Solar on a building you lease? Settle the ownership question first.
This is the most common reason good commercial solar projects die, and it is not technical. The landlord owns the roof. The tenant pays the electricity bill. The savings land with one party and the asset with the other, and unless that is resolved in writing before installation, it surfaces later — at a lease renewal, at a sale, or when someone asks who is paying to fix an inverter. We are not going to tell you what your lease says. We are going to tell you which questions have to be answered.
Reviewed by the Mission Green commercial team · Updated August 2026
The split incentive,
stated plainly.
Nobody is behaving badly. The structure just points the benefits at different people.
Owns the roof
Controls whether anything is installed, carries the building risk, and owns an improvement that outlasts most lease terms — but does not pay the electricity bill.
Pays the bill
Captures the entire saving from generation, but may hold a lease considerably shorter than the payback period, on a roof they do not control.
Lease term vs asset life
A solar system is a twenty-plus year asset. Commercial leases are often a fraction of that, with options. The arithmetic only works if someone bridges the gap deliberately.
This is why so many otherwise sound commercial solar proposals stall. The person holding the quote frequently is not the person who has to approve the roof, and the person approving the roof does not see the saving that justifies it.
It is solvable. It is just solvable by agreement rather than by equipment, and the agreement has to come first.
Certificates follow
ownership, once.
One of the few parts of this with a clear, checkable answer.
Under the small-scale scheme, certificates are created at installation and are normally assigned to the installer, arriving as an upfront discount on the invoice. They are a one-time event tied to the system, not an annual entitlement that follows whoever happens to occupy the building.
Which means the certificate value is captured by whoever pays for the system, at the moment it goes in. If the tenant funds it, the tenant gets that discount — on an asset attached to someone else's building. If the landlord funds it, the landlord does — while the tenant collects the generation savings for as long as they stay.
Neither is wrong. Both need to be a decision rather than an accident.
What has to be
answered in writing.
Get these settled before a quote is accepted, not after.
Who pays for the system, and who owns it afterwards? These can be different answers and the second one needs to be explicit. "We paid for it" is not the same as "it is ours".
What happens at the end of the lease? Does the system stay, is it removed, is it bought out, does the rent change? If the tenant funded it and leaves in year six of a twenty-year asset, what were they buying?
Who is responsible for maintenance, faults and insurance? An inverter will need replacing inside the asset's life. Deciding then who pays is considerably worse than deciding now.
Who is the network customer, and whose meter does it connect behind? This decides who can actually use the generation and who deals with the distributor. On multi-tenant buildings it is the question that determines whether the project is straightforward or complicated.
What happens if the building is sold? The system does not move. Whether the arrangement survives a change of owner belongs in the document.
Does the lease already say anything about alterations or fixtures? It very often does, and it is cheaper to read that clause now than to litigate it later.
So what should
you actually do?
Short version.
Start with the lease and the landlord, not the quote. A signed solar contract on a roof you have not been given permission to use is the expensive order to do this in.
Match the funding to the party that keeps the benefit. If the tenant captures the savings, tenant funding with a documented end-of-lease position is coherent. If the landlord funds it, the mechanism that returns value to them — rent, a share, a green lease provision — needs to be written down.
Size to the tenant's actual load, not the roof. A system sized to the available roof rather than to consumption is exactly the system that becomes an argument when the occupier changes.
Put the end-of-lease position in writing before installation. It is a paragraph now. It is a dispute later.
If you cannot get agreement, that is an answer too. Some sites are not ready, and a business that installs anyway on an unresolved roof has bought a problem along with the panels.
Solar on leased premises:
your questions, answered.
Only with the building owner's agreement, and what your lease permits regarding alterations and fixtures is a matter for that lease and your legal advice. The practical position is that the roof is controlled by the owner and the electricity bill is paid by the tenant, so the arrangement has to be documented between them before installation rather than after.
That depends on what the parties agree and on the terms of the lease, which is precisely why it should be written down before anything is installed. Paying for a system and owning it are not automatically the same thing, and whether equipment attached to a building becomes a fixture is a legal question that turns on the specific circumstances. Get advice on your lease.
Certificates under the small-scale scheme are created once at installation and are normally assigned to the installer, arriving as an upfront discount on the purchase price. So the value goes to whoever pays for the system at the time it is installed. It is not an ongoing entitlement that follows the occupier.
The building owner controls the roof and holds the asset, while the tenant pays the electricity bill and therefore captures the savings from generation. The party who has to approve the installation is not the party who benefits from it, so neither has a complete reason to act alone.
Whatever the parties agreed, which is why the end-of-lease position has to be settled before installation. The realistic options are that the system stays with the building, that it is bought out at an agreed value, or that it is removed and the roof made good. All three are workable. None of them is workable if it is first discussed at the end of the lease.
Usually, yes, and it is a commercial conversation rather than a technical one. The workable arrangements all match the funding to the party that keeps the benefit and document what happens at the end of the term — whether that is landlord funding with a return mechanism, tenant funding with an agreed end-of-lease position, or a third-party arrangement over the roof. What does not work is installing first and settling it later.
Where these figures come from.
The certificate mechanics are from the Clean Energy Regulator. Everything about your lease is a matter for your lease and your lawyer, and this page does not attempt to answer it.