Specialist solar panels for schools in Daventry
West Northamptonshire has 187 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.
25.7% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 890 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 460 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 Daventry- 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 Northamptonshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Daventry models at 890 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,137 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is within a few percent of our mean. Latitude is not the variable here. When the building is occupied is.
Scaled up, a 460 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 18 miles away at Coventry, models at about 409,400 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 105,200 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 20,100 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.
Daventry ranks 7 of 7 towns we cover in Northamptonshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 890 to 900, a spread of 10 kWh per kWp. Within Northamptonshire that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
School solar on record near NN11
No school or college solar scheme appears in the NN11 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 Daventry secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
Look 18 miles out and there is one: City College, Swanswell Street in Coventry, 460 kWp, applied for by EON Control Solutions Limited, 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 Daventry generation curve
A Daventry school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.7 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 13.9 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 4.9 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 6.2 times as much in July 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.
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 Daventry school is largely empty, so the hours that look best on a generation chart are the worst on a consumption one.
None of that makes a Daventry 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution, or a smaller array that consumes nearly everything it makes.
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 | 38 | 20 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 73 | 49 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 103 | 41 | 62 |
| May | 17 | 119 | 65 | 54 |
| Jun | 21 | 122 | 85 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 124 | 44 | 80 |
| Aug | 0 | 105 | 0 | 105 |
| Sep | 20 | 82 | 55 | 27 |
| Oct | 17 | 51 | 28 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 29 | 20 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 20 | 10 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 890 | 432 | 458 |
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 Northamptonshire the planning database records 133 solar schemes totalling 1932 MW, of which 25 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
West Northamptonshire schools, phase by phase
West Northamptonshire has 187 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 67,417 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 152 primary, 24 secondary, 9 special and 2 further education, at an average of 361 pupils a site. Read 6.3 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.
Book a roof survey at your Daventry school
Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges roof surveys for schools across Northamptonshire. 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.
Daventry school solar, answered
- How much would a school roof near Daventry generate?
- Modelled at 890 kWh per kWp a year, a 460 kWp array on a Daventry school models at about 409,400 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 Daventry?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.7 percent of the Daventry 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
- Which network operator handles the connection at a Daventry school?
- Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Northamptonshire. An export-limited offer usually still works for a school, because the summer surplus is the part you were least likely to be paid much for anyway.
- What does West Northamptonshire require for solar on a school building?
- Roof-mounted solar on a non-domestic building often falls within permitted development under Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order, subject to limits on how far the panels stand proud of the roof plane and, above a threshold, to prior approval from West Northamptonshire on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to West Northamptonshire before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Daventry?
- West Northamptonshire has 187 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 67,417 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.