Specialist solar panels for schools in Hinckley
25.8 percent of what a Hinckley 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.
870 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 290 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 252,300 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Hinckley- 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 Leicestershire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Hinckley models at 870 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,112 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Hinckley sits 2 percent under our mean. Worth knowing, but not decisive: how well the array matches the timetable moves the answer further than the latitude does.
Scaled up, a 290 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 4 miles away at Nuneaton, models at about 252,300 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 65,100 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 12,400 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.
Hinckley ranks 5 of 7 towns we cover in Leicestershire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 863 to 891, a spread of 28 kWh per kWp. Within Leicestershire that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
The planning position for Hinckley schools
No school or college solar scheme appears in the LE10 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 Hinckley secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
The closest recorded one is about 4 miles away at Nuneaton: North Warwickshire College, Hinckley Road, a 290 kWp roof mounted array applied for by North Warwickshire South Leicestershire College, 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 Warwickshire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Hinckley falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Hinckley. July and August carry 25.8 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 14 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 4.9 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Hinckley 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 5.2 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 weekly pattern repeats the annual one. Saturdays and Sundays generate as well as any other day and consume almost nothing, so before storage or export is even discussed it is worth knowing what the site does at a weekend, which only half hourly data will tell you.
None of that makes a Hinckley 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 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 | 23 | 15 | 8 |
| Feb | 15 | 37 | 20 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 71 | 48 | 23 |
| Apr | 12 | 101 | 40 | 61 |
| May | 17 | 118 | 65 | 53 |
| Jun | 21 | 119 | 83 | 36 |
| Jul | 11 | 122 | 43 | 79 |
| Aug | 0 | 103 | 0 | 103 |
| Sep | 20 | 80 | 53 | 27 |
| Oct | 17 | 49 | 27 | 22 |
| Nov | 21 | 28 | 20 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 20 | 10 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 871 | 424 | 447 |
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
National Grid Electricity Distribution operates the distribution network across Leicestershire, 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 Leicestershire the planning database records 165 solar schemes totalling 1259 MW, of which 37 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
The school estate in Hinckley and Bosworth
Hinckley and Bosworth has 46 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 18,101 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 35 primary, 9 secondary and 2 special, at an average of 394 pupils a site. Read 3.9 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.
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 Hinckley trusts ask before a survey
- What would a 290 kWp array produce at a Hinckley school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 870 kWh per kWp a year puts a 290 kWp array at around 252,300 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 Hinckley?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.8 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 Hinckley?
- 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 Hinckley and Bosworth?
- 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 Hinckley and Bosworth. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Hinckley?
- Hinckley and Bosworth has 46 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 18,101 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.