Specialist solar panels for schools in Norwich
A kilowatt-peak on a Norwich school roof models at 904 kWh a year, above the mean across the towns we cover, and the roofs it applies to are mostly carrying nothing. The survey records sheet type, remaining life, purlin spacing and the state of the incoming supply, and the model runs off your own meter data rather than an average.
904 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 210 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 189,800 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Norwich- 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 Norfolk
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Norwich models at 904 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,156 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 210 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 28 miles away at Thetford, models at about 189,800 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 624 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 48,800 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 9,100 kWh across December and January. UK Power Networks 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.
Norwich ranks 5 of 8 towns we cover in Norfolk on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 897 to 923, a spread of 26 kWh per kWp. Within Norfolk that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
The planning position for Norwich schools
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the NR3 postcode district 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 closest recorded one is about 28 miles away at Thetford: The Bishops CE Primary Academy, a 210 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Solar Options for Schools Limited, 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 Norfolk. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Norwich falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Norwich. July and August carry 25.7 percent of the modelled output (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the site is closed for most of those nine weeks. June is the strongest single month here at 13.7 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 4.8 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Norwich school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.2 times as much in June 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.
Summed over the year, about 49 percent of what a school roof makes arrives while the school is open. For a business trading every weekday the equivalent is roughly 71 percent. Nothing about Norwich changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
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.
A Norwich governing body should read that as a sizing constraint, not a reason to stop. The base load that runs through the holidays, servers, comms, refrigeration, ventilation and hot water, is the floor the array should be built up from, and everything above it has to be justified by storage, export or summer occupancy.
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 | 38 | 20 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 73 | 49 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 107 | 43 | 64 |
| May | 17 | 123 | 67 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 124 | 87 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 124 | 44 | 80 |
| Aug | 0 | 108 | 0 | 108 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 51 | 28 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 29 | 20 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 20 | 10 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 903 | 438 | 465 |
The school estate in Norwich
Norwich has 50 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 17,469 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 35 primary, 8 secondary, 5 special and 2 further education, at an average of 349 pupils a site. 4.4 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 8 secondaries and the 2 further education sites.
Across an estate of that size the roofs will not be in the same condition, and that is the point of surveying them together: the block with the best orientation is often not the block whose covering has twenty years left in it.
Grid connection through UK Power Networks
UK Power Networks 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 Norfolk the planning database records 179 solar schemes totalling 1490 MW, of which 43 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Send us the school postcode
Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges roof surveys for schools across Norfolk. 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.
What Norwich trusts ask before a survey
- What would a 210 kWp array produce at a Norwich school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 904 kWh per kWp a year puts a 210 kWp array at around 189,800 kWh, on roughly 624 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 Norwich?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.7 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 UK Power Networks.
- Who do we apply to for export near Norwich?
- Only UK Power Networks 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 Norwich?
- 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 Norwich. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Norwich?
- Norwich has 50 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 17,469 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.