How much would a school roof near Cramlington generate?

Modelled at 825 kWh per kWp a year, a 610 kWp array on a Cramlington school models at about 503,300 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 Cramlington?

It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 26.1 percent of the Cramlington 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 Northern Powergrid, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.

Which network operator handles the connection at a Cramlington school?

Applications go to Northern Powergrid, who run the network across Northumberland. 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 Northumberland 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 Northumberland on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Northumberland before a design is finalised.

How many schools are there around Cramlington?

Northumberland has 164 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 42,515 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.

Specialist solar panels for schools in Cramlington

A kilowatt-peak on a Cramlington school roof models at 825 kWh a year, below 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.

503,300 kWh a year, modelled for a 610 kWp array on roughly 1,812 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 Cramlington

1 teaching block
2 hall and kitchen
3 sports hall
4 1960s block, no array
first phase
later phase

Drawing Illustrative estate, not a Cramlington school

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 285,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / NE23

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.

Cramlington / Northumberland

A school on the edge of a North East town, solar arrays on its roofs and low hills beyond — School buildings of the kind we survey across North East. Not a named school and not our work.

Solar PV for academy trusts across Northumberland

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Cramlington models at 825 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,051 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is about 7 percent below the mean across the towns we cover, so the case at this latitude rests almost entirely on using the output on site rather than exporting it.

Scaled up, a 610 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 4 miles away at Blyth, models at about 503,300 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,812 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 131,400 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 20,600 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.

FIG. 1 Cramlington against the rest of Northumberland

Blyth848
Alnwick840
Berwick-upon-Tweed827
Cramlington825
Morpeth824
Hexham803

Cramlington ranks 4 of 6 towns we cover in Northumberland on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 803 to 848, a spread of 45 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 22,500 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.

Bars are zero based, so length is proportional to the figure. Where a county is flat, that is the finding: latitude is not the lever, the timetable is. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, modelled per town

The planning position for Cramlington schools

No school or college solar scheme appears in the NE23 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 Cramlington secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.

The closest recorded one is about 4 miles away at Blyth: Bede Academy North, Sixth Avenue, a 450 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Emmanuel Schools Foundation, 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 Northumberland. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

Why demand in Cramlington falls as the roof peaks

The generating year and the school year are out of step in Cramlington. July and August carry 26.1 percent of the modelled output (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the site is closed for most of those nine weeks. May is the strongest single month here at 14.4 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 4.1 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Cramlington school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 7.9 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 6.6 to one. 75 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.

Nationally this comes out at about 49 percent of annual generation falling on a session day. A business open every weekday sees roughly 71 percent. The 22 point gap is what a school appraisal has to absorb, and it is much the same in Cramlington as anywhere else.

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 Cramlington school is largely empty, so the hours that look best on a generation chart are the worst on a consumption one.

The conclusion is not that a Cramlington school should do nothing. It is that the array should be sized to the load that survives the holidays, which is usually the server room, the catering refrigeration, the ventilation and the hot water, plus whatever the site lets out over the summer. Anything above that line needs storage or an export agreement with Northern Powergrid to earn its keep.

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.

FIG. 2 A Cramlington roof against the English school year

generated while the school is open
generated at a weekend or in the holidays

The same figures as a table

Monthly output for a 1 kWp array in Cramlington, split by whether the day is a school session day. Across the year 48 percent of generation lands while the school is open.
Month	Session days	Output, kWh per kWp	School open	School closed
Jan	20	19	12	7
Feb	15	35	19	16
Mar	21	67	45	22
Apr	12	98	39	59
May	17	119	65	54
Jun	21	113	79	34
Jul	11	116	41	75
Aug	0	99	0	99
Sep	20	75	50	25
Oct	17	44	24	20
Nov	21	24	17	7
Dec	15	15	7	8
Year	190	824	398	426

Per kWp installed, month by month, separating generation while the school is open from generation at a weekend or in the holidays. 75 percent of the Cramlington year sits between April and September, most of which is term time; it is the tail of that period, the last week of July and all of August, that the school is not there for. The daily split is a flat apportionment of each month, not a metered one. Session days follow a typical English school year of 190 days. Your own trust or authority may differ by a few days either way. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, session days from a typical school calendar

The school estate in Northumberland

Northumberland has 164 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 42,515 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 127 primary, 27 secondary and 10 special, at an average of 259 pupils a site. Read 4.7 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.

Aerial view of a school site with teaching blocks of several different ages, a sports hall and a playing field, solar arrays on two of the flat roofs — A school site with blocks of several ages, which is the usual starting point for a trust estate survey.

Grid connection through Northern Powergrid

Northern Powergrid 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 Northumberland the planning database records 38 solar schemes totalling 276 MW, of which 2 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

Book the survey

Send us the school postcode

A survey in Cramlington 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 Cramlington 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.

What Cramlington trusts ask before a survey

How much would a school roof near Cramlington generate?: Modelled at 825 kWh per kWp a year, a 610 kWp array on a Cramlington school models at about 503,300 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 Cramlington?: It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 26.1 percent of the Cramlington 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 Northern Powergrid, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
Which network operator handles the connection at a Cramlington school?: Applications go to Northern Powergrid, who run the network across Northumberland. 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 Northumberland 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 Northumberland on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Northumberland before a design is finalised.
How many schools are there around Cramlington?: Northumberland has 164 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 42,515 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.

Nearby

All Northumberland locations