Specialist solar panels for schools in Maindee
A kilowatt-peak on a Maindee school roof models at 910 kWh a year, above the mean across the towns we cover, and the roofs it applies to are mostly carrying nothing. 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.
910 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 320 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 291,200 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Maindee- 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 Maindee models at 910 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,167 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Maindee models 3 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, 17 miles away at Weston-super-Mare, models at about 291,200 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 74,800 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 13,700 kWh across December and January. The July figure is the one worth putting in front of a governing body first.
Maindee ranks 1 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 Maindee
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for Maindee and the area around it and nothing comes back under education. That is worth stating plainly and then setting aside: the register is built around generating stations, a school array is a fraction of the size it captures reliably, and plenty of school roofs never appear in any national record at all.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 17 miles from Maindee, 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 Maindee school
25.7 percent of the annual output modelled for Maindee 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 14.1 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 4.7 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.
Across the country the arithmetic settles at roughly 49 percent of output on a session day, against about 71 percent for a weekday business. That figure hardly varies by location, which is why the local numbers that matter here are the yield, the roofs and what has already cleared planning nearby.
Then there is the afternoon. From roughly three o'clock the building empties while the roof is still working, so a system sized on annual consumption will over-generate in exactly the hours nobody is there. We size on half hourly data for that reason.
That argues for a particular shape of scheme rather than against one. Size to the load that does not stop at the end of term, count in lettings, holiday clubs and summer works honestly rather than optimistically, and then decide whether storage or an export arrangement with the network operator pays for the surplus that is left.
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 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 73 | 49 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 106 | 42 | 64 |
| May | 17 | 126 | 69 | 57 |
| Jun | 21 | 128 | 90 | 38 |
| Jul | 11 | 128 | 45 | 83 |
| Aug | 0 | 105 | 0 | 105 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 49 | 27 | 22 |
| Nov | 21 | 28 | 20 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 20 | 10 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 908 | 443 | 465 |
Start with the Maindee roof
Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges roof surveys for schools across Newport. Send the school postcode and a rough idea of the roof area, and the last twelve months of half hourly meter data if the school holds it. We come back with what the roofs can carry, what they would generate against your own consumption, and the funding routes open to a school.
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 Maindee schools
- How much would a school roof near Maindee generate?
- Modelled at 910 kWh per kWp a year, a 320 kWp array on a Maindee school models at about 291,200 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 Maindee?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.7 percent of the Maindee 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.