Specialist solar panels for schools in Bath
National Grid Electricity Distribution runs the network around Bath, and on a school site their answer on export shapes the design as much as the roof pitch does. We look at the roof, the switchboard and the timetable in that order, then set the array size against what the site draws in term time.
135,600 kWh a year, modelled for a 150 kWp array on roughly 446 sqm of clear roof. That is 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 Bath- 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.
School rooftop solar across Somerset
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Bath models at 904 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,156 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). Bath models 2 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 150 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 6 miles away at Keynsham, models at about 135,600 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 34,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 6,900 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.
Bath ranks 6 of 8 towns we cover in Somerset on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 894 to 934, a spread of 40 kWh per kWp. Within Somerset that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
What the planning record shows around Bath
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the BA1 postcode district 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 nearest education scheme on the record is 6 miles from Bath, at Keynsham: 150 kWp at Wellsway School, Chandag Road, applicant Bath & West Community Energy, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Bristol planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Bath school
25.6 percent of the annual output modelled for Bath 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. July is the single strongest month here at 14 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
The inverse holds at the other end. December and January together return only 5.1 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 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.
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 Bath 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 whole argument about term dates and 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 | 74 | 50 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 105 | 42 | 63 |
| May | 17 | 122 | 67 | 55 |
| Jun | 21 | 123 | 86 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 126 | 45 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 105 | 0 | 105 |
| Sep | 20 | 82 | 55 | 27 |
| Oct | 17 | 51 | 28 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 30 | 21 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 21 | 10 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 903 | 441 | 462 |
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
Connections around Bath are handled by National Grid Electricity Distribution, 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 Somerset the planning database records 223 solar schemes totalling 1574 MW, of which 79 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
How many schools Bath and North East Somerset has
Bath and North East Somerset has 81 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 27,058 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 63 primary, 14 secondary, 3 special and 1 further education, at an average of 334 pupils a site. 4.5 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 14 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.
Start with the Bath roof
A survey in Bath 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 Bath 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.
Questions governors ask us about Bath schools
- What would a 150 kWp array produce at a Bath school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 904 kWh per kWp a year puts a 150 kWp array at around 135,600 kWh, on roughly 446 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 Bath?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.6 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 Bath?
- 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.
- Do we need planning permission in Bath and North East Somerset?
- Often not, because panels on the roof of a school building usually sit within permitted development for non-domestic buildings. The exceptions are listed buildings, conservation areas and arrays that project too far above the roof plane, and larger schemes still need prior approval from Bath and North East Somerset. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Bath?
- Bath and North East Somerset has 81 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 27,058 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.