Our solar assets performed well over the first six months of this financial year owing to the prolonged sunny weather. Overall, we generated 1,907 kWh more from our solar arrays at The King’s Centre, Aldi and Matthew Arnold School than we did in the same period in 2024. This was despite the Science Block re-roofing project at Matthew Arnold School which put that array out of action for several months.

Matthew Arnold Science Block

WOCoRe owns and operates two solar PV arrays at Matthew Arnold School – one on their Main Block and one on the Science Block. The Science Block roof had been leaking for several years, and earlier this year the school managed to secure funding to replace the roof. This necessitated removing the solar panels, storing them while the roof was replaced, and then reinstalling them on the new roof. This work was undertaken by Darke & Taylor, our preferred electrical contractor, working as a sub-contractor to the main roofer.

The project took place in the summer holiday when the building is not needed for teaching. While this is sensible from the school’s point of view, it meant we were without the solar array for much of the summer, which is the peak generation season for solar installations. The cost of removing and reinstating the array was mostly covered by the school’s funding grant, but we took the opportunity to pay for some incremental improvements (mainly tidying up the wiring configuration).

The project overran and so was not finished by the start of term. The array returned to service on 11 October, having gone offline on 23 July, so a total outage of around 10 weeks. Results for Matthew Arnold School were slightly down on last year as a result but more than compensated for by the performance of our other arrays.