Specialist solar panels for schools in Whitby
North Yorkshire has 346 state-funded schools and colleges, and most of them are buying electricity in exactly the hours their own roofs could be making it. We start with the roof build up and the age of the covering, because across a school estate that is usually what decides which block goes first.
849 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 460 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 390,500 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Whitby- 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 North Yorkshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Whitby models at 849 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,071 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Whitby sits 4 percent under our mean. Worth knowing, but not decisive: how well the array matches the timetable moves the answer further than the latitude does.
Scaled up, a 460 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 35 miles away at Peterlee, models at about 390,500 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,366 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 102,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 16,000 kWh across December and January. Northern Powergrid 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.
Whitby ranks 2 of 8 towns we cover in North Yorkshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 799 to 859, a spread of 60 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 30,000 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.
School solar on record near YO21
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the YO21 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.
Look 35 miles out and there is one: East Durham College, Willerby Grove in Peterlee, 460 kWp, applied for by East Durham & Houghall Community College, 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 Whitby generation curve
A Whitby school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 26.3 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. May is the strongest single month here at 14.5 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.
Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 4.1 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 7.7 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 6.4 to one. 76 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.
The same mismatch repeats every day. Peak generation lands between eleven and three, the timetable ends shortly after, and by four the site is down to caretaking and cleaning. An annual consumption figure cannot show that, which is why we ask for the half hourly data instead.
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 Northern Powergrid 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 | 19 | 12 | 7 |
| Feb | 15 | 34 | 18 | 16 |
| Mar | 21 | 69 | 47 | 22 |
| Apr | 12 | 102 | 41 | 61 |
| May | 17 | 123 | 67 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 116 | 81 | 35 |
| Jul | 11 | 120 | 43 | 77 |
| Aug | 0 | 103 | 0 | 103 |
| Sep | 20 | 78 | 52 | 26 |
| Oct | 17 | 45 | 25 | 20 |
| Nov | 21 | 24 | 17 | 7 |
| Dec | 15 | 16 | 8 | 8 |
| Year | 190 | 849 | 411 | 438 |
Grid connection through Northern Powergrid
Northern Powergrid operates the distribution network across North Yorkshire, so the export application goes to them. Anything larger than 3.68 kW per phase falls under G99, which means an application before commissioning rather than a notification afterwards. A constrained network is not the end of a scheme. Capping export costs little when the building already absorbs most of what the roof produces.
Across North Yorkshire the planning database records 151 solar schemes totalling 1723 MW, of which 18 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
North Yorkshire schools, phase by phase
North Yorkshire has 346 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 79,545 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 293 primary, 41 secondary, 10 special and 2 further education, at an average of 230 pupils a site. 7.1 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 41 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.
Book a roof survey at your Whitby school
A survey in Whitby 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 Whitby 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.
Whitby school solar, answered
- What would a 460 kWp array produce at a Whitby school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 849 kWh per kWp a year puts a 460 kWp array at around 390,500 kWh, on roughly 1,366 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 Whitby?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 26.3 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 Northern Powergrid.
- Who do we apply to for export near Whitby?
- Only Northern Powergrid 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 Scarborough?
- 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 Scarborough. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Whitby?
- North Yorkshire has 346 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 79,545 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.