We recently received the following question related to this credit.

"We are a city owned convention center going for LEED EB O&M. Another city department, (Department of Water & Power) has photo voltaic cells located on the roof of our building which generates power. The convention center does not use the power that the photo voltaic cells produce, but the power does go back to
the grid. Can we still get credits for onsite renewable energy even though we
don't use the energy our building produces?"

This scenario should work as long as three conditions are met. The first is that the system needs to be sub-metered, second the RECs associated with the PV need to be retained by the city, and the third is that the city must somehow assign the associated RECs to the project building, similar to how you can use a corporate pool of RECs (see off-site renewable energy) to earn the credit at a specific building, but have to make sure you're not also using those RECs for other claims in other buildings.