Specialist solar panels for schools in Nottingham
Nottingham has 98 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.
859 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 180 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 154,600 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Nottingham- 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 Nottinghamshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Nottingham models at 859 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,098 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Nottingham sits 3 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 180 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 3 miles away at Arnold, models at about 154,600 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 535 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 40,200 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 7,400 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.
Nottingham ranks 4 of 7 towns we cover in Nottinghamshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 842 to 874, a spread of 32 kWh per kWp. Within Nottinghamshire 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 NG7
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the NG7 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 3 miles out and there is one: Arnold Hill Spencer Academy in Arnold, 180 kWp, applied for by Green Nation Solar Energy, 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 Nottingham generation curve
A Nottingham school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 26 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 4.8 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 6.3 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.5 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.
The weekly pattern repeats the annual one. Saturdays and Sundays generate as well as any other day and consume almost nothing, so before storage or export is even discussed it is worth knowing what the site does at a weekend, which only half hourly data will tell you.
None of that makes a Nottingham 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 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 | 22 | 14 | 8 |
| Feb | 15 | 37 | 20 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 70 | 47 | 23 |
| Apr | 12 | 100 | 40 | 60 |
| May | 17 | 118 | 65 | 53 |
| Jun | 21 | 115 | 81 | 35 |
| Jul | 11 | 119 | 42 | 77 |
| Aug | 0 | 104 | 0 | 104 |
| Sep | 20 | 78 | 52 | 26 |
| Oct | 17 | 48 | 26 | 22 |
| Nov | 21 | 28 | 20 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 19 | 9 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 858 | 416 | 442 |
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
Connections around Nottingham are handled by National Grid Electricity Distribution, which sets the export limit for the site. Above 3.68 kW per phase the connection runs under G99, so the export limit is agreed in advance rather than assumed. Where the local network is constrained, an export-limited connection usually still makes the scheme work, because a school uses most of what the roof makes during the working day.
Across Nottinghamshire the planning database records 164 solar schemes totalling 3700 MW, of which 35 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Nottingham schools, phase by phase
Nottingham has 98 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 46,024 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 74 primary, 17 secondary, 5 special and 2 further education, at an average of 470 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 17 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 Nottingham school
A survey in Nottingham 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 Nottingham 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.
Nottingham school solar, answered
- What would a 180 kWp array produce at a Nottingham school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 859 kWh per kWp a year puts a 180 kWp array at around 154,600 kWh, on roughly 535 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 Nottingham?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 26 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution.
- Who do we apply to for export near Nottingham?
- Only National Grid Electricity Distribution 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 Nottingham?
- 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 Nottingham. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Nottingham?
- Nottingham has 98 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 46,024 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.