Specialist solar panels for schools in Yeovil
A kilowatt-peak on a Yeovil school roof models at 923 kWh a year, above 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.
25.5% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 923 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 590 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 Yeovil- 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 PV for academy trusts across Somerset
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Yeovil models at 923 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,180 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 4 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, so latitude is working slightly in your favour here.
Scaled up, a 590 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 18 miles away at Dorchester, models at about 544,600 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,752 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 138,900 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 28,300 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.
Yeovil ranks 3 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.
The planning position for Yeovil schools
The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for the BA20 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 18 miles away at Dorchester: Damers First School, a 190 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Solar Options for Schools Limited, 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 Dorset. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Yeovil falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Yeovil. July and August carry 25.5 percent of the modelled output (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the site is closed for most of those nine weeks. July is the single strongest month here at 13.8 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 5.2 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Yeovil school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 5.8 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 4.9 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.
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 Yeovil changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
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.
A Yeovil 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 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 | 108 | 43 | 65 |
| May | 17 | 125 | 69 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 126 | 88 | 38 |
| Jul | 11 | 127 | 45 | 82 |
| Aug | 0 | 108 | 0 | 108 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 50 | 27 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 923 | 450 | 473 |
The school estate in Dorset
Dorset has 155 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 44,528 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 119 primary, 29 secondary, 6 special and 1 further education, at an average of 287 pupils a site. That is 4.1 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.
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
Connections around Yeovil 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).
Send us the school postcode
A survey in Yeovil 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 Yeovil 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.
What Yeovil trusts ask before a survey
- What would a 590 kWp array produce at a Yeovil school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 923 kWh per kWp a year puts a 590 kWp array at around 544,600 kWh, on roughly 1,752 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 Yeovil?
- 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 Yeovil?
- 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 Dorset?
- 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 Dorset. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Yeovil?
- Dorset has 155 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 44,528 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.