How much would a school roof near Braintree generate?

Modelled at 932 kWh per kWp a year, a 290 kWp array on a Braintree school models at about 270,300 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 Braintree?

It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.4 percent of the Braintree 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 UK Power Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.

Which network operator handles the connection at a Braintree school?

Applications go to UK Power Networks, who run the network across Essex. 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 Braintree 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 Braintree on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Braintree before a design is finalised.

How many schools are there around Braintree?

Braintree has 63 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 20,740 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 Braintree

What decides a solar scheme at a Braintree school is how much of the output the site uses itself, not how much the roof makes. We arrange the roof survey, model the output against the school's own half hourly consumption, and set out the funding routes.

270,300 kWh a year, modelled for a 290 kWp array on roughly 861 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 Braintree

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

Drawing Illustrative estate, not a Braintree school

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 322,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / CM7

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.

Braintree / Essex

A school on the edge of an eastern commuter town, solar arrays on its roofs and wooded low hills beyond — School buildings of the kind we survey across East of England. Not a named school and not our work.

Solar for education buildings across Essex

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Braintree models at 932 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,191 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 5 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, which is about as strong as a UK school roof gets.

Scaled up, a 290 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 17 miles away at Bishop's Stortford, models at about 270,300 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 861 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 68,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 13,500 kWh across December and January. UK Power 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 Braintree against the rest of Essex

Colchester953
Canvey Island945
Southend-on-Sea942
Basildon933
Braintree932
Chelmsford930
Grays927
Brentwood913
Harlow908

Braintree ranks 6 of 10 towns we cover in Essex on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 908 to 973, a spread of 65 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 32,500 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

School solar on record near CM7

The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for the CM7 postcode district. Read that as a gap in the record, not a gap in the roofs: the database is reliable above one megawatt and thin below it, and a school array is typically a fifth of a megawatt.

Look 17 miles out and there is one: Hockerill Anglo European College, Dunmow Road in Bishop's Stortford, 290 kWp, applied for by Solar Options for Schools Limited, which is with the planning authority. None of our doing. It is a public planning record, and the nearest evidence available of how an application like yours is treated around here. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

Term dates against the Braintree generation curve

A Braintree school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.4 percent of the modelled year lands in July and August alone (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the summer holiday takes roughly six of those nine weeks out of the timetable. June is the strongest single month here at 13.7 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.

Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 5 percent of the modelled year, and that is when the heating, the lighting and a full register are all drawing at the same time. The roof makes 5.8 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5 to one. 73 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 Braintree as anywhere else.

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.

The conclusion is not that a Braintree 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 UK Power Networks 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 Braintree 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 Braintree, 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	25	16	9
Feb	15	40	21	19
Mar	21	75	51	24
Apr	12	109	44	65
May	17	125	69	56
Jun	21	128	90	38
Jul	11	128	45	83
Aug	0	109	0	109
Sep	20	86	57	29
Oct	17	54	30	24
Nov	21	32	22	10
Dec	15	22	11	11
Year	190	933	456	477

Per kWp installed, month by month, separating generation while the school is open from generation at a weekend or in the holidays. 73 percent of the Braintree 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

Braintree schools, phase by phase

Braintree has 63 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 20,740 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 52 primary, 8 secondary and 3 special, at an average of 329 pupils a site. That is 6.5 primaries for every secondary, which is the ratio that matters for a roof: a primary of a few hundred pupils usually offers a hall roof and one teaching block, while a secondary site carries a sports hall, a dining block and several flat roofs.

If your trust holds several of them, the sequencing question comes before the sizing question. Roof age, covering type and the state of the incoming supply vary block by block across an estate, and that is normally what sets the order of works.

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 UK Power Networks

UK Power Networks operates the distribution network across Essex, 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 Essex the planning database records 221 solar schemes totalling 2787 MW, of which 46 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

Book the survey

Book a roof survey at your Braintree school

We survey school and college roofs throughout Essex. 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.

Braintree school solar, answered

How much would a school roof near Braintree generate?: Modelled at 932 kWh per kWp a year, a 290 kWp array on a Braintree school models at about 270,300 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 Braintree?: It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.4 percent of the Braintree 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 UK Power Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
Which network operator handles the connection at a Braintree school?: Applications go to UK Power Networks, who run the network across Essex. 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 Braintree 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 Braintree on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Braintree before a design is finalised.
How many schools are there around Braintree?: Braintree has 63 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 20,740 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.

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