Specialist solar panels for schools in Barnet
A kilowatt-peak on a Barnet school roof models at 899 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.
152,800 kWh a year, modelled for a 170 kWp array on roughly 505 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 Barnet- 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 Greater London
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Barnet models at 899 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,154 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Against a mean of 886 kWh per kWp across the towns we cover, Barnet is unremarkable, which is the useful finding: the scheme will be decided by the load curve, not the map.
Scaled up, a 170 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 10 miles away at St Albans, models at about 152,800 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 505 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 39,000 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 7,900 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.
Barnet ranks 46 of 50 towns we cover in Greater London on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 847 to 987, a spread of 140 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 70,000 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.
The planning position for Barnet schools
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for Barnet and the area around it and nothing comes back under education. That is worth stating plainly and then setting aside: the register is built around generating stations, a school array is a fraction of the size it captures reliably, and plenty of school roofs never appear in any national record at all.
The closest recorded one is about 10 miles away at St Albans: Samuel Ryder Academy, a 200 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Scholars Education Trust, which was withdrawn before determination. We were not involved in it. We cite it because it is a public record of what has cleared planning in this part of Hertfordshire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Barnet falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Barnet. 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 13.8 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 5.2 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Barnet school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 5.6 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 4.8 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 Barnet 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 Barnet 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 Barnet 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.
- 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 | 25 | 16 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 73 | 49 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 104 | 42 | 62 |
| May | 17 | 119 | 65 | 54 |
| Jun | 21 | 123 | 86 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 124 | 44 | 80 |
| Aug | 0 | 105 | 0 | 105 |
| Sep | 20 | 82 | 55 | 27 |
| Oct | 17 | 51 | 28 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 898 | 439 | 459 |
The school estate in Barnet
Barnet has 129 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 59,659 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 92 primary, 27 secondary, 7 special and 3 further education, at an average of 462 pupils a site. 3.4 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 27 secondaries and the 3 further education sites.
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.
Grid connection through UK Power Networks
UK Power 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.
Send us the school postcode
We survey school and college roofs throughout Greater London. 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 Barnet trusts ask before a survey
- What would a 170 kWp array produce at a Barnet school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 899 kWh per kWp a year puts a 170 kWp array at around 152,800 kWh, on roughly 505 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 Barnet?
- 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 UK Power Networks.
- Who do we apply to for export near Barnet?
- Only UK Power Networks 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.
- How many schools are there around Barnet?
- Barnet has 129 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 59,659 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.