"My partner and I own a small apartment in Amsterdam. Eager to take action on climate change, we installed solar panels on our roof in 2019 when we still lived there. For a year and a half, we enjoyed the benefits—lower energy bills and a sense of contributing to a more sustainable world.

However, when I moved to the U.S. for business school, our investment in solar suddenly turned into a loss, because as a landlord (instead of a resident-owner), I was no longer seeing any returns from the panels because the tenants now paid the energy bill. I tried to offer tenants a fixed rate, but without proof of savings or visibility into their own energy usage, no one was willing to pay for something they couldn’t see or trust.

The solar investment, which had once empowered us as homeowners, became a terrible financial decision as a landlord. This experience opened my eyes to a much larger issue: the split incentive problem that discourages landlords from making energy-efficient upgrades because tenants reap all the benefits.