Solar Energy for Shopping Centres and Large Retail Stores in Colombia: Load Profile, Meters and Tenants

Retail brings together much of what commercial solar needs: consumption concentrated in daylight hours, large roofs and car parks, and a high tariff. According to UPME, with data from the 2025 Colombian Energy Balance (year 2024), the tertiary sector —commerce and the public sector— uses 22% of the electricity of the National Interconnected System, and 91% of that consumption comes from commercial establishments. Unlike industry, where electricity is a small part of the energy used, in the tertiary sector it is 74.8% of everything the sector consumes, so a solar plant acts on most of its energy bill.

There are two differences with a factory, and both change the project. The first is good news: a shopping centre opens every day, Sundays and public holidays included, so it has almost no days when solar production goes unused. The second complicates things: the energy is not consumed by a single user. The common areas have their meter, each shop has its own and the anchor supermarket usually has another; the roof belongs to the owners' association or to the centre's owner, not to whoever consumes the most.

That is why most of the Colombian projects that have been made public feed the common areas. Two examples: Parque Caracolí, in Floridablanca, announced 312.8 kWp which, according to the press report, will generate more than 10% of the energy of its common areas; and Parque Alegra, in the Barranquilla metropolitan area, announced 1,900 kWp which, according to the same source, replace 34% of its grid consumption; with any usual ratio between panels and inverters, that plant exceeds the megawatt of inverter capacity that caps a small-scale self-generator.

The daily curve of the common areas follows the centre's opening hours. Large centres open between 9:00 and 11:00 and close between 20:00 and 22:00, with somewhat shorter hours on Sundays and public holidays, but they open every day. Before opening, air conditioning, lighting and cleaning start up; after closing, a base load of security, systems, pumping and refrigeration remains.

The dominant use is air conditioning. According to UPME's PAI PROURE 2026-2035, electricity use in retail breaks down as follows: air conditioning and climate control, 43.4%; other uses, such as office equipment, 19.1%; lighting, 18.2%; refrigeration, 7.8%; and motive power, 4.3%. And air conditioning depends on the city: in the ERA5 reanalysis series used by PVGIS —averages over a grid cell, not weather-station measurements— the average temperature between 9:00 and 22:00 is 14.5 °C in Bogotá, 19.0 °C in Medellín, 22.1 °C in Cali and 28.3 °C in Barranquilla. The baseline set by the Ministry of Housing for shopping centres over 5,000 m² reflects that difference: 132.0 kWh per m² per year in a cold climate, such as Bogotá's; 242.1 in a temperate one and 265.8 in a hot, humid one (Resolución 0194 de 2025, with 2020 data; it includes the energy that would be needed for thermal comfort and is a reference for new buildings, not measured consumption).

In hot climates, air conditioning has an advantage that this article's model does not count: its demand rises with the midday heat, exactly when the solar plant produces most. In Bogotá, with an average temperature of 14.5 °C during trading hours, that overlap matters much less.

A supermarket or hypermarket leaves a different footprint: refrigerated display cases, cold rooms and freezers run day and night. In the United States, refrigeration is 48% of the electricity used by food sales buildings (our own calculation from table E5 of the EIA's 2018 CBECS survey; there is no equivalent figure for Colombia). That continuous load means solar covers a smaller share of its consumption, but it practically does not export.

As in any business, the starting point is the twelve-month hourly load curve of each billing point to be supplied, requested from the retailer or the network operator, not the monthly consumption on the bill.

To give orders of magnitude, three profiles were modelled with PVGIS hourly production for Bogotá, Medellín, Cali and Barranquilla, using 19 years of data (2005-2023), and compared with the two-shift factory from the manufacturing article. It is our own calculation, not a measurement of real centres; the assumptions are further down, with the example. The range for each case runs from the lowest to the highest value across the four cities; for coverage, from Cali, the one with the least sun, to Barranquilla, the one with the most.

The solar plant was sized with the same criterion as for factories: 1.25 kWp for each kW of load during operating hours, the load cap from the roof-area article.

With the same relative size and almost the same annual consumption per kW of load, the shopping centre covers slightly more than the two-shift factory and exports a third to a quarter as much, because it has no empty Sundays; if the factory also closed on public holidays, the gap would be wider. The headroom shows when the plant grows: exporting at most 5% of what it produces, the shopping centre can take 1.50 to 1.65 kWp per kW of load, and the supermarket or the store without refrigeration, 1.70 to 1.95. With 2 kWp per kW, the supermarket would cover 33% to 39% and export 6% to 11%.

