Specialist solar panels for schools in Leiston
A school roof in Leiston makes 6.4 times as much in June 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.
25.6% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 956 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 220 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 Leiston- 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 Suffolk
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Leiston models at 956 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,216 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is around 8 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, which is about as strong as a UK school roof gets.
Scaled up, a 220 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 20 miles away at Felixstowe, models at about 210,300 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 653 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 53,800 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 10,100 kWh across December and January. UK Power Networks 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.
Leiston ranks 1 of 8 towns we cover in Suffolk on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 905 to 956, a spread of 51 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 25,500 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.
What the planning record shows around Leiston
No school or college solar scheme appears in Leiston and the area around it 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 Leiston secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 20 miles from Leiston, at Felixstowe: 220 kWp at Felixstowe School, High Street, applicant eEnergy, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Suffolk planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Leiston school
25.6 percent of the annual output modelled for Leiston 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. June is the strongest single month here at 14 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 4.8 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 June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.3 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.
Nationally this comes out at about 49 percent of annual generation falling on a session day. A business open every weekday sees roughly 71 percent. The 22 point gap is what a school appraisal has to absorb, and it is much the same in Leiston as anywhere else.
The daily curve does the same thing in miniature. Load drops sharply after about three o'clock, generation does not, so the last three hours of a summer afternoon are pushing into an empty building unless something absorbs them. Half hourly meter data is the only way to see how much.
The conclusion is not that a Leiston school should do nothing. It is that the array should be sized to the load that survives the holidays, which is usually the server room, the catering refrigeration, the ventilation and the hot water, plus whatever the site lets out over the summer. Anything above that line needs storage or an export agreement with UK Power Networks to earn its keep.
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 | 25 | 16 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 76 | 51 | 25 |
| Apr | 12 | 114 | 46 | 68 |
| May | 17 | 132 | 72 | 60 |
| Jun | 21 | 134 | 94 | 40 |
| Jul | 11 | 133 | 47 | 86 |
| Aug | 0 | 112 | 0 | 112 |
| Sep | 20 | 87 | 58 | 29 |
| Oct | 17 | 53 | 29 | 24 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 21 | 10 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 957 | 466 | 491 |
How many schools East Suffolk has
East Suffolk has 101 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 29,869 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 84 primary, 12 secondary, 4 special and 1 further education, at an average of 296 pupils a site. Read 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.
Grid connection through UK Power Networks
Connections around Leiston are handled by UK Power Networks, which sets the export limit for the site. Above 3.68 kW per phase the connection runs under G99, so the export limit is agreed in advance rather than assumed. Where the local network is constrained, an export-limited connection usually still makes the scheme work, because a school uses most of what the roof makes during the working day.
Across Suffolk the planning database records 118 solar schemes totalling 1369 MW, of which 23 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Start with the Leiston roof
A survey in Leiston starts with three things from you. Give us the postcode, the approximate roof area and, if you can get it from your supplier, twelve months of half hourly readings. What comes back is a usable area figure per block, output modelled against your own load rather than an average, and the ways a Leiston school can pay for it.
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 Leiston schools
- How much would a school roof near Leiston generate?
- Modelled at 956 kWh per kWp a year, a 220 kWp array on a Leiston school models at about 210,300 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 Leiston?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.6 percent of the Leiston 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 UK Power Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
- Which network operator handles the connection at a Leiston school?
- Applications go to UK Power Networks, who run the network across Suffolk. 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.
- How many schools are there around Leiston?
- East Suffolk has 101 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 29,869 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.