Specialist solar panels for schools in Lichfield
A school roof in Lichfield 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.
857 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 128,600 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Lichfield- 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 Lichfield models at 857 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,097 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 3 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 150 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 14 miles away at Stafford, models at about 128,600 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 32,900 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 6,300 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.
Lichfield ranks 2 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 Lichfield
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the WS13 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 nearest education scheme on the record is 14 miles from Lichfield, 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 Lichfield school
25.6 percent of the annual output modelled for Lichfield 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 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.1 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 Lichfield changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
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.
A Lichfield 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 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 | 37 | 20 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 71 | 48 | 23 |
| Apr | 12 | 99 | 40 | 59 |
| May | 17 | 117 | 64 | 53 |
| Jun | 21 | 117 | 82 | 35 |
| Jul | 11 | 119 | 42 | 77 |
| Aug | 0 | 101 | 0 | 101 |
| Sep | 20 | 79 | 53 | 26 |
| Oct | 17 | 48 | 26 | 22 |
| Nov | 21 | 28 | 20 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 20 | 10 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 858 | 419 | 439 |
How many schools Lichfield has
Lichfield has 54 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 16,332 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 42 primary, 7 secondary and 5 special, at an average of 302 pupils a site. 6 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 7 secondaries.
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 National Grid Electricity Distribution
National Grid Electricity Distribution is the network operator here, and their answer on export capacity shapes the design. Any commercial array above 3.68 kW per phase connects under G99 rather than G98, and the application fixes what you are allowed to push back onto the network. If the local network is tight, limiting export rarely breaks the case here: most of the generation is consumed on site while the building is working.
Across Staffordshire the planning database records 118 solar schemes totalling 1054 MW, of which 17 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Start with the Lichfield roof
Lenzie Consulting Ltd arranges roof surveys for schools across Staffordshire. Send the school postcode and a rough idea of the roof area, and the last twelve months of half hourly meter data if the school holds it. We come back with what the roofs can carry, what they would generate against your own consumption, and the funding routes open to a school.
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 Lichfield schools
- Is there enough sun around Lichfield for this to be worth doing?
- The model gives 857 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 150 kWp array comes out at roughly 128,600 kWh a year before shading. It needs about 446 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 Lichfield school waste its generation in August?
- 25.6 percent of the modelled annual output for Lichfield 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution. We model all three against your half hourly data before an array is sized.
- Will the network around Lichfield accept the export?
- National Grid Electricity Distribution is the distribution network operator for Staffordshire. 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 Lichfield?
- Usually permitted development covers a roof array on a school, with prior approval from Lichfield 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 Lichfield?
- Lichfield has 54 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 16,332 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.