Can You Sell Solar Power to Your Tenants in Florida?

Why the obvious idea doesn't work here

The pitch is intuitive. You own the roof, you put solar on it, you sell the power to the tenants below at less than the utility charges, everybody wins. In roughly thirty states some version of that is normal.

In Florida there are two separate walls, and you hit both.

Wall one: selling electricity makes you a utility

In PW Ventures, Inc. v. Nichols, 533 So. 2d 281 (Fla. 1988), the Florida Supreme Court held that an entity selling electricity to another is a public utility subject to Public Service Commission regulation and to the incumbent utility's exclusive service territory. That single holding is why Florida has no meaningful third-party power purchase agreement market, and it's the reason a landlord billing tenants for solar kilowatt-hours is doing the thing the case forbids.

Wall two: submetering can only recover cost

Where a building is master-metered, Fla. Admin. Code R. 25-6.049(5) permits reasonable apportionment, including submetering, solely to allocate the cost of the electricity billed by the utility. 'Cost' means charges authorized by the utility's tariff — energy, fuel, and related charges. It excludes late fees, the cost of billing, and administrative overhead. You may pass through. You may not profit.

The utilities restate it in their own tariffs. LCEC's residential, general service, general service demand, and net metering schedules each say the same sentence: standby or resale service is not permitted.

What does work

1. Offset the owner-paid common load

The cleanest option and the one most multi-tenant projects should start with. The array offsets the meter you already pay: corridors, elevators, pumps, pool, gates, parking-lot lighting, irrigation, amenity buildings, the leasing office. It's pure self-consumption, so no resale question arises and no lease has to be reopened.

The catch is size. The common-area meter is usually smaller than owners assume. Pull twelve months of that specific meter before anyone designs anything.

2. Fold power into rent

An electric-included lease isn't a sale of electricity. It's rent for space that includes utilities. Solar lowers your cost of delivering that rent, and the tenant gets one predictable number with no August spike.

This is a genuine leasing advantage in a market where a high summer bill decides whether a tenant renews. The trade-off is real: rent-inclusive utilities remove the tenant's incentive to conserve, so pair it with efficient equipment or you absorb the waste. Have counsel draft it — you're changing the lease, not adding a utility line.

3. Allocate cost honestly under a modified gross lease

Submeter and allocate the actual billed cost, per the rule. Solar lowers the master bill, which lowers what you allocate. The benefit shows up as a more competitive occupancy cost rather than as margin. You cannot keep the savings and bill the old number.

4. Solve the split incentive with a green lease

In a triple-net building the landlord pays for the system and the tenant gets the savings. That's the split incentive, and it's why so many perfect NNN roofs sit empty. A green-lease amendment lets the landlord recover the capital cost as a recoverable operating expense or a defined rent adjustment, capped at the tenant's documented savings, so the tenant is never worse off.

This is a negotiation rather than a product. It needs the tenant at the table, counsel drafting, and enough remaining term to matter. Time it to a renewal.

Can you promise tenants no electric bill?

You can make the unit electric-included, which removes their exposure to the variable part of the bill and to the next rate case. You cannot remove the bill itself. There's still a customer charge, a minimum charge, and on a demand-metered account a demand charge. Promising a zero bill is a promise a tenant disproves in month one.

What to watch

A bill filed in October 2025 would amend the definition of public utility to exclude an owner who installs renewable generation up to 2.5 MW on their own property and sells the output to others. Similar bills have been filed repeatedly in Florida and have not passed. If one ever does, the tenant-sale model flips from prohibited to available, and it's worth knowing the day it happens rather than the year after.

Questions worth asking

• How much load is actually on the owner-paid meter, over twelve months?
• What does my lease say about utilities, roof access, and recoverable operating expenses?
• If this is a green-lease structure, who drafts it and when does the tenant see it?
• Is any part of this proposal premised on billing tenants for solar power?