How much would a school roof near Loughborough generate?

Modelled at 868 kWh per kWp a year, a 190 kWp array on a Loughborough school models at about 164,900 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 Loughborough?

It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.9 percent of the Loughborough 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.

Which network operator handles the connection at a Loughborough school?

Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Leicestershire. 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 Charnwood 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 Charnwood on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Charnwood before a design is finalised.

Has a school near LE11 already done this?

One school scheme is on record in this postcode district, including a 190 kWp array at The Loughborough Schools Foundation Sports Hall that holds consent and is awaiting construction. We were not involved in it. It is a public planning record, and it matters less as proof that solar works than as evidence of what this authority and this network operator have already accepted. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

How many schools are there around Loughborough?

Charnwood has 64 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 24,344 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 Loughborough

The Loughborough Schools Foundation Sports Hall sits on the planning record near Loughborough at 190 kWp, which makes the question here less whether a school roof works and more what yours would carry. A survey here starts with the covering and the structure, then the incoming supply, then what the timetable actually draws.

164,900 kWh a year, modelled for a 190 kWp array on roughly 564 sqm of clear roof. That is the median size schools around Loughborough have applied for. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.

Book a roof survey in Loughborough

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

Drawing Illustrative estate, not a Loughborough school

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 299,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / LE11

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.

Loughborough / Leicestershire

A school on the edge of a Midlands town, solar arrays on its roofs and flat open farmland beyond — School buildings of the kind we survey across East Midlands. Not a named school and not our work.

School solar consented near Loughborough

The Renewable Energy Planning Database records 1 school and college solar scheme in the LE11 postcode district. The Loughborough Schools Foundation Sports Hall is down for a 190 kWp roof mounted array and the application holds consent and is awaiting construction. The applicant on record is Loughborough Endowed Schools.

Those are other organisations' planning applications, not our projects. We list them because a scheme a few miles away tells you what this local authority and this network operator have already accepted for a building very like yours. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

The plan above the fold is a generic four block estate, drawn to make the scale and the phasing legible. Nobody should read it as The Loughborough Schools Foundation Sports Hall or as any other Loughborough site. Our knowledge of these applications comes entirely from the public record.

The median array applied for here is 190 kWp. At 190 kWp you are covering roughly 564 square metres of roof once walkways, edge zones and rooflight setbacks come out, which on most sites means a sports hall plus one teaching block rather than the whole estate.

Site on record	Applicant on record	Size	Mounting	Status
The Loughborough Schools Foundation Sports Hall	Loughborough Endowed Schools	190 kWp	Roof	Awaiting Construction

Solar PV for academy trusts across Leicestershire

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Loughborough models at 868 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,107 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Loughborough 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 190 kWp array, sized to the median array applied for at schools around Loughborough itself, models at about 164,900 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 564 square metres of clear roof. That size is not one we chose. It is what schools in this district have actually applied for.

Spread across the year that is about 42,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 8,200 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.

FIG. 1 Loughborough against the rest of Leicestershire

Market Harborough891
Melton Mowbray879
Wigston877
Leicester874
Hinckley870
Loughborough868
Coalville863

Loughborough ranks 6 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.

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

Why demand in Loughborough falls as the roof peaks

The generating year and the school year are out of step in Loughborough. July and August carry 25.9 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 13.9 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 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Loughborough 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 daily curve does the same thing in miniature. Load drops sharply after about three o'clock, generation does not, so the last three hours of a summer afternoon are pushing into an empty building unless something absorbs them. Half hourly meter data is the only way to see how much.

None of that makes a Loughborough 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 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 Loughborough 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 Loughborough, 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	23	15	8
Feb	15	38	20	18
Mar	21	70	47	23
Apr	12	100	40	60
May	17	119	65	54
Jun	21	117	82	35
Jul	11	121	43	78
Aug	0	104	0	104
Sep	20	80	53	27
Oct	17	48	26	22
Nov	21	28	20	8
Dec	15	20	10	10
Year	190	868	421	447

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 Loughborough 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

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 Charnwood

Charnwood has 64 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 24,344 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 49 primary, 11 secondary, 3 special and 1 further education, at an average of 380 pupils a site. At 4.5 primaries to every secondary, most of the buildings here are small. That is not a reason to skip them, but it does mean the usable area on a primary is a hall roof and a teaching block rather than an estate.

For a trust with more than one site in Charnwood, the first survey is worth running across the whole estate. It tells you which roofs are near the end of their covering life, which have the switchboard headroom, and therefore which one should carry the first array.

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.

Book the survey

Send us the school postcode

A survey in Loughborough 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 Loughborough 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.

What Loughborough trusts ask before a survey

How much would a school roof near Loughborough generate?: Modelled at 868 kWh per kWp a year, a 190 kWp array on a Loughborough school models at about 164,900 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 Loughborough?: It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.9 percent of the Loughborough 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
Which network operator handles the connection at a Loughborough school?: Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Leicestershire. 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 Charnwood 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 Charnwood on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Charnwood before a design is finalised.
Has a school near LE11 already done this?: One school scheme is on record in this postcode district, including a 190 kWp array at The Loughborough Schools Foundation Sports Hall that holds consent and is awaiting construction. We were not involved in it. It is a public planning record, and it matters less as proof that solar works than as evidence of what this authority and this network operator have already accepted. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
How many schools are there around Loughborough?: Charnwood has 64 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 24,344 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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