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A report on UK commercial roofs finds 60GW of solar potential and less than 10% of it built, and the reason isn't the panels

Cushman & Wakefield's 10 September report for Real Estate:UK, Forsters and Push Power puts unused UK commercial rooftop solar capacity at 60GW, nearly 20 Hinkley Point Cs worth, with current deployment at just 3-5GW, and names the blockers as leasing and funding structure, not technology or cost.

13 September 2026 · Source: Solar Power Portal

The financial case in this report is not the interesting part. A 300kWp commercial rooftop system costing 250,000 pounds returns a 20% first-year net yield with a 5.5-year payback when the tenant funds it, or a still-solid 12% yield and 8-year payback when the landlord does, and both save 53 tonnes of CO2e a year. Those numbers have been true, roughly, for several years. What makes this report worth reading is where it puts the blame for less than 10% of suitable commercial roof space being used: not cost, not panel supply, not grid capacity as the primary constraint, but a mismatch between who owns a commercial roof and who would capture the savings from putting panels on it.

Cushman & Wakefield's list of barriers reads like a landlord-tenant lease negotiation rather than an energy problem: REIT regime uncertainty over how self-generated power counts against tax status, insurance requirements that complicate rooftop installations on let buildings, and leasing structures that were never written with an on-site power source in mind. Rob Wall of Real Estate:UK frames commercial real estate as having the potential to lead solar deployment, which is true, but the report's own barrier list explains why it hasn't: a landlord funding the install captures a smaller yield and a longer payback than a tenant would, yet it's usually the landlord who controls the roof and the capital.

For a domestic solar audience the direct read-across is limited, most of this site's readers own their own roof and don't have a lease structure standing between them and their panels. The wider lesson holds anyway. Every constraint on UK solar growth this year, grid connection queues, DNO delays, MCS mounting rules, plug-in kit compliance gaps, has turned out to be a coordination problem between parties with different incentives rather than a hard technical ceiling. Commercial rooftops just make that pattern easiest to see, because the 60GW gap here is entirely a paperwork and ownership problem sitting on top of a roof that was always structurally capable of holding the panels.

Read the original: Solar Power Portal. Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.

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