The base load also counts. If the common areas drop to 15% outside opening hours instead of 30%, solar covers 28% to 34% and exports 5% to 6%; if they stay at 45%, it covers 24% to 30% and exports at most 0.5%. In the supermarket, with refrigeration between 35% and 65% of the daytime load, it practically does not export in any case.

In the shopping-centre profile, 99.6% to 100% of what is exported leaves before 9:00, depending on the city. Between sunrise and opening time the plant produces 12% to 13% of its daily energy, and at that hour only the base load uses it. From 9:00 onwards, the common-area load exceeds production in almost every hour of the year.

That gives a simple lever: bring forward into the first hour of sun the consumption that can be moved, without adding consumption. If the full-load schedule moves from 9:00-22:00 to 8:00-21:00 —for example, pre-cooling, pumping to tanks or cleaning before opening, and switching off an hour earlier— with the same daily consumption the model's exports fall from 1.7%-2.4% to under 0.1%, and coverage rises to 27%-33%; with 1.5 kWp per kW, exports stay between 0.4% and 1.1% and coverage reaches 32%-39%. What does not pay is switching on an hour earlier without switching off earlier: exports stop, but more energy is bought from the grid than is gained.

It is a small calculation, but it shapes the design: in a shopping centre almost all solar energy is self-consumed, and the load barely limits size —up to 1.50-1.65 kWp per kW, exports stay below 5%— so roof and car-park area, budget or the 1 MW limit usually take over first.

The example is modelled, not a real project. The common areas of a fictitious shopping centre in Barranquilla, with 600 kW of load from 9:00 to 22:00 and 180 kW outside those hours, consume about 3,572 MWh a year (about 298 MWh a month). With 750 kWp, PVGIS gives about 1,179 MWh of production a year: about 1,150 MWh is self-consumed, 32.2% of consumption, and about 28.6 MWh is exported, 2.4% of production, practically all of it before 9:00. The plant's maximum hourly output, about 614 kW, only just exceeds the 600 kW load: it happens a few hours a year and leaves less than 0.01 MWh of exports after 9:00.

Three practical consequences. With 600 kW of demand and 298 MWh a month on a single billing point, the common areas meet the threshold to contract as an unregulated user (0.1 MW or 55 MWh a month, under Resolución CREG 131 de 1998); the resolution does not allow the consumption of several installations to be added together to reach it. If it contracts as an unregulated user, the value of the avoided kWh comes from its contract, as explained in the article on the company bill. The 28.6 MWh of surplus belongs to a plant of more than 100 kW, with the charges per swapped kWh explained in the article on selling surplus, or it can be avoided by bringing the load schedule forward by an hour. And 750 kWp on a flat roof needs, with the criteria from the roof-area article, between about 3,750 and 3,900 m² of array field at 10° (about 4,800 with NREL's 70%), before subtracting air-conditioning units, skylights, edges and walkways; if the roof is not enough, the car park is the reserve.

A self-generation plant offsets the consumption of the billing point (frontera comercial) it connects to, and a shopping centre has many. The usual choice is the common-area one, because the management pays it and it sits under the roof. What cannot be done, as CREG reads it, is to share that energy out to the shops afterwards by charging for it through an internal sub-meter.

The starting point is Ley 142 de 1994, which defines a user as whoever benefits from the service, either as owner of the property or as direct recipient (art. 14.33): the tenant is a user even if they do not own the shop. Resolución CREG 108 de 1997 requires every user to have individual metering of their consumption and, when a property has a single meter used by several people, treats it as a single subscriber and orders the cost of the service to be divided into shares; any user can ask for their own meter by paying for the equipment (art. 24).

CREG has applied those rules to very similar cases. In Concepto 3740 de 2021, about an anchor store with a single meter in the name of the centre's owner, which was to be split among several tenants, it said that metering consumption and charging for energy is an activity proper to the companies that provide the service, and that whoever buys energy to sell it to end users would be retailing. In Concepto 5612 de 2026, about a logistics park with tenants and a solar plant, it went further: settling consumption with third parties through sub-metering, even if it is called reimbursement, would amount to billing and retailing, and the plant's energy credits are settled only on the bill of the billing point where it is registered, without passing to sub-meters. The Superintendency of Residential Public Utilities, which supervises the sector, has said that a horizontal-property scheme cannot, by itself, carry out retailing, although in the same opinion it considered that supplying energy through the common areas' sockets is not retailing, because it does not go through the wholesale market (Concepto SSPD 602 de 2023). The most direct argument against re-billing is CREG's on billing: metering and settling consumption with third parties.

