Solar for Flats in UP: Virtual Net Metering for Housing Societies
You don't need your own rooftop or balcony access. Here's how a group housing society can install one shared solar plant and credit the generation across individual flat owners.
Short answer: most of our guides assume a single-family home with its own roof and its own electricity connection. Multi-storey apartment buildings work differently, but they're not excluded from rooftop solar. Two regulatory pieces make it possible: UPERC's 13th Amendment to the Electricity Supply Code (2018), which lets individual flats move off a single shared connection, and Virtual Net Metering, which lets a Resident Welfare Association install one common plant and credit the generation across participating flats' own bills.
The old problem: single-point connections
Historically, multi-storey housing societies in UP had a single electricity connection for the whole building, with the developer or RWA acting as a "deemed franchisee": responsible for internal wiring, sub-metering, billing and collection from individual flat owners. That structure made individual, flat-level solar credit essentially impossible, there was no way for a DISCOM to attribute generation to one specific flat's usage when the whole building shared one meter.
What the 13th Amendment changed
UPERC's 13th Amendment to the Electricity Supply Code, 2005, issued in August 2018, addressed this directly: it enables the conversion of these single-point connections into multi-point connections, with individual flats billed directly by the DISCOM rather than through the RWA. It also envisages dual-register energy meters, which is the metering infrastructure that makes it technically possible to track and apportion shared generation, exactly what's needed for a common rooftop solar plant to credit multiple individual accounts.
How Virtual Net Metering (VNM) actually works
With individual flat-level connections in place, the RWA (or a designated lead consumer) installs a single rooftop solar plant on common building infrastructure, the terrace, for instance, rather than requiring each flat to have its own separate installation. The plant's generation is exported to the grid and virtually apportioned across participating flats' individual bills, based on an agreed allocation method, commonly by flat square footage or ownership share. Each flat owner sees the benefit as a credit on their own electricity bill, without needing any panels of their own or access to shared roof space beyond what the RWA arranges collectively.
Why this matters for eastern UP's growing apartment market
As multi-storey housing expands in and around Gorakhpur, this is a genuinely underused option: apartment dwellers often assume solar simply isn't available to them because they don't have an individual roof, when in reality the constraint is organisational (getting the RWA to coordinate an application) rather than technical or regulatory. For an RWA, a common plant sized to the building's shared infrastructure and common-area load, plus VNM apportionment to residents, is a meaningfully different project from a single-family residential job, larger scale, different stakeholder coordination, and no residential PM Surya Ghar subsidy eligibility for the shared plant itself, but often a strong ROI given collective purchasing scale.
RWA member or committee looking into this?
We're happy to walk your committee through what a shared plant and apportionment would look like for your specific society.
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