Specialist solar panels for schools in Oxford
What decides a solar scheme at a Oxford 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.
25.5% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 895 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 540 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 Oxford- 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 Oxford models at 895 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,146 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Against a mean of 886 kWh per kWp across the towns we cover, Oxford is unremarkable, which is the useful finding: the scheme will be decided by the load curve, not the map.
Scaled up, a 540 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 20 miles away at Aylesbury, models at about 483,300 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,604 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 123,200 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 24,600 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.
Oxford ranks 5 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 OX1
The OX1 postcode district has no education solar entry in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. Almost no school array is large enough to be captured there reliably, so the absence tells you about the reporting threshold and very little about what is already on the roofs around Oxford.
Look 20 miles out and there is one: Aylesbury College Decarbonisation in Aylesbury, 540 kWp, applied for by Aylesbury College, 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 Oxford generation curve
A Oxford school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.5 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 5.9 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.
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 Oxford 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 Oxford 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 Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks to earn its keep.
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 | 25 | 16 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 73 | 49 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 103 | 41 | 62 |
| May | 17 | 119 | 65 | 54 |
| Jun | 21 | 122 | 85 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 124 | 44 | 80 |
| Aug | 0 | 104 | 0 | 104 |
| Sep | 20 | 82 | 55 | 27 |
| Oct | 17 | 51 | 28 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 21 | 10 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 894 | 436 | 458 |
Oxford schools, phase by phase
Oxford has 51 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 18,397 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 37 primary, 6 secondary, 6 special and 2 further education, at an average of 361 pupils a site. At 6.2 primaries to every secondary, most of the buildings here are small. That is not a reason to skip them, but it does mean the usable area on a primary is a hall roof and a teaching block rather than an estate.
For a trust with more than one site in Oxford, the first survey is worth running across the whole estate. It tells you which roofs are near the end of their covering life, which have the switchboard headroom, and therefore which one should carry the first array.
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).
Book a roof survey at your Oxford school
A survey in Oxford 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 Oxford 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.
Oxford school solar, answered
- Is there enough sun around Oxford for this to be worth doing?
- The model gives 895 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 540 kWp array comes out at roughly 483,300 kWh a year before shading. It needs about 1,604 square metres of clear roof once walkways and rooflight setbacks are allowed for. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
- Does a Oxford school waste its generation in August?
- 25.5 percent of the modelled annual output for Oxford falls in July and August, when the buildings are closed for most of six weeks (EU PVGIS v5.2). It does not go to waste, but it only has three places to go: the base load that runs regardless, such as servers, catering refrigeration and ventilation; storage; or export under an agreement with Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks. We model all three against your half hourly data before an array is sized.
- Will the network around Oxford accept the export?
- Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks is the distribution network operator for Oxfordshire. Anything above 3.68 kW per phase connects under G99, and the application fixes the export limit. On a school site the incoming supply is often the binding constraint rather than the roof, so we ask that question before anyone sizes an array.
- Is planning permission needed for panels on a school in Oxford?
- Usually permitted development covers a roof array on a school, with prior approval from Oxford needed above a capacity threshold. A ground mounted array in the grounds is a different question and much more likely to need a full application. We check both before design sign-off.
- How many schools are there around Oxford?
- Oxford has 51 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 18,397 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.