Who pays for solar on a multi-let London office?

Single-let buildings make solar easy: one meter, one beneficiary, one decision. Multi-let London offices — most of the stock — split the incentive: the landlord controls the roof but the tenants pay the electricity bills. Every workable scheme resolves that split one of three ways.

The three structures

Landlord feeds the common parts. The array supplies the landlord’s own meter — lifts, plant, common lighting — and the saving flows through the service charge to every tenant automatically. No tenant signature required. This is the default because it needs nothing from anyone except the landlord’s decision.

Landlord generates, tenants buy. Generated units are re-charged to occupiers at or below their grid rate, turning the roof into an income line. It needs sub-metering and a contractual basis — a lease clause or side agreement — and it is where green lease drafting earns its keep.

An occupier funds its own supply. Rarer, but real for anchor tenants with long terms: a licence to alter, the tenant’s capital, the tenant’s saving. The landlord’s question becomes reinstatement at lease end.

The questions that decide it

Can the service charge recover capital costs, or only the saving? What does the lease’s improvements clause actually say? Who owns the export relationship? These are solicitor-and-managing-agent questions, and they get asked before design money is spent — the engineering is the easy half. The building-side answers — roof capacity, structural reserve, the 56-day prior approval, the G99 application — are laid out on our page on solar for London offices.

And where neither landlord nor tenant wants the capex, a funder-owned structure sits in the middle: the funder takes the roof on a lease, both sides buy cheaper power, nobody raids a budget. The lease questions stay the same — they just get answered in the funder’s paperwork instead.