How much would a school roof near Shrewsbury generate?

Modelled at 852 kWh per kWp a year, a 150 kWp array on a Shrewsbury school models at about 127,800 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 Shrewsbury?

It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.4 percent of the Shrewsbury 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 Shrewsbury school?

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

How many schools are there around Shrewsbury?

Shropshire has 151 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 39,029 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 Shrewsbury

A kilowatt-peak on a Shrewsbury school roof models at 852 kWh a year, below 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.

852 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 150 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 127,800 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.

Book a roof survey in Shrewsbury

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

Drawing Typical school site, Shrewsbury scale

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 294,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / SY1

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.

Shrewsbury / Shropshire

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 West Midlands. Not a named school and not our work.

Solar PV for academy trusts across Shropshire

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Shrewsbury models at 852 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,091 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 4 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 150 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 28 miles away at Stafford, models at about 127,800 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 446 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 32,500 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 6,100 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 Shrewsbury against the rest of Shropshire

Ludlow860
Bridgnorth856
Oswestry855
Shrewsbury852
Market Drayton842

Shrewsbury ranks 4 of 5 towns we cover in Shropshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 842 to 860, a spread of 18 kWh per kWp. Within Shropshire 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

The planning position for Shrewsbury schools

The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for the SY1 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.

The closest recorded one is about 28 miles away at Stafford: Stafford Manor High School, Rising Brook, a 150 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 Staffordshire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.

Why demand in Shrewsbury falls as the roof peaks

The generating year and the school year are out of step in Shrewsbury. July and August carry 25.4 percent of the modelled output (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the site is closed for most of those nine weeks. May is the strongest single month here at 13.8 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.

At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 4.8 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Shrewsbury school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.2 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.3 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.

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 Shrewsbury changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.

Daily shape compounds it. A school's load climbs from breakfast club, holds through the teaching day and falls away from about three in the afternoon, while generation is still strong until six in high summer. That is why we size against half hourly meter data rather than against annual consumption: the annual figure hides both problems.

A Shrewsbury 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 complete version of the term time arithmetic on the home page, and what it does to a payback figure under costs.

FIG. 2 A Shrewsbury 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 Shrewsbury, 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	70	47	23
Apr	12	101	40	61
May	17	118	65	53
Jun	21	118	83	35
Jul	11	117	42	75
Aug	0	100	0	100
Sep	20	78	52	26
Oct	17	47	26	21
Nov	21	27	19	8
Dec	15	19	9	10
Year	190	854	417	437

Output per kWp installed, split by whether the day is a session day. July and August are 25.4 percent of the Shrewsbury year and the school is shut for most of them. Each month's total is spread evenly across its days, which is the only split available without half hourly readings. 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

The school estate in Shropshire

Shropshire has 151 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 39,029 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 127 primary, 20 secondary, 3 special and 1 further education, at an average of 258 pupils a site. That is 6.4 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.

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 operates the distribution network across Shropshire, 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 Shropshire the planning database records 110 solar schemes totalling 813 MW, of which 27 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).

Book the survey

Send us the school postcode

We survey school and college roofs throughout Shropshire. 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 Shrewsbury trusts ask before a survey

How much would a school roof near Shrewsbury generate?: Modelled at 852 kWh per kWp a year, a 150 kWp array on a Shrewsbury school models at about 127,800 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 Shrewsbury?: It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.4 percent of the Shrewsbury 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 Shrewsbury school?: Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Shropshire. 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 Shropshire 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 Shropshire on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Shropshire before a design is finalised.
How many schools are there around Shrewsbury?: Shropshire has 151 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 39,029 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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