Specialist solar panels for schools in Glastonbury
A school roof in Glastonbury makes 6 times as much in July as it does in December, and the school year runs against that curve rather than with it. What we come back with is the usable roof area, the modelled output against your meter data, and the routes schools use to pay for it.
25.2% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 913 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 320 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 Glastonbury- 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 Glastonbury 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). That is roughly 3 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, so latitude is working slightly in your favour here.
Scaled up, a 320 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 17 miles away at Weston-super-Mare, models at about 292,200 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 73,600 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 14,900 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.
Glastonbury ranks 4 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 Glastonbury
There is no school entry for Glastonbury and the area around it in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. The register is dependable for anything from a megawatt upward and incomplete below it, and a school array is usually nearer a fifth of a megawatt, so this says more about the threshold than about Glastonbury.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 17 miles from Glastonbury, 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 Glastonbury school
25.2 percent of the annual output modelled for Glastonbury 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 13.8 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.
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 Glastonbury as anywhere else.
Inside the day it happens again. The roof is still at three quarters of its peak at four in the afternoon, by which time a Glastonbury school is largely empty, so the hours that look best on a generation chart are the worst on a consumption one.
The conclusion is not that a Glastonbury 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution 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 | 26 | 17 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 41 | 22 | 19 |
| Mar | 21 | 76 | 51 | 25 |
| Apr | 12 | 107 | 43 | 64 |
| May | 17 | 124 | 68 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 124 | 87 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 126 | 45 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 104 | 0 | 104 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 51 | 28 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 21 | 10 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 914 | 448 | 466 |
How many schools Somerset has
Somerset has 266 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 68,648 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 219 primary, 35 secondary, 9 special and 3 further education, at an average of 258 pupils a site. A ratio of 6.3 to one tells you where the roof area is. It is not with the 219 primaries, which mostly offer a hall and a teaching block each, but with the larger sites that were built with a sports hall and a dining block attached.
Where a multi-academy trust holds several of those sites, surveying the estate in one pass beats taking a roof at a time. The design work, the connection applications and the procurement paperwork are the same job repeated, and a trust that runs them together gets a better answer on all three.
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
National Grid Electricity Distribution operates the distribution network across Somerset, 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 Somerset the planning database records 223 solar schemes totalling 1574 MW, of which 79 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Start with the Glastonbury roof
A survey in Glastonbury 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 Glastonbury 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 Glastonbury schools
- How much would a school roof near Glastonbury generate?
- Modelled at 913 kWh per kWp a year, a 320 kWp array on a Glastonbury school models at about 292,200 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 Glastonbury?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.2 percent of the Glastonbury 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 Glastonbury school?
- Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Somerset. 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.
- How many schools are there around Glastonbury?
- Somerset has 266 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 68,648 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.