Evaluating Commercial Roofs for Solar Revenue: Turning Idle Square Footage Into a Cash-Flowing Asset

Episode description

Most commercial property owners track revenue per square foot inside their buildings but almost none measure the financial potential sitting right above them.

In this episode, Alexis Lewis breaks down how commercial and industrial roofs should be evaluated not as maintenance liabilities, but as revenue-generating infrastructure. This is not a sales pitch for solar panels. It’s a practical framework for deciding whether a roof deserves capital allocation at all.

You’ll learn how experienced asset managers and operators should think about rooftop solar through the lens of math, risk, and lifecycle planning not hype.

Key topics covered include:

• Why “solar feasibility” is often misunderstood and why most projects fail before they start • The minimum roof size thresholds where solar economics begin to make sense • How remaining roof life directly impacts ROI and project viability • Watts per square foot planning ranges for flat commercial roofs • Expected annual energy production per installed kilowatt in Northeast markets • Translating kWh production into real dollar value per square foot • How to quickly filter out bad projects before spending money on engineering • Common red flags: shading, structural constraints, roof warranties, and deferred maintenance • The difference between a solar project and a rooftop asset strategy

Alexis draws from hands-on experience inspecting, managing, and rehabilitating aging commercial PV systems across New York City and the Northeast particularly systems installed between 2010 and 2021 that are now underperforming or approaching mid-life.

This episode is especially relevant for: • Commercial property owners and operators • Asset and facilities managers • Developers evaluating rooftops at scale • EPCs and O&M providers working with aging portfolios • Anyone deciding where capital should (or should not) be deployed

If you’ve ever asked: “Is this roof actually worth investing in?” or “Why does this solar project look good on paper but underperform in reality?”

This episode gives you the framework to answer those questions before costly mistakes are made.

Bottom line: A roof that doesn’t beat your financial hurdle rate per square foot isn’t an energy asset, it’s just dead space.

Most commercial roofs sit idle for decades unmeasured, undervalued, and ignored.

In this episode, I break down how to evaluate commercial roofs for real solar revenue, using asset-level math, lifecycle risk, and hard filters that kill bad projects early.

This isn’t solar hype. It’s rooftop asset strategy.

If you own, operate, or manage buildings, this one’s for you.

Episode description

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