🌐 Solar for 45 Million Renters: How Shine Gets Building Owners to Say "Yes"

One note before we jump in this week: I recently returned as fractional CMO at Plantd, the carbon-negative materials startup I co-founded in 2021.

Quick backstory: I raised Plantd’s Seed and Series A rounds, established our landmark partnership with D.R. Horton (America’s largest homebuilder), and helped Plantd make Fast Company’s list of Most Innovative Companies.

Supercool will continue, of course. I’m also taking on one additional engagement with a growth-stage climate or sustainability company.

A pattern I’ve seen (and written about) at Supercool: companies often hit a marketing gap as they move from selling “promise” to shipping products. The story that helps you raise doesn’t always help you scale. I help close it by sharpening the narrative, aligning internal and external teams, and coordinating execution to accelerate growth.

If this sounds like it might be a fit, reply and tell me the core challenge you’re facing. I’ll respond.

Now for Supercool this week.

In 2025, a Deloitte survey revealed that 65% of Gen Zs and 63% of Millennials are willing to pay more for environmentally responsible products. The desire to live sustainably in America remains strong.

But if you're renting a home and want to run your life on the cheapest renewable energy, solar power, then you're mostly out of luck.

40% of Americans who rent live in apartment buildings. Roughly 45 million people. Nearly none of their apartments are powered by solar.

It’s not a technology problem. Solar works. Costs keep falling. 

It’s an incentive problem. For individually metered buildings—where each unit has its own electric bill—the owner pays for installation. The tenant gets the savings. Therefore, nobody invests. 

This conundrum, known as the split incentive, has long stifled solar adoption in multifamily real estate.

Owen Barrett spent years trying to solve it. Passive investing in apartment syndications. A consulting startup aimed at advising building owners. Buying buildings himself. Each attempt taught him something.

The real barrier wasn’t money or technology. It was billing.

In a 200-unit building, you need a monthly solar ledger: a way to measure how much solar power each unit received and push the right line item onto the tenant’s statement—without creating a mess for property management.

Owen built it. That software became Shine.

But Shine isn’t a software company.

They install solar on apartment buildings—design, permitting, installation, billing, monitoring, maintenance—and give the software away for free. The real revenue is in installation (roughly $8,000 per unit). Remove the software barrier. Capture everything else.

Once the billing layer was in place, deployment began to scale.

• 100 apartment units installed in 2024

• 3,000 units in 2025

• Projecting 20,000 units in 2026

• Working with AvalonBay and Equity Residential—two of the five largest multifamily owners in the country

Across the country, Owen is now seeing electricity prices rise 25%, 50%, even 80% year over year in some areas. At those rates, solar pencils without tax credits.

Here’s what stood out from my conversation with Owen:

The owner earns money. The tenant saves money. That’s the whole game.

"Your average tenant may pay $100 per month to the electric utility pre-solar. Post-solar, they're going to pay the utility $50 a month. They're saving $50 from solar, but they're paying the owner $45 per month. The tenant is saving $5, the owner is now making $45 per month per unit."

The split incentive problem isn’t just solved—it’s inverted. The owner earns income on every unit. The tenant gets a lower combined bill. The math is clean enough to work in a Texas boardroom, and Texas is one of Shine’s largest markets.

Your sustainability team might be the obstacle.

"ESG teams, a lot of the time, are in this analysis paralysis—prioritizing reporting, not prioritizing actual projects. Sometimes the people I think should be our biggest champions actually hold up projects."

After two years of selling into large portfolios, Owen’s path is clear: skip the sustainability department. Go straight to asset management or the C-suite. The people responsible for returns move faster than the people responsible for reporting. IRR closes the deal.

The bottleneck was never the technology.

"We've got everything we need. We don't need all of these revolutionary innovations. We need to spend a lot of time focusing on just deploying what we have."

Shine isn’t a hardware company. Panels are a commodity. Inverters are off the shelf. What Owen built is the operational layer—billing, monitoring, and maintenance—that enables long-term management of tenant-level solar.

The market is too large for any one company to solve.

"We could be a $500 million a year company and not put a dent in this thing. We need other players doing this."

45 million multifamily renters. A few thousand units installed so far. Owen shares what they’ve learned with other installers because the alternative—one company doing it alone—won’t go fast enough.

Rising electricity prices are now doing the selling.

"We've talked to customers where rates have gone up 80% year over year, and another customer 50%. These are not outliers. This is just what we're going to see for the next few years."

Outsized rate increases have a favorable unintended consequence. The worse the grid gets for ratepayers, the more Shine’s model sells itself.

The real asset is the data—and they’re just getting started.

"When we interconnect solar into the tenant units, we get 15-minute interval data at the tenant level. As utilities start rolling out incentive programs for storage, we will have all the data we need to say this building is a good candidate for storage."

Most owners can’t see tenant-level usage patterns. Shine can. Owen sees it as the setup for its next growth cycle: battery storage, tied to utility incentive programs. Solar gets Shine in the door. Data becomes the long-term play.

Supercool Takeaway

Shine didn’t invent new solar technology. They innovated the business model to scale into a massive market too big to ignore.

Operator Takeaways

• Follow the friction. The best insights are inside failed attempts.
  

• Bypass the ESG team. Asset managers and C-suite leaders close deals.
  

• Make the software free. The value isn’t the SaaS fee—it’s the installation it unlocks.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

Solar for 45 Million Renters: How Shine Gets Building Owners to Say "Yes"

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

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This week’s Supercool sponsor

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Related Supercool Pods

Here are more ways multi-family buildings are cutting costs, reducing emissions, and improving the tenant experience:

Episode 72 — Remote-Control High-Rises: HVAC That Pays You Back
Parity remotely optimizes HVAC in high-rises and hotels—and guarantees savings. Owners are seeing 20–30% cuts in HVAC costs with 1–2 year payback, plus steadier comfort during extreme weather.

Episode 60 — Alloy Built Brooklyn’s First All-Electric Skyscraper — Wall Street Wants More
Alloy is proving that electrification and Passive House aren’t “nice-to-haves”—they’re risk management. A real-world look at how all-electric, high-performance buildings can lower long-term operating risk and pull institutional capital toward climate performance.

Episode 57 — The Clean Energy Transition Is Cooking: Copper’s Battery-Enabled Appliances Unlock Home Electrification
Copper proved its battery-enabled induction range in residential homes. Now it’s pushing into multifamily: NYPA, NYCHA, and NYSERDA are backing a $32M commitment to develop, pilot, and produce 10,000 induction stoves designed to run on standard 120V outlets—a path to electrify cooking in apartments without expensive electrical upgrades.

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

InsurTechLA : Josh Dorfman, Co-founder & CMO of Plantd

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