Specialist solar panels for schools in Wombwell
26.1 percent of what a Wombwell school roof makes arrives in July and August, which is when the buildings are shut. A survey here starts with the covering and the structure, then the incoming supply, then what the timetable actually draws.
26.1% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 838 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 200 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 Wombwell- 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 Wombwell models at 838 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,071 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). 5 percent below our mean puts Wombwell at the weaker end of the range, which raises the premium on self consumption and lowers the value of anything that leaves the site.
Scaled up, a 200 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 27 miles away at Matlock, models at about 167,600 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 594 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 43,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 7,900 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.
Wombwell ranks 4 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 Wombwell schools
The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for the S73 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 27 miles away at Matlock: Anthony Gell School, Wood Street, a 200 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Private Developer, which is with the planning authority. We were not involved in it. We cite it because it is a public record of what has cleared planning in this part of Derbyshire. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Wombwell falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Wombwell. 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. July is the single strongest month here at 14 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 4.7 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Wombwell school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.5 times as much in July 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.
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 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.
None of that makes a Wombwell 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 Northern Powergrid, or a smaller array that consumes nearly everything it makes.
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 | 70 | 47 | 23 |
| Apr | 12 | 97 | 39 | 58 |
| May | 17 | 116 | 64 | 52 |
| Jun | 21 | 112 | 78 | 34 |
| Jul | 11 | 117 | 42 | 75 |
| Aug | 0 | 102 | 0 | 102 |
| Sep | 20 | 76 | 51 | 25 |
| Oct | 17 | 46 | 25 | 21 |
| Nov | 21 | 26 | 18 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 18 | 9 | 9 |
| Year | 190 | 838 | 407 | 431 |
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).
The school estate in Barnsley
Barnsley has 92 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 34,586 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 77 primary, 11 secondary, 3 special and 1 further education, at an average of 376 pupils a site. That is 7 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.
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 Wombwell trusts ask before a survey
- Is there enough sun around Wombwell for this to be worth doing?
- The model gives 838 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 200 kWp array comes out at roughly 167,600 kWh a year before shading. It needs about 594 square metres of clear roof once walkways and rooflight setbacks are allowed for. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
- Does a Wombwell school waste its generation in August?
- 26.1 percent of the modelled annual output for Wombwell falls in July and August, when the buildings are closed for most of six weeks (EU PVGIS v5.2). It does not go to waste, but it only has three places to go: the base load that runs regardless, such as servers, catering refrigeration and ventilation; storage; or export under an agreement with Northern Powergrid. We model all three against your half hourly data before an array is sized.
- Will the network around Wombwell accept the export?
- Northern Powergrid is the distribution network operator for South Yorkshire. Anything above 3.68 kW per phase connects under G99, and the application fixes the export limit. On a school site the incoming supply is often the binding constraint rather than the roof, so we ask that question before anyone sizes an array.
- Is planning permission needed for panels on a school in Wombwell?
- Usually permitted development covers a roof array on a school, with prior approval from Barnsley needed above a capacity threshold. A ground mounted array in the grounds is a different question and much more likely to need a full application. We check both before design sign-off.
- How many schools are there around Wombwell?
- Barnsley has 92 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 34,586 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.