Specialist solar panels for schools in Brecon

School rooftop solar across Powys

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Brecon models at 828 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,057 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). 7 percent below our mean puts Brecon at the weaker end of the range, which raises the premium on self consumption and lowers the value of anything that leaves the site.

Scaled up, a 320 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 46 miles away at Weston-super-Mare, models at about 265,000 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 67,600 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 11,900 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.

What the planning record shows around Brecon

The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for Brecon and the area around it. 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.

The nearest education scheme on the record is 46 miles from Brecon, at Weston-super-Mare: 300 kWp at Weston College, applicant Weston College, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Somerset planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

The summer holiday problem for a Brecon school

25.5 percent of the annual output modelled for Brecon arrives in the two months a school uses least (EU PVGIS v5.2). Term ends in the third week of July and the buildings stay largely empty until September. June is the strongest single month here at 14 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.

The inverse holds at the other end. December and January together return only 4.5 percent of the year, and those are the months with the heating, the lighting and the full timetable all running at once. The roof makes 6.8 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.7 to one. 75 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 daily curve does the same thing in miniature. Load drops sharply after about three o'clock, generation does not, so the last three hours of a summer afternoon are pushing into an empty building unless something absorbs them. Half hourly meter data is the only way to see how much.

None of that makes a Brecon 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 full treatment of the school year against the generation curve on the home page, and what it does to a payback figure under costs.

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 Powys the planning database records 18 solar schemes totalling 39 MW, of which 1 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

Questions governors ask us about Brecon schools

What would a 320 kWp array produce at a Brecon school?

Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 828 kWh per kWp a year puts a 320 kWp array at around 265,000 kWh, on roughly 950 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 Brecon?

Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.5 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 Brecon?

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.