Specialist solar panels for schools in Didcot
South Oxfordshire has 73 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.
913 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 300 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 273,900 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Didcot- 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 Oxfordshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Didcot models at 913 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,169 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Didcot models 3 percent above our mean. That is a real advantage, though a smaller one than the difference between an array matched to the timetable and one matched to the roof.
Scaled up, a 300 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 15 miles away at Thatcham, models at about 273,900 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 70,100 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 14,000 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.
Didcot ranks 1 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.
School solar on record near OX11
The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for the OX11 postcode district. Read that as a gap in the record, not a gap in the roofs: the database is reliable above one megawatt and thin below it, and a school array is typically a fifth of a megawatt.
Look 15 miles out and there is one: Kennet Secondary School, Stoney Lane in Thatcham, 300 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 Didcot generation curve
A Didcot school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.6 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 5.1 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 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.1 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.
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.
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.
None of that makes a Didcot 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 Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, 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 | 26 | 17 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 75 | 51 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 106 | 42 | 64 |
| May | 17 | 122 | 67 | 55 |
| Jun | 21 | 125 | 88 | 38 |
| Jul | 11 | 127 | 45 | 82 |
| Aug | 0 | 107 | 0 | 107 |
| Sep | 20 | 84 | 56 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 52 | 29 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 30 | 21 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 21 | 10 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 914 | 447 | 467 |
Grid connection through Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks
Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks operates the distribution network across Oxfordshire, so the export application goes to them. Anything larger than 3.68 kW per phase falls under G99, which means an application before commissioning rather than a notification afterwards. A constrained network is not the end of a scheme. Capping export costs little when the building already absorbs most of what the roof produces.
Across Oxfordshire the planning database records 149 solar schemes totalling 2544 MW, of which 31 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
South Oxfordshire schools, phase by phase
South Oxfordshire has 73 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 23,161 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 59 primary, 10 secondary, 3 special and 1 further education, at an average of 317 pupils a site. That is 5.9 primaries for every secondary, which is the ratio that matters for a roof: a primary of a few hundred pupils usually offers a hall roof and one teaching block, while a secondary site carries a sports hall, a dining block and several flat roofs.
If your trust holds several of them, the sequencing question comes before the sizing question. Roof age, covering type and the state of the incoming supply vary block by block across an estate, and that is normally what sets the order of works.
Book a roof survey at your Didcot school
Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges roof surveys for schools across Oxfordshire. 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.
Didcot school solar, answered
- How much would a school roof near Didcot generate?
- Modelled at 913 kWh per kWp a year, a 300 kWp array on a Didcot school models at about 273,900 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 Didcot?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.6 percent of the Didcot 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 Didcot 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.
- What does South Oxfordshire 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 South Oxfordshire on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to South Oxfordshire before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Didcot?
- South Oxfordshire has 73 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 23,161 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.