How much would a school roof near Retford generate?

Modelled at 869 kWh per kWp a year, a 320 kWp array on a Retford school models at about 278,100 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 Retford?

It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.9 percent of the Retford 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 Retford school?

Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Nottinghamshire. 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 Bassetlaw 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 Bassetlaw on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Bassetlaw before a design is finalised.

How many schools are there around Retford?

Bassetlaw has 57 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 18,033 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 Retford

What decides a solar scheme at a Retford school is how much of the output the site uses itself, not how much the roof makes. We arrange the roof survey, model the output against the school's own half hourly consumption, and set out the funding routes.

278,100 kWh a year, modelled for a 320 kWp array on roughly 950 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 Retford

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

Drawing Illustrative estate, not a Retford school

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 300,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / DN22

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.

Retford / Nottinghamshire

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

Solar for education buildings across Nottinghamshire

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Retford models at 869 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,111 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 2 percent below the mean across the towns we cover, which is a smaller gap than most schools expect and smaller than the gap between a well matched and a badly matched system.

Scaled up, a 320 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 16 miles away at Mansfield, models at about 278,100 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 950 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 72,000 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 13,100 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.

FIG. 1 Retford against the rest of Nottinghamshire

Newark874
Retford869
West Bridgford864
Nottingham859
Arnold857
Mansfield852
Worksop842

Retford ranks 2 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.

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

School solar on record near DN22

Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the DN22 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 16 miles out and there is one: The Samworth Church Academy, Sherwood Hall Road in Mansfield, 320 kWp, applied for by eEnergy Group PLC, 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 Retford generation curve

A Retford school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.9 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 13.9 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 4.7 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 6.4 times as much in May 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.

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 Retford as anywhere else.

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.

The conclusion is not that a Retford 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution 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 Retford 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 Retford, split by whether the day is a school session day. Across the year 49 percent of generation lands while the school is open.
Month	Session days	Output, kWh per kWp	School open	School closed
Jan	20	22	14	8
Feb	15	37	20	17
Mar	21	71	48	23
Apr	12	100	40	60
May	17	121	66	55
Jun	21	117	82	35
Jul	11	120	43	77
Aug	0	105	0	105
Sep	20	80	53	27
Oct	17	48	26	22
Nov	21	28	20	8
Dec	15	19	9	10
Year	190	868	421	447

Per kWp installed, month by month, separating generation while the school is open from generation at a weekend or in the holidays. 74 percent of the Retford 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

Bassetlaw schools, phase by phase

Bassetlaw has 57 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 18,033 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 50 primary, 6 secondary and 1 special, at an average of 316 pupils a site. 8.3 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 6 secondaries.

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.

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 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 Nottinghamshire the planning database records 164 solar schemes totalling 3700 MW, of which 35 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

Book the survey

Book a roof survey at your Retford school

Roof condition decides the order of works on most school estates, so that is where we start. Send us the postcode and a rough roof area, with twelve months of half hourly readings if you have them, and we come back with usable area, modelled output against your own load, and the funding routes.

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.

Retford school solar, answered

How much would a school roof near Retford generate?: Modelled at 869 kWh per kWp a year, a 320 kWp array on a Retford school models at about 278,100 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 Retford?: It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.9 percent of the Retford 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 Retford school?: Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Nottinghamshire. 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 Bassetlaw 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 Bassetlaw on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Bassetlaw before a design is finalised.
How many schools are there around Retford?: Bassetlaw has 57 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 18,033 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.

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