Specialist solar panels for schools in Dewsbury
26.3 percent of what a Dewsbury school roof makes arrives in July and August, which is when the buildings are shut. A survey here starts with the covering and the structure, then the incoming supply, then what the timetable actually draws.
26.3% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 835 kWh per kWp a year. The worked example below runs at 400 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 Dewsbury- 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 PV for academy trusts across West Yorkshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Dewsbury models at 835 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,064 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). 6 percent below our mean puts Dewsbury at the weaker end of the range, which raises the premium on self consumption and lowers the value of anything that leaves the site.
Scaled up, a 400 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 23 miles away at Ashton-under-Lyne, models at about 334,000 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 1,188 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 87,800 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 14,700 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.
Dewsbury ranks 3 of 8 towns we cover in West Yorkshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 811 to 846, a spread of 35 kWh per kWp. Within West Yorkshire that difference is small enough to ignore: where the building sits is not what decides this scheme, your consumption pattern is.
The planning position for Dewsbury schools
The WF12 postcode district has no education solar entry in the Renewable Energy Planning Database. Almost no school array is large enough to be captured there reliably, so the absence tells you about the reporting threshold and very little about what is already on the roofs around Dewsbury.
The closest recorded one is about 23 miles away at Ashton-under-Lyne: Tameside College, Beaufort Road, a 400 kWp roof mounted array applied for by Tameside College, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. We were not involved in it. We cite it because it is a public record of what has cleared planning in this part of Greater Manchester. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
Why demand in Dewsbury falls as the roof peaks
The generating year and the school year are out of step in Dewsbury. July and August carry 26.3 percent of the modelled output (EU PVGIS v5.2), and the site is closed for most of those nine weeks. May is the strongest single month here at 14 percent of the annual total, which is still term time, and that works slightly in your favour against towns whose curve peaks in July.
At the other end of the year the mismatch flips. Only 4.4 percent of output falls in December and January, the two months when a Dewsbury school is fully occupied and its heating and lighting are at their heaviest. The roof makes 6.9 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 6.1 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.
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 Dewsbury 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 Northern Powergrid, or a smaller array that consumes nearly everything it makes.
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 | 35 | 19 | 16 |
| Mar | 21 | 69 | 47 | 22 |
| Apr | 12 | 97 | 39 | 58 |
| May | 17 | 117 | 64 | 53 |
| Jun | 21 | 112 | 78 | 34 |
| Jul | 11 | 117 | 42 | 75 |
| Aug | 0 | 103 | 0 | 103 |
| Sep | 20 | 76 | 51 | 25 |
| Oct | 17 | 46 | 25 | 21 |
| Nov | 21 | 26 | 18 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 17 | 8 | 9 |
| Year | 190 | 835 | 404 | 431 |
Grid connection through Northern Powergrid
Northern Powergrid is the network operator here, and their answer on export capacity shapes the design. Any commercial array above 3.68 kW per phase connects under G99 rather than G98, and the application fixes what you are allowed to push back onto the network. If the local network is tight, limiting export rarely breaks the case here: most of the generation is consumed on site while the building is working.
Across West Yorkshire the planning database records 170 solar schemes totalling 550 MW, of which 8 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
The school estate in Kirklees
Kirklees has 181 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 63,774 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 145 primary, 27 secondary, 6 special and 3 further education, at an average of 352 pupils a site. At 5.4 primaries to every secondary, most of the buildings here are small. That is not a reason to skip them, but it does mean the usable area on a primary is a hall roof and a teaching block rather than an estate.
For a trust with more than one site in Kirklees, the first survey is worth running across the whole estate. It tells you which roofs are near the end of their covering life, which have the switchboard headroom, and therefore which one should carry the first array.
Send us the school postcode
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.
What Dewsbury trusts ask before a survey
- What would a 400 kWp array produce at a Dewsbury school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 835 kWh per kWp a year puts a 400 kWp array at around 334,000 kWh, on roughly 1,188 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 Dewsbury?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 26.3 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 Dewsbury?
- 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 Leeds?
- 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 Leeds. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Dewsbury?
- Kirklees has 181 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 63,774 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.