Property – Retail & Commercial Property · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · Global Issue · June 2026

The cheapest kilowatt is the one a building never has to buy. Botswana has signed energy and mineral exploration deals with Oman, part of a broader push to widen the country's energy base. For owners of offices, warehouses and retail centres, the signal is not abstract: renewable supply at scale changes the arithmetic of whether a commercial site should draw all its power from the grid, or generate much of it on the roof. Energy policy and property strategy, often treated as separate conversations, are converging into one.

Botswana's sun is its most underused commercial asset. A property that pairs on-site solar with grid backup – a hybrid site – is no longer a sustainability gesture. It is a building with a lower, more predictable operating cost, which is exactly what a tenant under inflation pressure is shopping for. As the national energy base widens through deals like the Oman agreement, the case for putting generation on the building itself shifts from speculative to sensible.

Off-grid and hybrid as a leasing pitch

For a Gaborone office park or a Francistown warehouse, solar plus storage turns an unpredictable utility line into a fixed one. That stability is leasable. A landlord who can quote a tenant a lower, steadier total occupancy cost – rent plus utilities – holds an advantage over a neighbour wholly exposed to grid tariffs and the risk of interruption. In a market where tenants count every Pula of running cost, the building that controls its own power has a tangible pitch.

The advantage compounds for power-hungry uses. Cold storage, light manufacturing and data-heavy offices feel energy costs most sharply, and these are precisely the tenants for whom a hybrid building changes the economics of staying. An owner who designs for them is widening, not narrowing, the pool of businesses able to occupy the space profitably.

There is also a tenant-retention logic that owners undervalue. A business that has fitted out a hybrid building, trained its staff around reliable on-site power and built its operating model on a predictable energy cost has a strong reason to renew rather than move. The building's power infrastructure becomes a form of stickiness, lengthening leases and lowering the churn that erodes a rent roll. In a competitive Gaborone office market, that retention is worth as much as the energy saving itself.

A building that makes its own power sells certainty, not just space.

Renewable deals lower the entry cost

As national renewable capacity grows through deals like the Oman agreement, the equipment, financing and technical skills behind on-site generation become more available and less of a frontier bet. What once looked like an expensive experiment for a single building starts to read as standard practice, with a supply chain, installers and a lender's comfort behind it. The first solar building in a town carries the risk; the tenth benefits from a market that has already formed.

Financing follows familiarity. As more commercial solar installations operate and prove their savings, lenders gain the data to underwrite them, and the cost of capital for the next project falls. For Botswana owners, that means the window in which on-site generation is both a differentiator and an affordable one is opening now, before it becomes a baseline expectation that every building must meet just to compete.

When renewables become national policy, on-site solar becomes ordinary infrastructure.

The valuation angle

A commercial property with lower running costs and resilience against supply interruption carries a stronger income profile, and income is what valuation rests on. For owners weighing a refurbishment or a new build in Gaborone, Palapye or Maun, designing in hybrid power is a way to protect the asset's value against an energy market that is still tightening. A building that can keep operating through a grid failure is simply worth more than one that goes dark with it.

Resilience priced into a building today is value defended tomorrow.

For Botswana's commercial property sector, the Oman deals are less about diplomacy than about a shift in what a competitive building looks like. The sites that win tenants through the rest of this decade will increasingly be those that treat power as something to be generated and controlled on the premises, not merely bought from a grid under strain. The roof, in other words, is becoming part of the rent roll – and the owners who recognise that early will set the standard others have to match.

Sources: Reuters