Specialist solar panels for schools in Sutton Coldfield
What decides a solar scheme at a Sutton Coldfield school is how much of the output the site uses itself, not how much the roof makes. We arrange the roof survey, model the output against the school's own half hourly consumption, and set out the funding routes.
852 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 370 kWp array, the median size schools across West Midlands have applied for, models at about 315,200 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Sutton Coldfield- 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 West Midlands
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Sutton Coldfield models at 852 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,092 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 370 kWp array, sized to the median array applied for at schools across West Midlands, models at about 315,200 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,099 square metres of clear roof. We use that size because it is what schools across West Midlands have applied for, not because it suits the arithmetic.
Spread across the year that is about 81,000 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 15,800 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.
Sutton Coldfield ranks 5 of 8 towns we cover in West Midlands on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 839 to 868, a spread of 29 kWh per kWp. Within West Midlands 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 Sutton Coldfield
The Renewable Energy Planning Database holds no school scheme for Sutton Coldfield 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.
Look 6 miles out and there is one: Eden Boys Leadership Academy, Alum Rock Road in Birmingham, 0 kWp, applied for by Star Academies, 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 Sutton Coldfield generation curve
A Sutton Coldfield school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.7 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 14 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 5 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 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 5 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.
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 Sutton Coldfield changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
The weekly pattern repeats the annual one. Saturdays and Sundays generate as well as any other day and consume almost nothing, so before storage or export is even discussed it is worth knowing what the site does at a weekend, which only half hourly data will tell you.
A Sutton Coldfield 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 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 | 37 | 20 | 17 |
| Mar | 21 | 70 | 47 | 23 |
| Apr | 12 | 98 | 39 | 59 |
| May | 17 | 115 | 63 | 52 |
| Jun | 21 | 117 | 82 | 35 |
| Jul | 11 | 119 | 42 | 77 |
| Aug | 0 | 100 | 0 | 100 |
| Sep | 20 | 78 | 52 | 26 |
| Oct | 17 | 47 | 26 | 21 |
| Nov | 21 | 28 | 20 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 20 | 10 | 10 |
| Year | 190 | 852 | 416 | 436 |
Birmingham schools, phase by phase
Birmingham has 439 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 198,904 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 318 primary, 89 secondary, 26 special and 6 further education, at an average of 453 pupils a site. That is 3.6 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.
Grid connection through National Grid Electricity Distribution
Connections around Sutton Coldfield 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 West Midlands the planning database records 195 solar schemes totalling 533 MW, of which 3 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Book a roof survey at your Sutton Coldfield school
We survey school and college roofs throughout West Midlands. 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.
Sutton Coldfield school solar, answered
- Is there enough sun around Sutton Coldfield for this to be worth doing?
- The model gives 852 kWh a year for every kWp installed at this latitude, so a 370 kWp array comes out at roughly 315,200 kWh a year before shading. It needs about 1,099 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 Sutton Coldfield school waste its generation in August?
- 25.7 percent of the modelled annual output for Sutton Coldfield 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 National Grid Electricity Distribution. We model all three against your half hourly data before an array is sized.
- Will the network around Sutton Coldfield accept the export?
- National Grid Electricity Distribution is the distribution network operator for West Midlands. 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.
- How many schools are there around Sutton Coldfield?
- Birmingham has 439 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 198,904 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.