Why allocation is becoming a board-level topic
Shopping centers used to treat electricity like a utility line item: negotiated, paid, and forgotten. In Ukraine, that mindset has been breaking down. Retail operators now juggle volatile market prices, tighter tenant expectations, and a growing push to improve resilience after repeated stress on the energy system. That combination explains why more owners are moving beyond “install PV and reduce bills” toward a tougher question: how do you share the benefit between dozens or even hundreds of tenants without triggering disputes?
For many property groups, the entry point is a shopping mall solar retrofit project "turnkey". It sounds simple, yet multi-tenant reality makes it complex. A mall has common loads (lighting, lifts, security, ventilation, IT rooms), plus tenant loads (stores, pharmacies, food courts, cinemas). The solar plant typically sits on the building’s roof and feeds one connection point, while consumption happens behind many submeters. If the landlord alone captures savings, tenants feel the building is monetizing “their” roof. If every tenant demands a separate share, the project can stall under legal and metering overhead.
Internationally, the solution is rarely a single “perfect” model. Strong programs combine engineering logic, transparent accounting, and contract governance. Ukraine’s regulatory trajectory also matters: reforms have been moving toward a more EU-aligned framework for active consumers, self-consumption, and net-billing-type settlements, while secondary rules continue to mature.
Three allocation logics that actually work
Allocation fails when it is treated as a one-off calculation. It succeeds when it is designed as an operating system: measurable, auditable, and repeatable across seasons and tenancy changes.
Here are three practical logics that leading malls use, often in hybrids:
- Common-area first, tenants second: PV offsets base building loads, then remaining benefit is returned to tenants via a transparent service-charge credit formula.
- Proportional allocation: PV value is split by each tenant’s metered consumption share during defined time windows, with quarterly true-ups to handle seasonality.
- Contracted offtake: selected anchor tenants sign long-term offtake terms (like an internal energy contract) while the rest participate through a standard crediting scheme.
Behind-the-meter crediting that tenants can verify
A common approach is to apply onsite generation to the landlord’s “house load” first, because that demand is predictable and constant. The next step is governance: tenants need to see how the remaining value is shared, or they will assume the allocation is arbitrary.
Two practices help build credibility:
- Treat energy performance like a managed KPI, not a utility bill. Many portfolios use ISO 50001 as an energy-management framework because it formalizes measurement, targets, and continual improvement.
- Publish a short allocation policy: what is included, what is excluded, how vacancy is handled, and how often the calculation is reconciled.
Metered attribution through tenant-level settlement
Where tenant relations are more demanding, the landlord can allocate benefits based on consumption profiles. This typically requires tenant submeters that are synchronized in time (hourly or sub-hourly) and a ruleset for how to treat peak periods, weekends, and maintenance downtime.
This model shines in mixed-use properties, where a supermarket’s refrigeration and a cinema’s evening peaks behave very differently. It also requires careful wording on baselines, because retrofits (new HVAC, LED upgrades) can change the load shape and distort “fairness” if the contract is too rigid.
Export, settlement, and the Ukrainian policy direction
Some malls prefer a structure that looks less like an internal redistribution and more like a market settlement. That is where grid tied PV for retail net billing installation becomes relevant.
Net billing is widely described as a mechanism where exported electricity is compensated at a defined price, often linked to wholesale market values rather than the retail tariff. In Ukraine’s reform pathway, net-billing-type provisions and the concept of active consumers have been part of the “green transformation” direction, alongside steps toward EU-aligned renewable energy communities (with secondary implementation still evolving).
For a mall, the strategic implication is clear: if export is settled on market terms, then the “benefit” is not only avoided retail purchases, but also the monetized surplus. That shifts the conversation with tenants. Instead of arguing about physical kilowatt-hours, parties can agree on financial crediting: a share of realized savings and revenues, after transparent deductions (metering, O&M, balancing costs, and agreed risk buffers).
Data quality is the difference between trust and conflict
In multi-tenant buildings, disputes rarely start with ideology. They start with data. If tenants suspect meters are inaccurate, or that curtailment and downtime are being “smoothed away,” confidence collapses.
A credible monitoring stack usually has two layers:
- Performance monitoring for the PV plant itself, aligned with recognized monitoring principles like IEC 61724-1, which sets out terminology, methods, and classes for PV performance monitoring systems.
- Settlement-grade metering for tenant allocation, with time-synchronized reads and audit trails.
A checklist that reduces friction from day one
- Map the loads: common areas, critical systems, anchor tenants, short-term tenants, seasonal kiosks.
- Define the allocation key: consumption share, fixed quota, or hybrid.
- Decide the settlement interval: monthly billing with quarterly reconciliation is typical for retail.
- Specify downtime handling: planned maintenance vs unplanned outages, and who bears the impact.
- Build an audit path: a tenant should be able to reproduce the calculation from meter exports.
- Align incentives: if the landlord invests in efficiency upgrades, the allocation should not punish that improvement.
What “fair” looks like in practice
Consider a mid-sized Ukrainian regional mall with a daytime-heavy load profile. The landlord may decide that common-area systems get first claim on onsite generation, because they keep the building safe and operational. Remaining value is then distributed to tenants based on their measured daytime consumption share, because that is when PV produces most.
Now add a realistic constraint: not every roof can host a multi-megawatt plant. Structural limits, shading, and fire-safety layouts often push projects into the few-hundred-kilowatt range. In that scenario, a 400 kW solar power station can still be meaningful if the allocation system is disciplined. The plant may not cover the entire site’s demand, but it can stabilize service charges, reduce exposure to peak-price periods, and strengthen the asset’s positioning for international tenants that track energy performance across portfolios.
Conclusions for decision-makers
A shopping center does not need a complicated model to share onsite generation. It needs a defensible one. The best-performing approaches combine clear allocation rules, settlement-grade data, and contracts that survive tenant churn.
Ukraine’s regulatory evolution toward active consumers and net-billing-type logic adds another lever: malls can think in both physical self-consumption and financial settlement terms, choosing the structure that best fits their tenant mix and risk appetite.
