By Vvon Engineering Team | Published | Updated
Compare school and madrasa term-time demand, holidays, roof capacity, utility eligibility and maintenance funding.
Solar EPC & street lighting RFQ checklist (TXT)
Day-school electricity use often overlaps with solar hours, but holidays, evening classes, boarding and low-demand periods change the annual picture. Assess the roof, connection, load profile and maintenance funding together before deciding the system size.
Walk a school at eleven in the morning and count what is running: ceiling fans in every classroom, tube lights on cloudy days, a computer lab, the office air conditioner, a water pump filling the overhead tank, and in larger schools a few classroom air conditioners. All of it is daytime. There is no night shift, no cold store, no standing load to speak of after the guard's light.
A well-matched array can offset daytime grid purchases. Estimate self-consumption across term time, weekends and holidays, then value exported energy using the applicable agreement. A daytime timetable alone does not prove near-total self-consumption.
Residential madrasas are a different animal and should be surveyed as such. A hifz madrasa with boarding students has lighting and fan load before Fajr and again after Maghrib, kitchen load in the evening, and pumping at both ends of the day. The generation curve still helps, but the flat daytime match that makes a day school so straightforward is not there, and the sizing should follow the measured load rather than the roof area.
On paper a three storey school block has plenty of roof. On site, after you subtract the overhead water tanks, the stair head, the parapet setback, the space the school uses for assembly or for drying, and the shadow of the tank on the array, the usable area falls sharply. Measure it with a tape and mark it out, because the difference must be measured rather than assumed.
Schools close for weeks at a time. Add the annual vacation, the Ramadan and Eid closures, public holidays and examination gaps, and a meaningful part of the year has almost no daytime load while the array keeps generating into the grid.
Compare additional capacity using annual term-time, holiday and weekend demand plus quarterly export treatment. Choose from the technical and financial comparison rather than making roof coverage or term-time minimum demand the only target.
School and madrasa projects are usually paid for in one go: an alumni collection, a single donor, a company's social spending, a waqf or zakat contribution, the upazila education office, or a managing committee that has saved for two years. The money arrives once, it buys equipment, and everybody is photographed on the roof.
If ongoing inspection, cleaning and repair are omitted from the funding plan, faults can remain unresolved. Allocate those responsibilities and a service budget at handover rather than relying on another donation later.
Net metering is granted to the holder of the electricity connection, and the plant is capped against that connection's sanctioned load. Two practical consequences follow. First, the application has to be made in the institution's name as it appears on the bill, and if the connection is still in the name of a founder or a former headmaster, that has to be corrected before anything else happens. Second, a school on a small single phase connection cannot install a large array no matter how much roof it has, and the honest answer may be to apply for a load increase first, or to build to the ceiling and stop.
Rural schools and madrasas supplied by the rural electrification network follow the same route through their own utility office, and it is worth asking early which office holds the file, because a rejected application returned after two months is usually a rejected form rather than a rejected project.
Consult the relevant edition and the documents for the exact equipment and site: SREDA: Net Metering Guidelines and current application documents; IEA PVPS: operation and maintenance in different climates.
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