Specialist solar panels for schools in Mexborough
A kilowatt-peak on a Mexborough school roof models at 847 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.
26.1% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 847 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 Mexborough- 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 South Yorkshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Mexborough models at 847 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,083 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 320 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 25 miles away at Mansfield, models at about 271,000 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 70,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 12,500 kWh across December and January. Northern Powergrid 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.
Mexborough ranks 2 of 6 towns we cover in South Yorkshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 830 to 856, a spread of 26 kWh per kWp. Within South Yorkshire 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 Mexborough schools
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the S64 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 closest recorded one is about 25 miles away at Mansfield: The Samworth Church Academy, Sherwood Hall Road, a 320 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 Nottinghamshire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Mexborough falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Mexborough. July and August carry 26.1 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 13.9 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 4.6 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Mexborough school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.6 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.7 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 Mexborough 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 Mexborough 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 | 21 | 14 | 7 |
| Feb | 15 | 37 | 20 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 69 | 47 | 22 |
| Apr | 12 | 97 | 39 | 58 |
| May | 17 | 118 | 65 | 53 |
| Jun | 21 | 114 | 80 | 34 |
| Jul | 11 | 118 | 42 | 76 |
| Aug | 0 | 103 | 0 | 103 |
| Sep | 20 | 77 | 51 | 26 |
| Oct | 17 | 47 | 26 | 21 |
| Nov | 21 | 27 | 19 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 18 | 9 | 9 |
| Year | 190 | 846 | 412 | 434 |
The school estate in Doncaster
Doncaster has 126 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 48,254 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 98 primary, 20 secondary, 6 special and 2 further education, at an average of 383 pupils a site. 4.9 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 20 secondaries and the 2 further education sites.
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.
Grid connection through Northern Powergrid
Northern Powergrid operates the distribution network across South Yorkshire, 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 South Yorkshire the planning database records 93 solar schemes totalling 1624 MW, of which 8 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Send us the school postcode
We survey school and college roofs throughout South Yorkshire. 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 Mexborough trusts ask before a survey
- How much would a school roof near Mexborough generate?
- Modelled at 847 kWh per kWp a year, a 320 kWp array on a Mexborough school models at about 271,000 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 Mexborough?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 26.1 percent of the Mexborough 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 Northern Powergrid, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
- Which network operator handles the connection at a Mexborough school?
- Applications go to Northern Powergrid, who run the network across South Yorkshire. 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 Doncaster 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 Doncaster on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Doncaster before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Mexborough?
- Doncaster has 126 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 48,254 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.