What would a 160 kWp array produce at a Tewkesbury school?

Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 878 kWh per kWp a year puts a 160 kWp array at around 140,500 kWh, on roughly 475 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 Tewkesbury?

Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.5 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution.

Who do we apply to for export near Tewkesbury?

Only National Grid Electricity Distribution 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 Tewkesbury?

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 Tewkesbury. We confirm it either way.

How many schools are there around Tewkesbury?

Tewkesbury has 41 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 14,230 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 Tewkesbury

25.5 percent of what a Tewkesbury 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.

140,500 kWh a year, modelled for a 160 kWp array on roughly 475 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 Tewkesbury

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

Drawing Illustrative estate, not a Tewkesbury school

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 303,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / GL20

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.

Tewkesbury / 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.

Solar PV for academy trusts across Gloucestershire

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Tewkesbury models at 878 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,125 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 what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 7 miles away at Cheltenham, models at about 140,500 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 475 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 35,800 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 7,000 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 Tewkesbury against the rest of Gloucestershire

Lydney905
Cirencester892
Stroud887
Cheltenham879
Tewkesbury878
Gloucester870

Tewkesbury ranks 5 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

The planning position for Tewkesbury schools

The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for the GL20 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.

The closest recorded one is about 7 miles away at Cheltenham: Ladies College Swimming Pool, Malvern Road, a 160 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Ladies College Swimming Pool, 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 Gloucestershire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

Why demand in Tewkesbury falls as the roof peaks

The generating year and the school year are out of step in Tewkesbury. July and August carry 25.5 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 13.9 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.

At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 5 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Tewkesbury school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.1 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.

The same mismatch repeats every day. Peak generation lands between eleven and three, the timetable ends shortly after, and by four the site is down to caretaking and cleaning. An annual consumption figure cannot show that, which is why we ask for the half hourly data instead.

None of that makes a Tewkesbury 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 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 Tewkesbury 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 Tewkesbury, 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	24	15	9
Feb	15	39	21	18
Mar	21	71	48	23
Apr	12	103	41	62
May	17	119	65	54
Jun	21	121	85	36
Jul	11	122	43	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	428	451

Per kWp installed, month by month, separating generation while the school is open from generation at a weekend or in the holidays. 74 percent of the Tewkesbury 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

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 Tewkesbury

Tewkesbury has 41 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 14,230 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 33 primary, 6 secondary and 2 special, at an average of 347 pupils a site. That is 5.5 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.

Book the survey

Send us the school postcode

A survey in Tewkesbury 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 Tewkesbury 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 Tewkesbury trusts ask before a survey

What would a 160 kWp array produce at a Tewkesbury school?: Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 878 kWh per kWp a year puts a 160 kWp array at around 140,500 kWh, on roughly 475 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 Tewkesbury?: Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.5 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution.
Who do we apply to for export near Tewkesbury?: Only National Grid Electricity Distribution 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 Tewkesbury?: 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 Tewkesbury. We confirm it either way.
How many schools are there around Tewkesbury?: Tewkesbury has 41 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 14,230 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 Gloucestershire locations