Specialist solar panels for schools in Oldham
Oldham has 108 state-funded schools and colleges, and most of them are buying electricity in exactly the hours their own roofs could be making it. We start with the roof build up and the age of the covering, because across a school estate that is usually what decides which block goes first.
771 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 400 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 308,400 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Oldham- 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 for education buildings across Greater Manchester
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Oldham models at 771 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 987 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). 13 percent below our mean puts Oldham at the weaker end of the range, which raises the premium on self consumption and lowers the value of anything that leaves the site.
Scaled up, a 400 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 3 miles away at Ashton-under-Lyne, models at about 308,400 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,188 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 79,300 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 12,300 kWh across December and January. Electricity North West 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.
Oldham ranks 9 of 10 towns we cover in Greater Manchester on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 769 to 828, a spread of 59 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 29,500 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.
School solar on record near OL4
No school or college solar scheme appears in the OL4 postcode district in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. That is a reporting threshold rather than a verdict. The database records generating stations from one megawatt upward reliably and smaller ones patchily, and almost every school array is a fraction of that, so a roof full of panels on a Oldham secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
Look 3 miles out and there is one: Tameside College, Beaufort Road in Ashton-under-Lyne, 400 kWp, applied for by Tameside College, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. 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 Oldham generation curve
A Oldham school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.7 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. May is the strongest single month here at 14.3 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 4 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 7.3 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 6.1 to one. 75 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 Oldham school has over that, and they are worth counting properly.
None of that makes a Oldham 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 Electricity North West, 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.
- 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 | 16 | 10 | 6 |
| Feb | 15 | 32 | 17 | 15 |
| Mar | 21 | 64 | 43 | 21 |
| Apr | 12 | 93 | 37 | 56 |
| May | 17 | 110 | 60 | 50 |
| Jun | 21 | 109 | 76 | 33 |
| Jul | 11 | 107 | 38 | 69 |
| Aug | 0 | 91 | 0 | 91 |
| Sep | 20 | 69 | 46 | 23 |
| Oct | 17 | 42 | 23 | 19 |
| Nov | 21 | 23 | 16 | 7 |
| Dec | 15 | 15 | 7 | 8 |
| Year | 190 | 771 | 373 | 398 |
Grid connection through Electricity North West
Electricity North West operates the distribution network across Greater Manchester, 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 Greater Manchester the planning database records 118 solar schemes totalling 110 MW, of which 11 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Oldham schools, phase by phase
Oldham has 108 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 86 primary, 14 secondary, 6 special and 2 further education, at an average of 411 pupils a site. Read 6.1 primaries per secondary as a sequencing hint rather than a statistic. A primary is a single survey visit and a modest array; a secondary is several roofs of different ages on one site, and that is where both the area and the complications are.
A trust holding more than one of these sites should look at them together. Grouping the surveys turns the grid question, the funding question and the procurement route into one exercise rather than four, and it usually changes which roof goes first.
Book a roof survey at your Oldham school
The first survey answers three questions at once: what the roofs carry, what they generate against your own timetable, and how a Oldham school pays for it. Send the postcode, an approximate roof area per block and half hourly meter data if the school can get it from its supplier.
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.
Oldham school solar, answered
- What would a 400 kWp array produce at a Oldham school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 771 kWh per kWp a year puts a 400 kWp array at around 308,400 kWh, on roughly 1,188 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 Oldham?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.7 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 Electricity North West.
- Who do we apply to for export near Oldham?
- Only Electricity North West 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 Oldham?
- 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 Oldham. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Oldham?
- Oldham has 108 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.