Specialist solar panels for schools in Spalding
What decides a solar scheme at a Spalding school is how much of the output the site uses itself, not how much the roof makes. We arrange the roof survey, model the output against the school's own half hourly consumption, and set out the funding routes.
25.6% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 902 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 Spalding- 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 for education buildings across Lincolnshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Spalding models at 902 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,154 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is roughly 2 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, so latitude is working slightly in your favour here.
Scaled up, a 900 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 32 miles away at Ely, models at about 811,800 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 207,800 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 40,600 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.
Spalding ranks 2 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.
School solar on record near PE11
No school or college solar scheme appears in the PE11 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 Spalding secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
Look 32 miles out and there is one: The Harbour School, Station Road in Ely, 900 kWp, applied for by Cambridge Meridian Academies Trust, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. None of our doing. It is a public planning record, and the nearest evidence available of how an application like yours is treated around here. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Term dates against the Spalding generation curve
A Spalding school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.6 percent of the modelled year lands in July and August alone (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the summer holiday takes roughly six of those nine weeks out of the timetable. July is the single strongest month here at 13.7 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 5 percent of the modelled year, and that is when the heating, the lighting and a full register are all drawing at the same time. The roof makes 5.9 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.1 to one. 73 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 Spalding 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 Spalding 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 Spalding 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution 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 | 24 | 15 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 75 | 51 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 104 | 42 | 62 |
| May | 17 | 123 | 67 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 122 | 85 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 124 | 44 | 80 |
| Aug | 0 | 107 | 0 | 107 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 52 | 29 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 30 | 21 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 21 | 10 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 904 | 440 | 464 |
South Holland schools, phase by phase
South Holland has 44 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 13,517 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 36 primary, 6 secondary and 2 special, at an average of 307 pupils a site. Read 6 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 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).
Book a roof survey at your Spalding school
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.
Spalding school solar, answered
- What would a 900 kWp array produce at a Spalding school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 902 kWh per kWp a year puts a 900 kWp array at around 811,800 kWh, on roughly 2,673 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 Spalding?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.6 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 Spalding?
- 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 South Holland?
- 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 South Holland. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Spalding?
- South Holland has 44 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 13,517 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.