Plenty of manufacturers rule out solar in one sentence: we lease the building. It is a reasonable instinct and usually the wrong conclusion. The obstacle is not the lease — it is that a twenty-five year asset is being pushed onto a seven-year tenancy without anyone restructuring the deal to fit.
The three problems, named properly
Term mismatch
A solar plant pays back over years and generates for decades. A lease runs to a fixed date. If the plant is sized and financed against twenty-five years of generation but your right to occupy ends in six, the arithmetic underneath the proposal is not yours.
Roof rights
A lease grants you the premises. It does not automatically grant you the roof, the right to penetrate it, or the right to put a third party's asset on it for a quarter of a century. That permission has to be obtained explicitly and documented.
Who owns what at exit
If you vacate, the plant does not follow you. Somebody has to have decided in advance whether it is removed, transferred to the landlord, or bought out — and at what price.
What actually resolves it
Match the contract to the tenure, not to the asset
The most common fix is the simplest. A power purchase agreement written to the remaining lease term, with a defined position at expiry, converts an unfinanceable project into a normal one. We would rather write a seven-year PPA that works than a twenty-year one that has to be unwound.
Bring the landlord in as a party, early
A roof-rights agreement or a tripartite structure — occupier, landlord, generator — is standard and rarely contentious once the landlord understands what is being asked. The plant improves their asset, they carry no capital, and they usually gain an option over it later. The conversation fails when it happens late, not when it happens.
Let someone else own the plant
On an OPEX or RESCO structure you do not own the asset at all. We finance, build, insure and operate it, and you buy the power it produces at an agreed rate. That removes the capital question from a leased site entirely, and it moves the tenure risk to the party best placed to price it.
Or leave the roof out of it
If the tenure is genuinely too short or the landlord will not engage, the roof is not the only route. Open access delivers power from a plant somewhere else entirely, wheeled to your meter. It is indifferent to who owns your building. For short-tenure or multi-site occupiers this is often the cleaner answer.
What we look at before proposing anything
- Remaining lease term, and whether renewal options are exercisable at your discretion
- Whether the lease is silent on roof use, or restricts it
- The landlord's own position — owner-occupier, fund, or industrial park operator
- Whether structural work needs the landlord's consent regardless of solar
- Whether the load justifies off-site supply instead, independent of the building
Lease structures and roof-rights practice vary widely, and industrial park leases differ again from standalone tenancies. This is a general explainer — the structure we would actually propose depends on your lease document, which we would want to read first.