Specialist solar panels for schools in Kenilworth
Warwick has 55 state-funded schools and colleges, and most of them are buying electricity in exactly the hours their own roofs could be making it. We start with the roof build up and the age of the covering, because across a school estate that is usually what decides which block goes first.
403,400 kWh a year, modelled for a 460 kWp array on roughly 1,366 sqm of clear roof. That is 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 Kenilworth- 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.
Solar for education buildings across Warwickshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Kenilworth models at 877 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,123 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is within a few percent of our mean. Latitude is not the variable here. When the building is occupied is.
Scaled up, a 460 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 5 miles away at Coventry, models at about 403,400 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,366 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 103,300 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 19,800 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.
Kenilworth ranks 5 of 7 towns we cover in Warwickshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 866 to 893, a spread of 27 kWh per kWp. Within Warwickshire that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
School solar on record near CV8
The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for the CV8 postcode district. Read that as a gap in the record, not a gap in the roofs: the database is reliable above one megawatt and thin below it, and a school array is typically a fifth of a megawatt.
Look 5 miles out and there is one: City College, Swanswell Street in Coventry, 460 kWp, applied for by EON Control Solutions Limited, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. None of our doing. It is a public planning record, and the nearest evidence available of how an application like yours is treated around here. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Term dates against the Kenilworth generation curve
A Kenilworth school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.6 percent of the modelled year lands in July and August alone (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the summer holiday takes roughly six of those nine weeks out of the timetable. July is the single strongest month here at 13.8 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 4.9 percent of the modelled year, and that is when the heating, the lighting and a full register are all drawing at the same time. The roof makes 6.1 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.2 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.
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.
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.
None of that makes a Kenilworth 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 whole argument about term dates and 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 | 23 | 15 | 8 |
| Feb | 15 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 73 | 49 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 101 | 40 | 61 |
| May | 17 | 118 | 65 | 53 |
| Jun | 21 | 120 | 84 | 36 |
| Jul | 11 | 121 | 43 | 78 |
| Aug | 0 | 103 | 0 | 103 |
| Sep | 20 | 80 | 53 | 27 |
| Oct | 17 | 49 | 27 | 22 |
| Nov | 21 | 29 | 20 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 20 | 10 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 876 | 427 | 449 |
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
National Grid Electricity Distribution operates the distribution network across Warwickshire, 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 Warwickshire the planning database records 94 solar schemes totalling 1201 MW, of which 18 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Warwick schools, phase by phase
Warwick has 55 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 19,093 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 46 primary, 7 secondary, 1 special and 1 further education, at an average of 347 pupils a site. That is 6.6 primaries for every secondary, which is the ratio that matters for a roof: a primary of a few hundred pupils usually offers a hall roof and one teaching block, while a secondary site carries a sports hall, a dining block and several flat roofs.
If your trust holds several of them, the sequencing question comes before the sizing question. Roof age, covering type and the state of the incoming supply vary block by block across an estate, and that is normally what sets the order of works.
Book a roof survey at your Kenilworth school
Roof condition decides the order of works on most school estates, so that is where we start. Send us the postcode and a rough roof area, with twelve months of half hourly readings if you have them, and we come back with usable area, modelled output against your own load, and the funding routes.
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.
Kenilworth school solar, answered
- What would a 460 kWp array produce at a Kenilworth school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 877 kWh per kWp a year puts a 460 kWp array at around 403,400 kWh, on roughly 1,366 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 Kenilworth?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.6 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 Kenilworth?
- 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 Warwick?
- 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 Warwick. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Kenilworth?
- Warwick has 55 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 19,093 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.