Specialist solar panels for schools in Abingdon
A kilowatt-peak on a Abingdon school roof models at 904 kWh a year, above 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.
25.6% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 904 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 300 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 Abingdon- 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 PV for academy trusts across Oxfordshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Abingdon models at 904 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,158 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is roughly 2 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, so latitude is working slightly in your favour here.
Scaled up, a 300 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 19 miles away at Thatcham, models at about 271,200 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 891 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 69,400 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 14,100 kWh across December and January. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks 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.
Abingdon ranks 2 of 8 towns we cover in Oxfordshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 891 to 913, a spread of 22 kWh per kWp. Within Oxfordshire that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
The planning position for Abingdon schools
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for Abingdon and the area around it 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.
The closest recorded one is about 19 miles away at Thatcham: Kennet Secondary School, Stoney Lane, a 300 kWp roof mounted array applied for by EEnergy Group plc, 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 Berkshire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Abingdon falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Abingdon. July and August carry 25.6 percent of the modelled output (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the site is closed for most of those nine weeks. July is the single strongest month here at 13.9 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 5.2 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Abingdon school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5 to one. 73 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.
Summed over the year, about 49 percent of what a school roof makes arrives while the school is open. For a business trading every weekday the equivalent is roughly 71 percent. Nothing about Abingdon changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
Then there is the afternoon. From roughly three o'clock the building empties while the roof is still working, so a system sized on annual consumption will over-generate in exactly the hours nobody is there. We size on half hourly data for that reason.
A Abingdon governing body should read that as a sizing constraint, not a reason to stop. The base load that runs through the holidays, servers, comms, refrigeration, ventilation and hot water, is the floor the array should be built up from, and everything above it has to be justified by storage, export or summer occupancy.
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 | 26 | 17 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 74 | 50 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 104 | 42 | 62 |
| May | 17 | 121 | 66 | 55 |
| Jun | 21 | 124 | 87 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 126 | 45 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 105 | 0 | 105 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 51 | 28 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 30 | 21 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 21 | 10 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 904 | 442 | 462 |
The school estate in Vale of White Horse
Vale of White Horse has 62 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 19,685 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 50 primary, 9 secondary, 2 special and 1 further education, at an average of 318 pupils a site. 5.6 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 9 secondaries and the 1 further education site.
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.
Grid connection through Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks
Connections around Abingdon are handled by Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, 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 Oxfordshire the planning database records 149 solar schemes totalling 2544 MW, of which 31 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Send us the school postcode
We survey school and college roofs throughout Oxfordshire. We need the postcode, a rough roof area and your half hourly meter data if the trust has it. From that we model what the roof carries, what it generates against the timetable, and which of the funding routes actually suits a school of your size.
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 Abingdon trusts ask before a survey
- How much would a school roof near Abingdon generate?
- Modelled at 904 kWh per kWp a year, a 300 kWp array on a Abingdon school models at about 271,200 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 Abingdon?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.6 percent of the Abingdon 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 Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
- Which network operator handles the connection at a Abingdon school?
- Applications go to Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, who run the network across Oxfordshire. 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.
- How many schools are there around Abingdon?
- Vale of White Horse has 62 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 19,685 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.