Specialist solar panels for schools in Boston
25.6 percent of what a Boston 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.
25.6% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 906 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 900 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 Boston- 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 Lincolnshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Boston models at 906 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,158 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Boston models 2 percent above our mean. That is a real advantage, though a smaller one than the difference between an array matched to the timetable and one matched to the roof.
Scaled up, a 900 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 41 miles away at Ely, models at about 815,400 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 2,673 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 208,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 38,300 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.
Boston ranks 1 of 8 towns we cover in Lincolnshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 861 to 906, a spread of 45 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 22,500 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.
The planning position for Boston schools
No school or college solar scheme appears in the PE21 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 Boston secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
The closest recorded one is about 41 miles away at Ely: The Harbour School, Station Road, a 900 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Cambridge Meridian Academies Trust, 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 Cambridgeshire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Boston falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Boston. July and August carry 25.6 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 13.8 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 4.7 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Boston school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.3 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.4 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.
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 Boston school is largely empty, so the hours that look best on a generation chart are the worst on a consumption one.
None of that makes a Boston 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 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 | 23 | 15 | 8 |
| Feb | 15 | 38 | 20 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 75 | 51 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 105 | 42 | 63 |
| May | 17 | 123 | 67 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 123 | 86 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 125 | 44 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 107 | 0 | 107 |
| Sep | 20 | 84 | 56 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 53 | 29 | 24 |
| Nov | 21 | 30 | 21 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 20 | 10 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 906 | 441 | 465 |
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
National Grid Electricity Distribution 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 Lincolnshire the planning database records 226 solar schemes totalling 7052 MW, of which 37 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
The school estate in Boston
Boston has 27 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 10,036 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 19 primary, 5 secondary, 2 special and 1 further education, at an average of 372 pupils a site. Read 3.8 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
A survey in Boston 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 Boston 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 Boston trusts ask before a survey
- How much would a school roof near Boston generate?
- Modelled at 906 kWh per kWp a year, a 900 kWp array on a Boston school models at about 815,400 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 Boston?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.6 percent of the Boston 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 Boston school?
- Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Lincolnshire. 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 Boston 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 Boston on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Boston before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Boston?
- Boston has 27 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 10,036 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.