There is a massive clean energy opportunity sitting on rooftops across the United States, and much of it remains untapped. Residential and multifamily solar could unlock trillions of dollars in long term energy savings, according to a range of industry and academic estimates that look at avoided utility costs over the life of solar assets. Yet adoption in rental housing has lagged far behind owner occupied homes. The reason is not technical. It is financial. In most rental scenarios, landlords pay for the solar panels while tenants receive the lower utility bills. That imbalance has kept many property owners on the sidelines even as solar costs have fallen.
Charlotte Meerstadt, founder and CEO of Fram Energy, came to this problem through personal experience. She installed solar on her own home expecting it to be a smart long-term investment. Then life changed and she moved, turning the house into a rental. Suddenly, the economics looked very different. Her tenants received all the savings from the solar system while she still carried the upfront cost, and the presence of solar did not materially increase the rent she could charge. “I realized it was not a good investment once I became a landlord,” Meerstadt said.
That realization became the starting point for a new approach. While at Stanford, Meerstadt began working on a system that could fairly allocate the value of on site solar generation between landlords and tenants. The idea was not to simply charge tenants for solar power, which can trigger resistance, but to create a transparent framework that shows exactly how much energy is being produced and how the savings are split. Fram Energy’s platform calculates what each tenant receives from the solar array and enables a cost sharing model that gives landlords a return while still lowering tenant bills.
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Charging for power inside a residential building is not straightforward. Utility billing is already complex, and tenants can be sensitive to anything that feels like a new fee. That is why transparency is central to the model. “The transparency makes it a lot easier for the residents to get behind this, they see it as the way that they buy power and dont see anything wrong with it,” Meerstadt said. “Clean energy is a value prop for some but savings are universal.”
That clarity becomes even more important across different types of communities. Not every resident engages with technology in the same way. Fram Energy has had to adapt its communication strategies depending on who lives in the building. “In some retirement communities, many of the residents don’t even have an email so we have to be creative,” Meerstadt said. That might mean printed materials, in person explanations, or working closely with property managers to ensure residents understand what they are paying for and why.
Positioning also matters. Solar cost-sharing works best when it is framed as both a financial benefit and a quality of life improvement. Tenants still save money compared to standard utility rates, and landlords gain a way to recover their investment. “Tenants are already probably paying for other things like parking or amenities like a gym, so this can be pitched as another amenity,” she said. In that framing, solar becomes part of the property’s value proposition rather than a confusing line item.
The technical challenge behind all of this is that utilities are not uniform. Rate structures vary widely by geography, and the rules governing submetering and energy resale differ from one jurisdiction to another. On top of that, individual building layouts and tenant mixes introduce endless variations. Fram Energy has leaned into that complexity rather than avoiding it. “We get excited every time a new edge case pops up so we can make the system stronger, one of our biggest advantages is the edge case engine,” Meerstadt said.
Those edge cases are only increasing as energy systems become more sophisticated. Utility rate structures are growing more complex, with time-of-use pricing and demand charges becoming more common. At the same time, batteries are being added alongside solar at a rapid pace. Storage changes when energy is used and who benefits from it, making fair allocation even harder without software. “About half of our installs include battery storage,” Meerstadt said. “I think it is where things are headed, by 2030 I think it will be almost all include energy storage.”
Taken together, these tools point to a future where the landlord/tenant split incentive problem no longer blocks clean energy adoption. Technology is making it possible to measure, allocate, and explain energy savings with a level of precision that did not exist before. That unlocks a huge portion of the housing stock that has been effectively excluded from the solar transition.
The rooftop opportunity has always been there. What was missing was a way to align incentives without alienating residents or overwhelming property managers. As energy systems grow more complex and capital becomes more selective, solutions that consolidate savings, improve transparency, and deliver predictable returns may be what finally allows rental housing to participate fully in the clean energy economy.
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