The opportunity
Pacific American Group (PAG) is a Bay Area property investor that owns commercial real estate across Northern California. Like most California landlords, they had two problems pulling against each other: PG&E rates were rising relentlessly, eroding tenant margins (and tenant retention), while the rooftops above those same tenants sat unused and generated nothing.
Most of the industry treats this as a sustainability question. PAG treated it as a balance-sheet question. The roof at 1900 W. Winton Ave. in Hayward was a 125-kilowatt income stream waiting to be turned on.
The Monetize Rooftop model — how it actually works
Symmetric Energy's Monetize Rooftop program is a three-piece machine. The first piece is the rooftop solar system itself — engineered to match the building's actual tenant load profile, not just whatever fits. The second is a metering and billing layer (we use Solar Shadow) that tracks tenant solar consumption in real time and bills it cleanly. The third is the financial structure: PAG sells the solar electricity to its tenant at a fixed 10% discount to prevailing PG&E rates.
Three economic facts fall out of that arrangement. The tenant sees an immediate ~10% reduction on the largest non-rent line item on their P&L. PAG captures the spread between cost of solar production and the discounted sale rate — every kWh of every billing cycle, indefinitely. And neither party has to manage the operational complexity: Symmetric runs the asset.
System at a glance
- Property
- 1900 W. Winton Avenue, Hayward, CA
- Solar capacity
- 125 kW rooftop array
- Financing
- Self-financed by PAG
- Tenant pricing
- 10% discount to prevailing PG&E tariff
- Billing software
- Solar Shadow metering & settlement
- EV charging
- Added as on-site tenant amenity
- Symmetric scope
- Site assessment, design, install, metering, ongoing settlement
- Status
- Operational; replicated across PAG's expanding 8-site Bay Area portfolio
Why this worked for PAG specifically
Three things made 1900 W. Winton the right pilot for the model. The roof had structural headroom and a clean solar window. The tenant was a steady, long-tenured occupant whose load profile mapped well to a 125 kW system. And PAG had the balance sheet appetite to self-finance — preserving the full upside of the revenue spread rather than sharing it with a financier.
For property owners without the appetite to self-finance, the same structure works through PPAs, roof leases, or third-party investment partners. We model all three at the evaluation stage so the owner can pick the one that matches their cost of capital.
What it returned
The honest measurement is in three places. Monthly revenue: PAG now collects a new monthly cash flow line item from a roof that previously generated zero. Property valuation: the NOI increase (revenue from solar net of operating expense) flows directly through the building's cap rate into appraised value. For a property at a 6% cap rate, every $10,000 of annual NOI is worth roughly $167,000 in valuation. Tenant economics: the tenant now operates with materially lower utility costs, which strengthens lease renewal probability — quietly one of the most valuable outcomes for a landlord.
EV chargers were added at the same time, generating incremental revenue and positioning the property for the next decade of tenant expectations around workplace charging infrastructure.
The replication pattern
1900 W. Winton was a proof case. PAG is now extending the model across a broader Bay Area portfolio — same Monetize Rooftop structure, same Solar Shadow metering, same Symmetric end-to-end execution. The economics that worked on one building work across a portfolio with one critical advantage: each additional site amortizes shared overhead (billing, monitoring, asset management) over a larger revenue base.
That is, frankly, the entire point. The first building proves the model. The next seven turn it into an asset class.