Solar for landlords. How to make unused commercial roof space work harder
- Rob Whitney
- Jul 3
- 5 min read
Most commercial roofs do very little. They keep the weather out and nothing more. For a landlord, that same roof space is an asset waiting to work harder. It can generate clean power, lower energy costs for your tenants, improve the building itself and add long term value to your portfolio. And with the right structure, it can do all of that without any capital outlay.
That was the theme of a recent webinar we ran with the law firm TLT and the funder AMPYR Distributed Energy, called "Knocking down the barriers to onsite solar generation". Our Commercial Director Ben Westcott was joined by Miles Thomas of AMPYR, Lowri Randall from TLT, and Peter O'Brien-Ward, Finance Director at Landlink Estates, one of our customers who has already done exactly this. You can watch the full session below. Here is what it means if you own commercial property.
The roof is the asset. The funded model removes the risk
The reason solar now works so well for landlords is the power purchase agreement, or PPA. Under a funded PPA the site host spends nothing upfront. As Miles put it during the session, it is absolutely zero. The funder deploys the capital directly into the project and covers the design, the installation, the grid connection, the monitoring and the ongoing maintenance. In return, the occupier simply buys the electricity the system generates, at a fixed rate that is lower than the grid from day one. The revenue then flows back to the funder over a contract that typically runs from ten to twenty five years, and up to thirty five in some cases.
You let the equipment go on the roof. You get a better building and a cheaper, cleaner energy supply for whoever occupies it. Someone else carries the cost and the performance risk for the life of the contract.
Three ways solar adds value for a landlord
Myles was clear that the benefit for landlords layers differently to the benefit for an owner occupier, and he highlighted three things in particular.
The first is asset value. A building with proven onsite generation is simply a better building, and that shows up when the asset is valued.
The second is compliance. Onsite solar improves a building's energy performance rating, which matters more every year as minimum energy efficiency standards tighten and strong EPC ratings stop being optional.
The third is the one landlords most often underestimate, which is tenant retention. An occupier locked into a below market energy cost, and meeting their own carbon targets from a building that you own, has a very good reason to stay.
Real reductions your tenants can actually count
Sustainability is not a soft benefit here. Purchased electricity sits in a company's scope two emissions, and onsite solar is one of the very few interventions that delivers a genuine, auditable reduction against it. This is not an offset bought in from somewhere else. It is power generated on the roof and consumed in the building, reported with monthly metered data.
For any tenant with net zero commitments, science based targets or CDP disclosures, that is exactly the kind of evidence they need. Peter saw this at first hand. His tenants supply the major UK supermarkets, and their customers were pushing hard on sustainability. Solar became a significant tick in that box and made those tenant relationships noticeably stickier, which is no small thing in a competitive market.
The barriers are real, and every one of them is surmountable
The webinar was honest about the fact that these projects come with obstacles. That honesty is the point. Lowri from TLT walked through the legal questions that need thinking about early. Who occupies the building and on what basis. Whether to grant a lease or a licence of the airspace above the roof. How to protect all parties if a tenant leaves or becomes insolvent. Whether planning consent is needed, and whether a generation licence exemption applies.
Miles described the funding side as consent stacking. On a tenanted commercial property a PPA can involve the landlord, the occupier and the funder, and you may also need sign off from the mortgagee and the buildings insurer. None of that is unusual and all of it is manageable, but it takes time and it takes the right advice early.
Ben's point tied it together. Most projects that stall do so not because of the technology or the economics, but because of decision making friction between siloed teams. The ESG team, the finance team, the operations team, the facilities team and the legal team all have their own priorities, and those priorities often never make it onto the table at the outset. Our job is to surface them early, align them, and do the legwork before anyone reaches a lawyer's desk. When that groundwork is done properly, the legal stage becomes fast and straightforward rather than the thing everyone blames. As Lowri put it, legals are almost always seen as the barrier, and almost never actually are.
Proof. The Landlink Estates story
Landlink Estates manages a six thousand acre estate across Sussex and Suffolk for an agribusiness group, with two tenants who grow and pack leafy produce and herbs for the major UK supermarkets. The board already understood that you can make money from the sun, having had ground mounted solar in the past. So when Peter asked why they were not putting panels on the roofs of their large buildings, the answer was simple. Off you go and run with it.
Two years on, Landlink has solar across all four of its sites, two happy tenants and a double digit return on investment. The route there is a useful blueprint for any landlord.
They started with the two smaller sites and the more flexible tenant, deliberately, to build the working relationship and get everyone match fit before taking on the bigger, busier sites. They funded the systems themselves and put a PPA in place with each tenant, coterminous with the fifteen year leases. Because one tenant runs around the clock, Eden's delivery team planned the works in phases and timed them for the quiet season, negotiating a short shutdown window rather than disrupting production. They even used the scaffolding to fold in roof repairs and site infrastructure upgrades that the tenants needed anyway.
The financial outcome speaks for itself. In the first full year across all four sites, Landlink bettered its own financial model by fifteen per cent. The annual valuation put a significant uplift on the assets because of the solar on the roofs, which left the property company with a stronger balance sheet. Positive return, beefed up balance sheet, and, in Peter's words, with the right partners it was relatively straightforward.
Is your building a fit
The honest answer is that a feasibility study will tell you, and it will tell you quickly. As a rough guide, a funded PPA tends to start to make sense from around one hundred to two hundred kilowatts of capacity, which is very roughly fifteen hundred square metres of usable roof and somewhere in the region of three to five hundred thousand kilowatt hours of annual consumption. Smaller roofs can still work through the right funding partner, and there is no upper limit. Every site is different, which is exactly why the feasibility stage matters. We take your half hourly consumption data, model a compliant design on your roof, and match the two together so you can see the real numbers before you commit to anything.
Make your roofs work harder
Unused commercial roof space is an asset waiting to work harder. If you own commercial property and want to understand what your roofs could deliver, we will run the feasibility and walk you through every step, from the first conversation to a system that is generating.
Watch the full webinar below, then get in touch to start the conversation.
