Specialist solar panels for schools in South Shields
A school roof in South Shields makes 8.3 times as much in May 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.
25.9% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 849 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 610 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 South Shields- 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 Tyne and Wear
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in South Shields models at 849 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,081 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 4 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 610 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 11 miles away at Blyth, models at about 517,900 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,812 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 134,100 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 21,200 kWh across December and January. Northern Powergrid 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.
South Shields ranks 2 of 6 towns we cover in Tyne and Wear on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 806 to 849, a spread of 43 kWh per kWp. On a 500 kWp array that is about 21,500 kWh a year between the strongest and weakest town in the county.
What the planning record shows around South Shields
No school or college solar scheme appears in the NE34 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 South Shields secondary could be generating today without ever reaching it.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 11 miles from South Shields, at Blyth: 450 kWp at Bede Academy North, Sixth Avenue, applicant Emmanuel Schools Foundation, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Northumberland planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a South Shields school
25.9 percent of the annual output modelled for South Shields 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 14.6 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 4.1 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 8.3 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 6.7 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.
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 South Shields changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
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.
A South Shields 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 | 20 | 13 | 7 |
| Feb | 15 | 36 | 19 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 69 | 47 | 22 |
| Apr | 12 | 101 | 40 | 61 |
| May | 17 | 124 | 68 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 116 | 81 | 35 |
| Jul | 11 | 119 | 42 | 77 |
| Aug | 0 | 101 | 0 | 101 |
| Sep | 20 | 77 | 51 | 26 |
| Oct | 17 | 46 | 25 | 21 |
| Nov | 21 | 25 | 18 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 15 | 7 | 8 |
| Year | 190 | 849 | 411 | 438 |
How many schools South Tyneside has
South Tyneside has 62 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 22,675 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 49 primary, 8 secondary, 4 special and 1 further education, at an average of 366 pupils a site. Read 6.1 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 Northern Powergrid
Connections around South Shields are handled by Northern Powergrid, 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 Tyne and Wear the planning database records 116 solar schemes totalling 290 MW, of which 3 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Start with the South Shields roof
A survey in South Shields 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 South Shields 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 South Shields schools
- What would a 610 kWp array produce at a South Shields school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 849 kWh per kWp a year puts a 610 kWp array at around 517,900 kWh, on roughly 1,812 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 South Shields?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.9 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 Northern Powergrid.
- Who do we apply to for export near South Shields?
- Only Northern Powergrid 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 South Tyneside?
- 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 South Tyneside. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around South Shields?
- South Tyneside has 62 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 22,675 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.