A Rogerstone School Roof, Generating Its Own Power

Jubilee Park Primary School opened in September 2017 as the education hub of the Jubilee Park development in Rogerstone, on the northern edge of Newport. The 100-acre site was once the Novellis aluminium works and has since been remediated and rebuilt as a large residential neighbourhood, with the school designed to serve the young families moving in. It is an English-medium community primary maintained by Newport City Council, teaching around 360 children aged three to eleven.

The school takes a genuine interest in its local environment, with pupils involved in efforts to make the site more sustainable. Generating clean electricity on the roof is a practical extension of that.

A school building offers a large, mostly unshaded roof, which makes it well suited to solar panels for commercial buildings of this scale. InspireGreen used the available roof areas across several orientations to fit 187 panels, giving a total installed capacity of 90.2 kWp.

The array is managed by a single 66.6 kW inverter with 94 optimisers, so each panel works independently. That matters on a roof with sections facing different directions, because shading or lower light on one part of the roof does not drag down the output of the rest. The design is estimated to generate around 75.3 MWh of clean electricity a year, most of which is used directly in the school, cutting the amount of power drawn from the grid.

It also turns the school's environmental interest's into something its pupils can see working on their own building.