Specialist solar panels for schools in Caerleon
25.5 percent of what a Caerleon school roof makes arrives in July and August, which is when the buildings are shut. We look at the roof, the switchboard and the timetable in that order, then set the array size against what the site draws in term time.
289,600 kWh a year, modelled for a 320 kWp array on roughly 950 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 Caerleon- 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.
School rooftop solar across Newport
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Caerleon models at 905 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,162 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Caerleon 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 320 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 18 miles away at Weston-super-Mare, models at about 289,600 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 950 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 73,800 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 14,200 kWh across December and January. The July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.
Caerleon ranks 2 of 4 towns we cover in Newport on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 887 to 910, a spread of 23 kWh per kWp. Within Newport that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
What the planning record shows around Caerleon
Caerleon and the area around it has no education solar entry in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. Almost no school array is large enough to be captured there reliably, so the absence tells you about the reporting threshold and very little about what is already on the roofs around Caerleon.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 18 miles from Caerleon, at Weston-super-Mare: 300 kWp at Weston College, applicant Weston College, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Somerset planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Caerleon school
25.5 percent of the annual output modelled for Caerleon 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 14 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 4.9 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 6.4 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.3 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 Caerleon 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 the network operator, 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.
- 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 | 73 | 49 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 105 | 42 | 63 |
| May | 17 | 124 | 68 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 127 | 89 | 38 |
| Jul | 11 | 126 | 45 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 105 | 0 | 105 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 50 | 27 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 29 | 20 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 20 | 10 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 905 | 441 | 464 |
Start with the Caerleon roof
The first survey answers three questions at once: what the roofs carry, what they generate against your own timetable, and how a Caerleon school pays for it. Send the postcode, an approximate roof area per block and half hourly meter data if the school can get it from its supplier.
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 Caerleon schools
- How much would a school roof near Caerleon generate?
- Modelled at 905 kWh per kWp a year, a 320 kWp array on a Caerleon school models at about 289,600 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 Caerleon?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.5 percent of the Caerleon 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 your network operator, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.