Specialist solar panels for schools in Cannock
National Grid Electricity Distribution runs the network around Cannock, 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.
842 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 150 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 126,300 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Cannock- 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 Staffordshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Cannock models at 842 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,078 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 Cannock 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 150 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 8 miles away at Stafford, models at about 126,300 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 32,500 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 6,200 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.
Cannock ranks 5 of 7 towns we cover in Staffordshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 826 to 857, a spread of 31 kWh per kWp. Within Staffordshire 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 Cannock
No school or college solar scheme appears in the WS11 postcode district in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. That is a reporting threshold rather than a verdict. The database records generating stations from one megawatt upward reliably and smaller ones patchily, and almost every school array is a fraction of that, so a roof full of panels on a Cannock secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 8 miles from Cannock, at Stafford: 150 kWp at Stafford Manor High School, Rising Brook, applicant eEnergy Group PLC, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Staffordshire planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Cannock school
25.7 percent of the annual output modelled for Cannock 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 13.9 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 4.9 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 6.2 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.2 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 same mismatch repeats every day. Peak generation lands between eleven and three, the timetable ends shortly after, and by four the site is down to caretaking and cleaning. An annual consumption figure cannot show that, which is why we ask for the half hourly data instead.
None of that makes a Cannock 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 complete version of the term time arithmetic 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 | 22 | 14 | 8 |
| Feb | 15 | 36 | 19 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 69 | 47 | 22 |
| Apr | 12 | 98 | 39 | 59 |
| May | 17 | 116 | 64 | 52 |
| Jun | 21 | 115 | 81 | 35 |
| Jul | 11 | 117 | 42 | 75 |
| Aug | 0 | 99 | 0 | 99 |
| Sep | 20 | 77 | 51 | 26 |
| Oct | 17 | 47 | 26 | 21 |
| Nov | 21 | 27 | 19 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 19 | 9 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 842 | 411 | 431 |
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
National Grid Electricity Distribution operates the distribution network across Staffordshire, 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 Staffordshire the planning database records 118 solar schemes totalling 1054 MW, of which 17 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
How many schools Cannock Chase has
Cannock Chase has 37 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 13,597 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 29 primary, 6 secondary and 2 special, at an average of 367 pupils a site. Read 4.8 primaries per secondary as a sequencing hint rather than a statistic. A primary is a single survey visit and a modest array; a secondary is several roofs of different ages on one site, and that is where both the area and the complications are.
A trust holding more than one of these sites should look at them together. Grouping the surveys turns the grid question, the funding question and the procurement route into one exercise rather than four, and it usually changes which roof goes first.
Start with the Cannock roof
We survey school and college roofs throughout Staffordshire. 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.
Questions governors ask us about Cannock schools
- How much would a school roof near Cannock generate?
- Modelled at 842 kWh per kWp a year, a 150 kWp array on a Cannock school models at about 126,300 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 Cannock?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.7 percent of the Cannock 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 Cannock school?
- Applications go to National Grid Electricity Distribution, who run the network across Staffordshire. 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 Cannock Chase 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 Cannock Chase on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Cannock Chase before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Cannock?
- Cannock Chase has 37 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 13,597 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.