What rooftop solar in a housing society does, and does not, cover
Rooftop panels on apartment buildings usually power shared spaces, not individual flats. What that means for maintenance bills and for the grid.
Sai Naman Group5 min read
Solar panels on the roof of an apartment building are often read as a promise of free electricity in every flat. That is not usually what they do. In most housing societies the roof is shared property, and the system connected to it feeds the shared load: lifts, staircase and corridor lighting, water pumps, the clubhouse, street lights and increasingly electric vehicle chargers.
That is a smaller promise, but a real one. Those loads run every day of the year, they are paid for by every resident through maintenance charges, and they are exactly what a roof can cover.
How the national scheme treats societies
India's rooftop programme, PM-Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana, was launched in February 2024 with the aim of installing rooftop solar on one crore homes in the residential sector. Its guidelines set central financial assistance at ₹30,000 per kWp for the first 2 kWp of capacity and ₹18,000 per kWp for the next kWp, with no additional assistance beyond 3 kWp. For an individual home that works out to a maximum of ₹78,000.
Group housing societies and resident welfare associations have their own line in the same table. For common facilities, including EV charging, assistance is ₹18,000 per kWp, up to 500 kWp, calculated at 3 kWp per house. The guidelines illustrate it plainly: a society with 50 households installing 100 kW is eligible for ₹18,000 x 100, that is ₹18,00,000.
Two conditions matter. The society's connection has to be dedicated to common facilities, and cannot be used to supply electricity to individual flats. The capacity cap also counts any rooftop systems individual residents have installed in the same society.
The GHS/RWA connection eligible under the scheme shall be dedicated only for common facilities and should not be utilized for provided electricity supply to residential consumers within the GHS/RWA.
The scheme is not a pilot. As on 19 March 2026 the ministry reported 26,19,879 rooftop systems installed since launch, with ₹17,967.53 crore disbursed as central financial assistance.
What residents actually notice
- A smaller shared electricity bill, which shows up as lower maintenance charges rather than as a credit in any one flat's bill.
- Lifts, pumps and common lighting running on daytime sunshine, which is when those loads are heaviest.
- No change to the meter inside a flat, unless a resident separately installs their own system.
- A system that needs cleaning and checking to keep producing, like any other piece of building equipment.
Why it is worth doing anyway
Common-area load is steady, predictable and paid for collectively, which makes it the easiest thing in a housing project to shift to the sun. Every unit generated on the roof at noon is a unit the grid does not have to send, at the hour when demand and heat both peak.
At Suburbia Estate the roofs are planned for solar from the start, feeding the shared services that keep the buildings running. It is described here for what it is: a lower shared bill and less drawn from the grid, not free power in every flat.