Specialist solar panels for schools in Wigan
A kilowatt-peak on a Wigan school roof models at 828 kWh a year, below 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.
25.7% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 828 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 290 kWp, 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 Wigan- 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 Manchester
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Wigan models at 828 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,058 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is about 7 percent below the mean across the towns we cover, so the case at this latitude rests almost entirely on using the output on site rather than exporting it.
Scaled up, a 290 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 7 miles away at Chorley, models at about 240,100 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 61,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 10,100 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.
Wigan ranks 1 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.
The planning position for Wigan schools
No school or college solar scheme appears in the WN6 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 Wigan secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
The closest recorded one is about 7 miles away at Chorley: Parklands High School, Southport Road - Solar Photovoltaic Panels, a 290 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Parklands High School, 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 Lancashire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Wigan falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Wigan. July and August carry 25.7 percent of the modelled output (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the site is closed for most of those nine weeks. May is the strongest single month here at 14.4 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 4.2 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Wigan school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 7.4 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.
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 Wigan 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 Wigan 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 Wigan 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 Electricity North West to earn its keep.
We set out the full treatment of the school year against 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 | 19 | 12 | 7 |
| Feb | 15 | 36 | 19 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 68 | 46 | 22 |
| Apr | 12 | 99 | 40 | 59 |
| May | 17 | 119 | 65 | 54 |
| Jun | 21 | 115 | 81 | 35 |
| Jul | 11 | 115 | 41 | 74 |
| Aug | 0 | 98 | 0 | 98 |
| Sep | 20 | 74 | 49 | 25 |
| Oct | 17 | 44 | 24 | 20 |
| Nov | 21 | 25 | 18 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 16 | 8 | 8 |
| Year | 190 | 828 | 403 | 425 |
The school estate in Wigan
Wigan has 129 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 47,918 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 101 primary, 19 secondary, 6 special and 3 further education, at an average of 371 pupils a site. Read 5.3 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.
Grid connection through Electricity North West
Electricity North West 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.
Across Greater Manchester the planning database records 118 solar schemes totalling 110 MW, of which 11 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Send us the school postcode
Roof condition decides the order of works on most school estates, so that is where we start. Send us the postcode and a rough roof area, with twelve months of half hourly readings if you have them, and we come back with usable area, modelled output against your own load, and the funding routes.
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 Wigan trusts ask before a survey
- What would a 290 kWp array produce at a Wigan school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 828 kWh per kWp a year puts a 290 kWp array at around 240,100 kWh, on roughly 861 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 Wigan?
- 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 Wigan?
- 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 Wigan?
- 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 Wigan. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Wigan?
- Wigan has 129 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 47,918 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.