Is there enough sun around Cheltenham for this to be worth doing?

The model gives 879 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 160 kWp array comes out at roughly 140,600 kWh a year before shading. It needs about 475 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 Cheltenham school waste its generation in August?

25.6 percent of the modelled annual output for Cheltenham 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution. We model all three against your half hourly data before an array is sized.

Will the network around Cheltenham accept the export?

National Grid Electricity Distribution is the distribution network operator for Gloucestershire. 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.

Is planning permission needed for panels on a school in Cheltenham?

Usually permitted development covers a roof array on a school, with prior approval from Cheltenham needed above a capacity threshold. A ground mounted array in the grounds is a different question and much more likely to need a full application. We check both before design sign-off.

Has a school near GL50 already done this?

One school scheme is on record in this postcode district, including a 160 kWp array at Ladies College Swimming Pool, Malvern Road that holds consent and is awaiting construction. We were not involved in it. It is a public planning record, and it matters less as proof that solar works than as evidence of what this authority and this network operator have already accepted. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

How many schools are there around Cheltenham?

Cheltenham has 38 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 16,278 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 Cheltenham

Ladies College Swimming Pool, Malvern Road sits on the planning record near Cheltenham at 160 kWp, which makes the question here less whether a school roof works and more what yours would carry. A survey here starts with the covering and the structure, then the incoming supply, then what the timetable actually draws.

879 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 160 kWp array, the median size schools around Cheltenham have applied for, models at about 140,600 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.

Book a roof survey in Cheltenham

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

Drawing Typical school site, Cheltenham scale

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 303,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / GL50

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.

Cheltenham / Gloucestershire

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.

School solar consented near Cheltenham

The Renewable Energy Planning Database records 1 school and college solar scheme in the GL50 postcode district. Ladies College Swimming Pool, Malvern Road is down for a 160 kWp roof mounted array and the application holds consent and is awaiting construction. The applicant on record is Ladies College Swimming Pool.

Those are other organisations' planning applications, not our projects. We list them because a scheme a few miles away tells you what this local authority and this network operator have already accepted for a building very like yours. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

The plan above the fold is a generic four block estate, drawn to make the scale and the phasing legible. Nobody should read it as Ladies College Swimming Pool, Malvern Road or as any other Cheltenham site. Our knowledge of these applications comes entirely from the public record.

The median array applied for here is 160 kWp. At 160 kWp you are covering roughly 475 square metres of roof once walkways, edge zones and rooflight setbacks come out, which on most sites means a sports hall plus one teaching block rather than the whole estate.

Every one of them is a college, which is worth knowing: a college runs longer days and more plant than a school, and it usually has the flat roof area to match.

Site on record	Applicant on record	Size	Mounting	Status
Ladies College Swimming Pool, Malvern Road	Ladies College Swimming Pool	160 kWp	Roof	Awaiting Construction

Solar PV for academy trusts across Gloucestershire

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Cheltenham models at 879 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,124 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is within a few percent of our mean. Latitude is not the variable here. When the building is occupied is.

Scaled up, a 160 kWp array, sized to the median array applied for at schools around Cheltenham itself, models at about 140,600 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 475 square metres of clear roof. That size is not one we chose. It is what schools in this district have actually applied for.

Spread across the year that is about 36,000 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 6,900 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.

FIG. 1 Cheltenham against the rest of Gloucestershire

Lydney905
Cirencester892
Stroud887
Cheltenham879
Tewkesbury878
Gloucester870

Cheltenham ranks 4 of 6 towns we cover in Gloucestershire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 870 to 905, a spread of 35 kWh per kWp. Within Gloucestershire that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.

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

Why demand in Cheltenham falls as the roof peaks

The generating year and the school year are out of step in Cheltenham. July and August carry 25.6 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 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 Cheltenham 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 5.1 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.

Put the two calendars together and roughly 49 percent of a school's generation nationally lands on a session day, against about 71 percent for a business open every weekday. That gap is the whole difference between appraising a school roof and appraising any other commercial one, and it barely moves from town to town.

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 Cheltenham school has over that, and they are worth counting properly.

None of that makes a Cheltenham scheme a bad one. It changes what the scheme should be: sized against the base load that runs whether or not the school is open, which on most sites is servers, comms, catering refrigeration, ventilation and hot water, with lettings, holiday clubs and summer works added on top. Where that base load is thin, the choices are storage, an export arrangement through National Grid Electricity Distribution, or a smaller array that consumes nearly everything it makes.

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.

FIG. 2 A Cheltenham 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 Cheltenham, 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	23	15	8
Feb	15	37	20	17
Mar	21	72	49	23
Apr	12	103	41	62
May	17	119	65	54
Jun	21	122	85	37
Jul	11	123	44	79
Aug	0	102	0	102
Sep	20	80	53	27
Oct	17	49	27	22
Nov	21	29	20	9
Dec	15	20	10	10
Year	190	879	429	450

Output per kWp installed, split by whether the day is a session day. July and August are 25.6 percent of the Cheltenham year and the school is shut for most of them. Each month's total is spread evenly across its days, which is the only split available without half hourly readings. 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

Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution

National Grid Electricity Distribution operates the distribution network across Gloucestershire, 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 Gloucestershire the planning database records 207 solar schemes totalling 1592 MW, of which 39 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

The school estate in Cheltenham

Cheltenham has 38 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 16,278 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 28 primary, 6 secondary and 4 special, at an average of 428 pupils a site. 4.7 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 6 secondaries.

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.

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Send us the school postcode

We survey school and college roofs throughout Gloucestershire. 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 Cheltenham trusts ask before a survey

Is there enough sun around Cheltenham for this to be worth doing?: The model gives 879 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 160 kWp array comes out at roughly 140,600 kWh a year before shading. It needs about 475 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 Cheltenham school waste its generation in August?: 25.6 percent of the modelled annual output for Cheltenham 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution. We model all three against your half hourly data before an array is sized.
Will the network around Cheltenham accept the export?: National Grid Electricity Distribution is the distribution network operator for Gloucestershire. 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.
Is planning permission needed for panels on a school in Cheltenham?: Usually permitted development covers a roof array on a school, with prior approval from Cheltenham needed above a capacity threshold. A ground mounted array in the grounds is a different question and much more likely to need a full application. We check both before design sign-off.
Has a school near GL50 already done this?: One school scheme is on record in this postcode district, including a 160 kWp array at Ladies College Swimming Pool, Malvern Road that holds consent and is awaiting construction. We were not involved in it. It is a public planning record, and it matters less as proof that solar works than as evidence of what this authority and this network operator have already accepted. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
How many schools are there around Cheltenham?: Cheltenham has 38 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 16,278 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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