Specialist solar panels for schools in Leamington Spa
National Grid Electricity Distribution runs the network around Leamington Spa, 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.
880 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 460 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 404,800 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Leamington Spa- 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 Warwickshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Leamington Spa models at 880 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,127 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That puts Leamington Spa in the middle of the national range, close enough to our mean of 886 kWh per kWp that the interesting question moves straight to consumption.
Scaled up, a 460 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 8 miles away at Coventry, models at about 404,800 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 104,000 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.
Leamington Spa ranks 4 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.
What the planning record shows around Leamington Spa
The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for Leamington Spa and the area around it. 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.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 8 miles from Leamington Spa, at Coventry: 460 kWp at City College, Swanswell Street, applicant EON Control Solutions Limited, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what West Midlands planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Leamington Spa school
25.7 percent of the annual output modelled for Leamington Spa 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. July is the single strongest month here at 14 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
The inverse holds at the other end. December and January together return only 4.9 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 6.2 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5.2 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.
Across the country the arithmetic settles at roughly 49 percent of output on a session day, against about 71 percent for a weekday business. That figure hardly varies by location, which is why the local numbers that matter here are the yield, the roofs and what has already cleared planning nearby.
And the week has the same hole in it. Two days in seven the site is closed altogether, at no cost to the generation, which is part of why the session day share sits where it does. Weekend lettings are the one lever a Leamington Spa school has over that, and they are worth counting properly.
That argues for a particular shape of scheme rather than against one. Size to the load that does not stop at the end of term, count in lettings, holiday clubs and summer works honestly rather than optimistically, and then decide whether storage or an export arrangement with National Grid Electricity Distribution pays for the surplus that is left.
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.
- 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 | 38 | 20 | 18 |
| Mar | 21 | 72 | 49 | 23 |
| Apr | 12 | 101 | 40 | 61 |
| May | 17 | 119 | 65 | 54 |
| Jun | 21 | 122 | 85 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 123 | 44 | 79 |
| 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 | 879 | 428 | 451 |
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
Connections around Leamington Spa are handled by National Grid Electricity Distribution, 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 Warwickshire the planning database records 94 solar schemes totalling 1201 MW, of which 18 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
How many schools Warwick has
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.
Start with the Leamington Spa roof
We survey school and college roofs throughout Warwickshire. 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 Leamington Spa schools
- What would a 460 kWp array produce at a Leamington Spa school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 880 kWh per kWp a year puts a 460 kWp array at around 404,800 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 Leamington Spa?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.7 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 Leamington Spa?
- 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.
- How many schools are there around Leamington Spa?
- 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.