Specialist solar panels for schools in Halifax
Northern Powergrid runs the network around Halifax, 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.
26.2% of the modelled year lands in July and August, on a roof that returns 812 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 Halifax- 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 West Yorkshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Halifax models at 812 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,034 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). 8 percent below our mean puts Halifax 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, 18 miles away at Ashton-under-Lyne, models at about 324,800 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 85,100 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 14,000 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.
Halifax ranks 7 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.
What the planning record shows around Halifax
The HX1 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 Halifax.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 18 miles from Halifax, at Ashton-under-Lyne: 400 kWp at Tameside College, Beaufort Road, applicant Tameside College, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Greater Manchester planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Halifax school
26.2 percent of the annual output modelled for Halifax 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 14.3 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 4.3 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 7.3 times as much in May as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 6.2 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.
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.
Inside the day it happens again. The roof is still at three quarters of its peak at four in the afternoon, by which time a Halifax school is largely empty, so the hours that look best on a generation chart are the worst on a consumption one.
None of that makes a Halifax 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 | 19 | 12 | 7 |
| Feb | 15 | 34 | 18 | 16 |
| Mar | 21 | 66 | 45 | 21 |
| Apr | 12 | 95 | 38 | 57 |
| May | 17 | 116 | 64 | 52 |
| Jun | 21 | 111 | 78 | 33 |
| Jul | 11 | 114 | 40 | 74 |
| Aug | 0 | 99 | 0 | 99 |
| Sep | 20 | 73 | 49 | 24 |
| Oct | 17 | 44 | 24 | 20 |
| Nov | 21 | 25 | 18 | 8 |
| Dec | 15 | 16 | 8 | 8 |
| Year | 190 | 812 | 394 | 418 |
Grid connection through Northern Powergrid
Connections around Halifax 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 West Yorkshire the planning database records 170 solar schemes totalling 550 MW, of which 8 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
How many schools Calderdale has
Calderdale has 99 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 33,757 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 81 primary, 13 secondary, 3 special and 2 further education, at an average of 341 pupils a site. At 6.2 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 Calderdale, 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.
Start with the Halifax roof
The first survey answers three questions at once: what the roofs carry, what they generate against your own timetable, and how a Halifax school pays for it. Send the postcode, an approximate roof area per block and half hourly meter data if the school can get it from its supplier.
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 Halifax schools
- What would a 400 kWp array produce at a Halifax school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 812 kWh per kWp a year puts a 400 kWp array at around 324,800 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 Halifax?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 26.2 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 Halifax?
- 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 Bradford?
- 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 Bradford. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Halifax?
- Calderdale has 99 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 33,757 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.