Ask an energy operator where the next wave of clean power will come from, and few will point at the roof scattered around them. Yet that roof, and millions like it, may be the most overlooked asset in the global energy sector. Most of them generate nothing because they sit idle as the process to identify them is long and fragmented.
Planno, a Dubai-based company, wants to change that by modernizing how developers find rooftops worth building on: identifying commercial buildings suited to solar, working out who owns them, and handing that intelligence to the people who build. Not just the large developers.
The company just raised a strategic investment from Incubayt Investments, the firm run by Sami Khoreibi. Someone who knows is dedicated to growing sustainability projects, having built the Arab world’s first utility-scale solar developer, grown it past $750M in revenue across nine countries, and sold it to a UK pension fund.
But for Khoreibi, the appeal wasn’t the panels. It was the intelligence.
“The solar industry has never been short of capital or sunlight,” he said. “What it lacked was intelligence. Where to build, and who owns the roof. In a data-driven economy, that insight is as valuable as the projects themselves. Planno is exactly that.”
Everyone Wants More Power. It’s Getting Expensive
The timing has a lot to do with electricity itself getting more expensive and more contested. AI data centres are coming online at a pace that’s straining grids, and every geopolitical shock ripples through energy markets, even in countries that pump their own oil.
That last point is one Planno’s founder feels strongly about.
“Oil and gas are global commodities. Even countries that produce them feel every shock, because the price is set somewhere else,” said Daniel Domingues, the company’s CEO. His argument for rooftops is basically an argument about control. A business can’t set the price of gas. It can, however, decide to make its own power. “Rooftop solar is one of the few cost-control levers a commercial operator actually owns.”
An enormous amount of nothing
Across almost every market Planno examines, the rooftops are just… empty.
Look at the Gulf: according to Planno’s own analysis, nearly 99% of the GCC’s 160,000 commercial rooftops have no solar at all. Dubai is one of the busier markets in the Middle East and grew 39% between late 2023 and early 2025, yet only 5.6% of its 15,283 commercial and industrial rooftops carry panels today. That’s 4 GW of unbuilt capacity in a single city that gets sun nearly every day of the year.
The pattern is not isolated to that region. In New York City, Planno has mapped 64,000 rooftops and 11 GW of untapped potential. Even in Europe, where solar is comparatively mature, the empty space is staggering. A January 2026 study from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre found that the roofs of Europe’s 271 million buildings could hold around 2.3 terawatts of solar and cover close to 40% of the continent’s electricity in a net-zero future. Today only about 10% of those roofs have anything on them.
Democratizing solar intelligence
Since Incubayt’s investment, the company has pushed out of the Gulf into the wider Middle East, then Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America, partnering with regional installers to global energy operators.
“We want every solar developer in every market, not just the largest ones, to have proper data to work with,” Domingues said. “Incubayt’s early backing gave us the foundation to build that. We’re now applying the same playbook country by country.”
The vision underneath all of it is almost mundane, which may be why it’s been ignored for so long. The world already has the sunlight. It already has the capital. What it’s been missing is a map of where the empty roofs are — and the intelligence capable of mapping it.
Article’s featured photo of Daniel Domingues, CEO of Planno