Concepto 5612 leaves one door open: sharing costs and benefits between landlord and tenant is governed by private law, provided it does not take the form or nature of a charge for energy consumption. A lease can reflect that the common areas are cheaper to run; it cannot become an energy bill per metered kWh. CREG and Superintendency opinions are not binding, but they are the regulator's and the supervisor's reading, and a proposal promising to cut the shops' electricity bills through sub-meters is promising something it does not control.

The regulated route for sharing a plant among different users is collective self-generation (autogeneración colectiva, AGRC), one of the energy-community schemes regulated by Decreto 2236 de 2023 and regulated by Resolución CREG 101 072 de 2025, amended by Resolución CREG 101 087 of the same year. CREG defines it as energy production by the energy community mainly to meet its own demand, and calls the group a collective self-generator (autogenerador colectivo, AC).

It fits a shopping centre on one condition: each member has to be a billing point of its own. The resolution requires the AC to consist of connection points that inject, that consume or that do both (art. 6), and CREG has clarified that each member must have its own meter and its own billing point, because the scheme does not allow several users to be grouped behind one meter (Concepto CREG 3978 de 2026). If the shops already have a meter and a contract with the retailer, the rooftop plant can be the injecting point, and the common areas and the shops that join, the consuming points. If the shops hang off a general meter, they first need billing points of their own. The AC must also be entered in the Ministry of Mines and Energy's Energy Communities Register and file a formation agreement with the sharing percentages (art. 9).

The sharing is not physical but on the bill. The energy the plant delivers is divided among the members using a surplus distribution percentage (porcentaje de distribución de excedentes, PDE) that they agree and that their representative reports to the retailer; changes are notified 10 working days before the billing cycle, unless another period is agreed, and if none is declared, the retailer shares it in proportion to the number of billing points (arts. 9 and 19). All the billing points must be with the same retailer, although any member can leave and return to the retailer of their choice (art. 10), and every member, including shops that only consume, must have the metering required of a self-generator that delivers surplus (art. 8, literal g), with a bidirectional meter where there is both delivery and import (art. 42). Each member's bill must show the AC's code, the number of members, its PDE and the energy allocated (art. 22).

The surplus regime depends on size. Up to 1 MW in aggregate and with non-conventional renewable sources, the rules for self-generators of up to 100 kW apply if the capacity per user —total capacity divided by the number of billing points— does not exceed 100 kW and no member has a PDE of 10% or more; otherwise, those for self-generators of 100 kW to 1 MW (art. 20, as worded by Resolución CREG 101 087 de 2025). Above 1 MW and below 5 MW, the limit set by Resolución UPME 501 de 2024, the surplus is traded under the rules of Resoluciones CREG 024 de 2015 and 096 de 2019. All members must be in the same retail market and the same local distribution system, which is normal within a single building. The difference between the first two cases matters: in the first, each shared kWh pays only the retail cost; in the second it also pays transmission, distribution, losses and constraints, so the shop receives little more than the value of the energy itself (Concepto CREG 8042 de 2026). And what is shared is what the plant's billing point delivers to the grid: if the plant sits behind the common-area meter, the shops only receive its surplus, which in this article's model is less than 2.5% of production. To share all the production, the plant has to be a billing point of its own that only injects.

Two caveats. The scheme is recent and there is no CREG opinion on a shopping centre specifically; and its development is still open: on 9 November 2026 CREG published the draft Proyecto de Resolución CREG 701 160, open for comments until 14 November, which would give ACs in the second case and self-generators of 0.1 to 1 MW the same energy credit small ones have today —paying only the retail cost per swapped kWh— for 24 months if they start operating within six months of its issue (12 months if they start within 36), in exchange for selling their surplus to the retailer integrated with the network operator. For ACs served by that retailer, it would also let consuming-only shops keep their current metering until advanced metering reaches them and would not require billing cycles to be unified. It is a draft, not a rule: check how it ends up before closing the financial model. How collective self-generation compares with the other schemes is covered in the article on self-generation and distributed generation.

