Specialist solar panels for schools in Sudbury
A school roof in Sudbury makes 5.8 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.
25.4% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 923 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 550 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 Sudbury- 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 Sudbury models at 923 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,180 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is roughly 4 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, so latitude is working slightly in your favour here.
Scaled up, a 550 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 14 miles away at Bury St Edmunds, models at about 507,700 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,634 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 129,000 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 25,900 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.
Sudbury ranks 5 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 Sudbury
There is no school entry for the CO10 postcode district in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. The register is dependable for anything from a megawatt upward and incomplete below it, and a school array is usually nearer a fifth of a megawatt, so this says more about the threshold than about Sudbury.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 14 miles from Sudbury, at Bury St Edmunds: 500 kWp at West Suffolk College, Western Way, applicant West Suffolk College, 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 Sudbury school
25.4 percent of the annual output modelled for Sudbury 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 13.8 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 5.1 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 5.8 times as much in June as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 4.9 to one. 73 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 Sudbury 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 Sudbury 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 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 | 75 | 51 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 109 | 44 | 65 |
| May | 17 | 123 | 67 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 127 | 89 | 38 |
| Jul | 11 | 126 | 45 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 108 | 0 | 108 |
| Sep | 20 | 85 | 57 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 53 | 29 | 24 |
| Nov | 21 | 31 | 22 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 923 | 452 | 471 |
How many schools Babergh has
Babergh has 47 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 10,977 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 38 primary, 5 secondary, 3 special and 1 further education, at an average of 234 pupils a site. A ratio of 7.6 to one tells you where the roof area is. It is not with the 38 primaries, which mostly offer a hall and a teaching block each, but with the larger sites that were built with a sports hall and a dining block attached.
Where a multi-academy trust holds several of those sites, surveying the estate in one pass beats taking a roof at a time. The design work, the connection applications and the procurement paperwork are the same job repeated, and a trust that runs them together gets a better answer on all three.
Grid connection through UK Power Networks
UK Power Networks operates the distribution network across Suffolk, 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 Suffolk the planning database records 118 solar schemes totalling 1369 MW, of which 23 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Start with the Sudbury roof
We survey school and college roofs throughout Suffolk. 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 Sudbury schools
- Is there enough sun around Sudbury for this to be worth doing?
- The model gives 923 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 550 kWp array comes out at roughly 507,700 kWh a year before shading. It needs about 1,634 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 Sudbury school waste its generation in August?
- 25.4 percent of the modelled annual output for Sudbury 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 UK Power Networks. We model all three against your half hourly data before an array is sized.
- Will the network around Sudbury accept the export?
- UK Power Networks is the distribution network operator for Suffolk. 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 Sudbury?
- Usually permitted development covers a roof array on a school, with prior approval from Braintree 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 Sudbury?
- Babergh has 47 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 10,977 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.