrid 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.
Hull ranks 3 of 6 towns we cover in East Riding of Yorkshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 858 to 870, a spread of 12 kWh per kWp. Within East Riding of Yorkshire that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
The planning position for Hull schools
There is no school entry for Hull and the area around it 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 Hull.
The closest recorded one is about 50 miles away at Ripon: Ripon Grammar School, Clotherholme Road, a 440 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 North Yorkshire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Hull falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Hull. July and August carry 26 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 4.5 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Hull school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.8 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.8 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.
Across the country the arithmetic settles at roughly 49 percent of output on a session day, against about 71 percent for a weekday business. That figure hardly varies by location, which is why the local numbers that matter here are the yield, the roofs and what has already cleared planning nearby.
The weekly pattern repeats the annual one. Saturdays and Sundays generate as well as any other day and consume almost nothing, so before storage or export is even discussed it is worth knowing what the site does at a weekend, which only half hourly data will tell you.
That argues for a particular shape of scheme rather than against one. Size to the load that does not stop at the end of term, count in lettings, holiday clubs and summer works honestly rather than optimistically, and then decide whether storage or an export arrangement with Northern Powergrid pays for the surplus that is left.
We set out the complete version of the term time arithmetic 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 | 21 | 14 | 7 |
| Feb | 15 | 37 | 20 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 71 | 48 | 23 |
| Apr | 12 | 101 | 40 | 61 |
| May | 17 | 122 | 67 | 55 |
| Jun | 21 | 117 | 82 | 35 |
| Jul | 11 | 121 | 43 | 78 |
| Aug | 0 | 104 | 0 | 104 |
| Sep | 20 | 78 | 52 | 26 |
| Oct | 17 | 48 | 26 | 22 |
| Nov | 21 | 27 | 19 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 18 | 9 | 9 |
| Year | 190 | 865 | 420 | 445 |
Grid connection through Northern Powergrid
Northern Powergrid operates the distribution network across East Riding of Yorkshire, 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 East Riding of Yorkshire the planning database records 86 solar schemes totalling 1439 MW, of which 2 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
The school estate in East Riding of Yorkshire
East Riding of Yorkshire has 150 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 44,348 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 128 primary, 18 secondary, 3 special and 1 further education, at an average of 296 pupils a site. A ratio of 7.1 to one tells you where the roof area is. It is not with the 128 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.
Send us the school postcode
We survey school and college roofs throughout East Riding of Yorkshire. 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 Hull trusts ask before a survey
- Is there enough sun around Hull for this to be worth doing?
- The model gives 867 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 440 kWp array comes out at roughly 381,500 kWh a year before shading. It needs about 1,307 square metres of clear roof once walkways and rooflight setbacks are allowed for. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
- Does a Hull school waste its generation in August?
- 26 percent of the modelled annual output for Hull falls in July and August, when the buildings are closed for most of six weeks (EU PVGIS v5.2). It does not go to waste, but it only has three places to go: the base load that runs regardless, such as servers, catering refrigeration and ventilation; storage; or export under an agreement with Northern Powergrid. We model all three against your half hourly data before an array is sized.
- Will the network around Hull accept the export?
- Northern Powergrid is the distribution network operator for East Riding of Yorkshire. Anything above 3.68 kW per phase connects under G99, and the application fixes the export limit. On a school site the incoming supply is often the binding constraint rather than the roof, so we ask that question before anyone sizes an array.
- How many schools are there around Hull?
- East Riding of Yorkshire has 150 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 44,348 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.