What would a 160 kWp array produce at a Newcastle-under-Lyme school?

Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 826 kWh per kWp a year puts a 160 kWp array at around 132,200 kWh, on roughly 475 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 Newcastle-under-Lyme?

Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.8 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 Newcastle-under-Lyme?

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 Newcastle-under-Lyme?

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 Newcastle-under-Lyme. We confirm it either way.

How many schools are there around Newcastle-under-Lyme?

Newcastle-under-Lyme has 55 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 16,261 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.

Specialist solar panels for schools in Newcastle-under-Lyme

National Grid Electricity Distribution runs the network around Newcastle-under-Lyme, 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.

826 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 160 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 132,200 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.

Book a roof survey in Newcastle-under-Lyme

1 teaching block
2 hall and kitchen
3 sports hall
4 1960s block, no array
first phase
later phase

Drawing Typical school site, Newcastle-under-Lyme scale

Blocks 4, 3 with array

Array about 345 kWp

Yield about 285,000 kWh/yr

Frontage about 90 m / Rev A / ST5

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.

Newcastle-under-Lyme / Staffordshire

A school on the edge of a Midlands town, solar arrays on its roofs and flat open farmland beyond — School buildings of the kind we survey across West Midlands. Not a named school and not our work.

School rooftop solar across Staffordshire

A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Newcastle-under-Lyme models at 826 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,056 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). 7 percent below our mean puts Newcastle-under-Lyme 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 160 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 5 miles away at Stoke-on-Trent, models at about 132,200 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 475 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 34,100 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 5,900 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.

FIG. 1 Newcastle-under-Lyme against the rest of Staffordshire

Tamworth857
Lichfield857
Burton upon Trent852
Stafford842
Cannock842
Stoke-on-Trent833
Newcastle-under-Lyme826

Newcastle-under-Lyme ranks 7 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.

Bars are zero based, so length is proportional to the figure. Where a county is flat, that is the finding: latitude is not the lever, the timetable is. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, modelled per town

What the planning record shows around Newcastle-under-Lyme

No school or college solar scheme appears in the ST5 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 Newcastle-under-Lyme secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.

The nearest education scheme on the record is 5 miles from Newcastle-under-Lyme, at Stoke-on-Trent: 160 kWp at Ormiston Meridian Academy, Sandon Road, applicant EEnergy Group plc, which is with the planning authority. 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 Newcastle-under-Lyme school

25.8 percent of the annual output modelled for Newcastle-under-Lyme 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. 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.

The inverse holds at the other end. December and January together return only 4.5 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 6.4 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.4 to one. 75 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.

Then there is the afternoon. From roughly three o'clock the building empties while the roof is still working, so a system sized on annual consumption will over-generate in exactly the hours nobody is there. We size on half hourly data for that reason.

None of that makes a Newcastle-under-Lyme 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.

FIG. 2 A Newcastle-under-Lyme roof against the English school year

generated while the school is open
generated at a weekend or in the holidays

The same figures as a table

Monthly output for a 1 kWp array in Newcastle-under-Lyme, split by whether the day is a school session day. Across the year 49 percent of generation lands while the school is open.
Month	Session days	Output, kWh per kWp	School open	School closed
Jan	20	19	12	7
Feb	15	35	19	16
Mar	21	67	45	22
Apr	12	98	39	59
May	17	115	63	52
Jun	21	115	81	35
Jul	11	115	41	74
Aug	0	98	0	98
Sep	20	76	51	25
Oct	17	45	25	20
Nov	21	26	18	8
Dec	15	18	9	9
Year	190	827	403	424

Output per kWp installed, split by whether the day is a session day. July and August are 25.8 percent of the Newcastle-under-Lyme year and the school is shut for most of them. Each month's total is spread evenly across its days, which is the only split available without half hourly readings. Session days follow a typical English school year of 190 days. Your own trust or authority may differ by a few days either way. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, session days from a typical school calendar

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 Newcastle-under-Lyme has

Newcastle-under-Lyme has 55 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 16,261 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.

The split is 42 primary, 9 secondary, 3 special and 1 further education, at an average of 296 pupils a site. Read 4.7 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.

Aerial view of a school site with teaching blocks of several different ages, a sports hall and a playing field, solar arrays on two of the flat roofs — A school site with blocks of several ages, which is the usual starting point for a trust estate survey.

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Start with the Newcastle-under-Lyme 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 Newcastle-under-Lyme schools

What would a 160 kWp array produce at a Newcastle-under-Lyme school?: Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 826 kWh per kWp a year puts a 160 kWp array at around 132,200 kWh, on roughly 475 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 Newcastle-under-Lyme?: Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.8 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 Newcastle-under-Lyme?: 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 Newcastle-under-Lyme?: 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 Newcastle-under-Lyme. We confirm it either way.
How many schools are there around Newcastle-under-Lyme?: Newcastle-under-Lyme has 55 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 16,261 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.

Nearby

All Staffordshire locations