How much would a school roof near Maidstone generate?

Modelled at 930 kWh per kWp a year, a 360 kWp array on a Maidstone school models at about 334,800 kWh. What decides whether that is worth doing is how much of it the school uses itself, not the total. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.

How does the school year affect a solar scheme in Maidstone?

It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.6 percent of the Maidstone generating year lands in July and August (EU PVGIS v5.2), and a closed school still runs servers, comms, refrigeration and ventilation. What that base load does not absorb is either stored, exported under an agreement with UK Power Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.

Which network operator handles the connection at a Maidstone school?

Applications go to UK Power Networks, who run the network across Kent. An export-limited offer usually still works for a school, because the summer surplus is the part you were least likely to be paid much for anyway.

What does Maidstone require for solar on a school building?

Roof-mounted solar on a non-domestic building often falls within permitted development under Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order, subject to limits on how far the panels stand proud of the roof plane and, above a threshold, to prior approval from Maidstone on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Maidstone before a design is finalised.

How many schools are there around Maidstone?

Maidstone has 64 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 30,037 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 Maidstone

A school roof in Maidstone makes 5.9 times as much in June as it does in December, and the school year runs against that curve rather than with it. What we come back with is the usable roof area, the modelled output against your meter data, and the routes schools use to pay for it.

334,800 kWh a year, modelled for a 360 kWp array on roughly 1,069 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 Maidstone

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

Drawing Illustrative estate, not a Maidstone school

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 321,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / ME15

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.

Maidstone / Kent

A school on the edge of a Home Counties town, solar arrays on its roofs and wooded low hills beyond — School buildings of the kind we survey across South East. Not a named school and not our work.

School rooftop solar across Kent

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Maidstone models at 930 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,193 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is around 5 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, which is about as strong as a UK school roof gets.

Scaled up, a 360 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 15 miles away at Sevenoaks, models at about 334,800 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,069 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 85,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 17,100 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.

FIG. 1 Maidstone against the rest of Kent

Folkestone990
Ashford983
Dover972
Canterbury961
Maidstone930
Tunbridge Wells930
Tonbridge927
Gravesend926
Chatham920

Maidstone ranks 6 of 12 towns we cover in Kent on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 915 to 990, a spread of 75 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 37,500 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.

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

What the planning record shows around Maidstone

No school or college solar scheme appears in the ME15 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 Maidstone secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.

The nearest education scheme on the record is 15 miles from Maidstone, at Sevenoaks: 360 kWp at The Sennocke Centre, High Street, applicant Sevenoaks School, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Kent planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

The summer holiday problem for a Maidstone school

25.6 percent of the annual output modelled for Maidstone arrives in the two months a school uses least (EU PVGIS v5.2). Term ends in the third week of July and the buildings stay largely empty until September. June is the strongest single month here at 13.9 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.

The inverse holds at the other end. December and January together return only 5.1 percent of the year, and those are the months with the heating, the lighting and the full timetable all running at once. The roof makes 5.9 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5 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.

Summed over the year, about 49 percent of what a school roof makes arrives while the school is open. For a business trading every weekday the equivalent is roughly 71 percent. Nothing about Maidstone changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.

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.

A Maidstone governing body should read that as a sizing constraint, not a reason to stop. The base load that runs through the holidays, servers, comms, refrigeration, ventilation and hot water, is the floor the array should be built up from, and everything above it has to be justified by storage, export or summer occupancy.

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 Maidstone 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 Maidstone, 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	25	16	9
Feb	15	39	21	18
Mar	21	74	50	24
Apr	12	108	43	65
May	17	123	67	56
Jun	21	129	90	39
Jul	11	129	46	83
Aug	0	109	0	109
Sep	20	86	57	29
Oct	17	53	29	24
Nov	21	32	22	10
Dec	15	22	11	11
Year	190	929	452	477

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 Maidstone 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

How many schools Maidstone has

Maidstone has 64 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 30,037 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 49 primary, 12 secondary and 3 special, at an average of 469 pupils a site. Read 4.1 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.

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.

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.

Across Kent the planning database records 237 solar schemes totalling 2072 MW, of which 45 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

Book the survey

Start with the Maidstone roof

A survey in Maidstone 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 Maidstone 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.

Questions governors ask us about Maidstone schools

How much would a school roof near Maidstone generate?: Modelled at 930 kWh per kWp a year, a 360 kWp array on a Maidstone school models at about 334,800 kWh. What decides whether that is worth doing is how much of it the school uses itself, not the total. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
How does the school year affect a solar scheme in Maidstone?: It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.6 percent of the Maidstone generating year lands in July and August (EU PVGIS v5.2), and a closed school still runs servers, comms, refrigeration and ventilation. What that base load does not absorb is either stored, exported under an agreement with UK Power Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
Which network operator handles the connection at a Maidstone school?: Applications go to UK Power Networks, who run the network across Kent. An export-limited offer usually still works for a school, because the summer surplus is the part you were least likely to be paid much for anyway.
What does Maidstone require for solar on a school building?: Roof-mounted solar on a non-domestic building often falls within permitted development under Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order, subject to limits on how far the panels stand proud of the roof plane and, above a threshold, to prior approval from Maidstone on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Maidstone before a design is finalised.
How many schools are there around Maidstone?: Maidstone has 64 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 30,037 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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