There are two kinds of shopping centre, and the decision is taken in different places. In centres with a single owner who leases the shops, the owner decides, and the relationship with tenants is governed by the leases within the limits of the previous section.

In centres under horizontal property, Ley 675 de 2001 applies, and it expressly defines buildings or complexes for commercial use (art. 3). The rules are those of the article on residential complexes, with some nuances. The roofs or slabs that serve as roofing are essential common assets (art. 3), and a solar plant is almost always an expense other than the necessary ones, which requires 70% of the complex's ownership coefficients (art. 46, numeral 3); the same majority applies if it is paid for with an extraordinary levy whose total amount, over the budget year, exceeds four times the monthly necessary expenses (numeral 2). Those decisions cannot be taken in remote meetings or at a second call, unless the required majority is reached there (paragraph of art. 46).

What is specific to commercial use is how costs are shared. In commercial and mixed-use complexes, coefficients are calculated by weighting private area against each unit's use and characteristics (art. 27), and the regulations must divide into sectors the common assets and services that are not for general use, which are paid through contribution modules (art. 31). If the centre has sectors —an office tower, a block of shops, a car park— it is worth defining which sector the billing point fed by the plant belongs to, who pays for the investment and who receives the savings, and putting it in writing before the assembly. If the roof is assigned to the exclusive use of one unit, as article 22 allows, an agreement with that owner comes first.

Stand-alone large stores —a hypermarket, a home-goods store or a warehouse store in its own building— are the simplest case: one owner, one billing point and one roof, like any other company.

When the roof is not enough, the open-air car park is the next surface. A solar canopy shades the vehicles and adds capacity, but it is a new structure, with more steel and foundations than a roof mounting, and it should be priced separately.

RETIE has no chapter for canopies. Its requirements for photovoltaic panels apply to panels either on their own or integrated into structures (article 3.17.23 of Book 3, in the version of Resolución 40284 de 2026): the support structure must account for the panels' weight, dimensions and thermal expansion, the design must define access for assembly, inspection and maintenance that the inspection body can verify (literal o), and installations on roofs or in open fields must have a lightning-risk assessment (literal p). The same regulation includes shopping centres and supermarkets built before it came into force among the installations that must have a lightning-risk assessment (numeral 3.13.1.1).

The structural side has no written answer. Ley 400 de 1997 and the NSR-10 building code apply to buildings, which the law defines as constructions whose primary use is human habitation or occupancy, and exclude special structures; where a canopy falls is a decision for the structural engineer and, if a permit is needed, the planning office (curaduría). The prudent course is to ask for the proposal to include a signed structural design, with wind loads, and to state whether the works need a permit.

On chargers, there is no national obligation to install them: Ley 1964 de 2019 requires commercial establishments with car parks open to the public, in special-category, first-category and second-category municipalities, to reserve at least 2% of spaces for preferential use by electric vehicles (art. 7), and requires commercial buildings whose permit was filed after the law to have a supply connection for charging (art. 10). Bogotá's land-use plan goes further: article 213 of Decreto 555 de 2021 requires existing commercial and service uses to have charging pre-installations in 3% of parking spaces after five years and 6% after ten, and more in new buildings. It is worth confirming with the city's Mobility Department how those periods are counted. If the centre plans to install chargers, add them to the load profile before sizing.

Commercial users pay the solidarity levy of 20% of the cost of the service (paragraph 2 of article 211 of the Tax Code, as worded by Ley 1430 de 2010), and retail activities are not among the exempt codes of Decreto 2860 de 2013. Each kWh the plant avoids buying also avoids that surcharge, so it is worth more than for an exempt industrial user with the same tariff. How to calculate the effective tariff, and what happens if the common areas contract as an unregulated user, is in the article on the company bill.

Continuity works as in a factory: a grid-connected solar plant does not keep the centre open during an outage, because RETIE requires the inverter to stop energising the grid within 2.0 s of losing grid voltage. If the centre has a backup generator, the design must define how the two systems coexist. The detail is in the article on solar energy for factories, and when batteries are justified, in the guide on panels with batteries.

With this data, a proposal for a shopping centre or a large store comes from calculations rather than assumptions, and it should say which billing point the plant connects to, what share of that billing point's consumption it covers month by month, how much it exports and at what time, and, if it proposes collective self-generation, with which members and which percentages.

If you want your centre assessed against these criteria, you can request a business quote from Nodosolar. Whoever prepares it, it pays to arrive with this: