Specialist solar panels for schools in Salisbury
A school roof in Salisbury makes 5.7 times as much in July as it does in December, and the school year runs against that curve rather than with it. What we come back with is the usable roof area, the modelled output against your meter data, and the routes schools use to pay for it.
923 kWh per kWp a year at this latitude, so a 320 kWp array, the size applied for at the nearest school scheme on record, models at about 295,400 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Salisbury- 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 Wiltshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Salisbury models at 923 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,182 kWh per square metre in the plane of the array (EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss). That is roughly 4 percent above the mean across the towns we cover, so latitude is working slightly in your favour here.
Scaled up, a 320 kWp array, sized to what the nearest school scheme on record applied for, 30 miles away at Chippenham, models at about 295,400 kWh a year before shading, and needs roughly 950 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 74,700 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 15,400 kWh across December and January. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks 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.
Salisbury ranks 1 of 8 towns we cover in Wiltshire on modelled yield, against a national mean of 886 kWh per kWp. The county runs from 894 to 923, a spread of 29 kWh per kWp. Within Wiltshire 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 Salisbury
Search the Renewable Energy Planning Database for the SP2 postcode district and nothing comes back under education. That is worth stating plainly and then setting aside: the register is built around generating stations, a school array is a fraction of the size it captures reliably, and plenty of school roofs never appear in any national record at all.
The nearest education scheme on the record is 30 miles from Salisbury, at Chippenham: 320 kWp at Wiltshire College, Lackham, applicant Wessex Energy Solutions, which holds consent and is awaiting construction. That is someone else's application, not ours, and it is here because it shows what Wiltshire planning has already accepted at an education site. Source: Renewable Energy Planning Database, Q1 2026.
The summer holiday problem for a Salisbury school
25.3 percent of the annual output modelled for Salisbury 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 13.7 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 5.2 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 5.7 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 4.9 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.
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 Salisbury changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
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.
A Salisbury 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 | 26 | 17 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 40 | 21 | 19 |
| Mar | 21 | 76 | 51 | 25 |
| Apr | 12 | 107 | 43 | 64 |
| May | 17 | 124 | 68 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 125 | 88 | 38 |
| Jul | 11 | 126 | 45 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 107 | 0 | 107 |
| Sep | 20 | 85 | 57 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 52 | 29 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 32 | 22 | 10 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 922 | 452 | 470 |
How many schools Wiltshire has
Wiltshire has 237 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register teaching 68,445 pupils between them. Source: DfE Get Information About Schools.
The split is 201 primary, 28 secondary, 6 special and 2 further education, at an average of 289 pupils a site. 7.2 primaries per secondary is a mix weighted towards small sites. The roof area, and therefore most of the generation, sits with the 28 secondaries and the 2 further education sites.
Across an estate of that size the roofs will not be in the same condition, and that is the point of surveying them together: the block with the best orientation is often not the block whose covering has twenty years left in it.
Grid connection through Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks
Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks operates the distribution network across Wiltshire, 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 Wiltshire the planning database records 159 solar schemes totalling 1585 MW, of which 56 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Start with the Salisbury roof
We survey school and college roofs throughout Wiltshire. 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 Salisbury schools
- How much would a school roof near Salisbury generate?
- Modelled at 923 kWh per kWp a year, a 320 kWp array on a Salisbury school models at about 295,400 kWh. What decides whether that is worth doing is how much of it the school uses itself, not the total. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
- How does the school year affect a solar scheme in Salisbury?
- It goes somewhere, just not into the timetable. 25.3 percent of the Salisbury generating year lands in July and August (EU PVGIS v5.2), and a closed school still runs servers, comms, refrigeration and ventilation. What that base load does not absorb is either stored, exported under an agreement with Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, or a sign the array is too big. We test which before sizing anything.
- Which network operator handles the connection at a Salisbury school?
- Applications go to Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, who run the network across Wiltshire. An export-limited offer usually still works for a school, because the summer surplus is the part you were least likely to be paid much for anyway.
- What does Wiltshire require for solar on a school building?
- Roof-mounted solar on a non-domestic building often falls within permitted development under Part 14 of the General Permitted Development Order, subject to limits on how far the panels stand proud of the roof plane and, above a threshold, to prior approval from Wiltshire on siting and design. Listed buildings and conservation areas are the usual exceptions. We put the position to Wiltshire before a design is finalised.
- How many schools are there around Salisbury?
- Wiltshire has 237 open state-funded schools and colleges on the DfE register, with 68,445 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.