Specialist solar panels for schools in Warminster
What decides a solar scheme at a Warminster 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.
912 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 291,800 kWh. Source: EU PVGIS v5.2, SARAH3, 10 degree pitch, 14 percent system loss.
Book a roof survey in Warminster- 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 Wiltshire
A one kilowatt-peak array on a shallow pitched roof in Warminster models at 912 kWh a year, from modelled irradiation of 1,165 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 3 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, 18 miles away at Chippenham, models at about 291,800 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 74,400 kWh landing in July and August and roughly 15,200 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.
Warminster ranks 3 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.
School solar on record near BA12
The BA12 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 Warminster.
Look 18 miles out and there is one: Wiltshire College, Lackham in Chippenham, 320 kWp, applied for by Wessex Energy Solutions, 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 Warminster generation curve
A Warminster school roof generates most in the weeks its buildings are closed. 25.5 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 13.8 percent of the annual total, and it falls almost entirely inside the holiday.
Winter reverses it. December and January between them return 5.2 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 5.7 times as much in July as it does in December, and August alone outproduces December by about 4.8 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 Warminster changes that ratio much, but plenty about your own site changes what to do with it.
Then there is the afternoon. From roughly three o'clock the building empties while the roof is still working, so a system sized on annual consumption will over-generate in exactly the hours nobody is there. We size on half hourly data for that reason.
A Warminster 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 | 25 | 16 | 9 |
| Feb | 15 | 40 | 21 | 19 |
| Mar | 21 | 75 | 51 | 24 |
| Apr | 12 | 106 | 42 | 64 |
| May | 17 | 123 | 67 | 56 |
| Jun | 21 | 124 | 87 | 37 |
| Jul | 11 | 126 | 45 | 81 |
| Aug | 0 | 106 | 0 | 106 |
| Sep | 20 | 83 | 55 | 28 |
| Oct | 17 | 51 | 28 | 23 |
| Nov | 21 | 30 | 21 | 9 |
| Dec | 15 | 22 | 11 | 11 |
| Year | 190 | 911 | 444 | 467 |
Wiltshire schools, phase by phase
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. At 7.2 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 Wiltshire, 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.
Grid connection through Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks
Connections around Warminster are handled by Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, 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 Wiltshire the planning database records 159 solar schemes totalling 1585 MW, of which 56 are operational (REPD Q1 2026).
Book a roof survey at your Warminster school
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.
Warminster school solar, answered
- What would a 320 kWp array produce at a Warminster school?
- Yes, and the figure matters more than the sunshine. 912 kWh per kWp a year puts a 320 kWp array at around 291,800 kWh, on roughly 950 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 Warminster?
- Less is wasted than governors expect, but the figure is worth seeing: 25.5 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 Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks.
- Who do we apply to for export near Warminster?
- Only Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks 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 Wiltshire?
- 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 Wiltshire. We confirm it either way.
- How many schools are there around Warminster?
- 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.