Clean Energy Economy Provides Unforeseen Profits for Real Estate Giant

The clean energy economy is already working in unforeseen ways. The latest beneficiary? A Denver-based company called Prologis, the world's largest owner and manager of industrial warehouses and distribution facilities.

What does Prologis have more of than anyone else -- to offer the clean energy economy?

Here's a hint: the company has more than $40 billion of real estate assets under management representing more than 500 million square feet of space in North America, Europe and Asia.

The answer is: rooftops. Acres and acres of sun-washed rooftops. And Prologis is starting to cash in.

The company just entered into an agreement with Southern California Edison (SCE), California’s largest electric utility, to lease 607,000 square feet (ft2) of roofspace at one of ProLogis’ distribution centers in California. At a rate of US 14 cents per square foot a year, Prologis will realize a return of $85,000 from this first arrangement.

California Edison is leasing the space in order to install solar panels in response to California’s Million Solar Roofs program, and Prologis is made in the shade. It's got 180 facilities totaling 41 million square feet of space in California Edison's catchment area. That's a lot of rooftop -- if fully leased at the same rate, it's worth more than $6 million a year, every year the sun shines.

And globally, the company has ten times more rooftop space to offer. In Europe, they've already got 1MW of solar capacity installed on top of their properties. They've discovered a new revenue stream for being the sun's landlord.

Further evidence of the potential of the clean energy economy to create new value propositions. Imagine if we pursued it with moonshot zeal.


Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <p> <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <img> <h> <h1> <h2> <h3> <ul> <li> <ol> <b> <i>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Youtube and google video links are automatically converted into embedded videos.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Images can be added to this post.

More information about formatting options