.webp)
Prologis was blocked from DER programs because tenants held the meters, so they flipped accounts and rewrote leases to unlock new revenue
Prologis owns roughly 3,800 logistics buildings in the US, and across hundreds of them, the local utility had no idea the company existed. Because tenants held the utility accounts and paid the bills, the real estate owner was invisible to the people running the grid. That invisibility quietly blocked Prologis from utility programs now generating new revenue.
Speaking at NexusCon 2025, Alex Perlman, who has focused on energy solutions at Prologis for six and a half years, traced the fix to a single operational change. About two years ago, the company started moving utility accounts into its own name. "Most of the utilities where we have hundreds of buildings had no idea who we were," Perlman said. "We're not on the utility account. We don't pay the utility bill." Once Prologis flipped the accounts, "they took notice." Utilities began focusing on load growth and distributed energy rather than treating each building as an isolated tenant meter.
That access reframed energy as what Perlman calls "another tenant opportunity," a new occupier type that leases land near grid nodes rather than space inside the warehouse. In Oregon and Washington, Portland General and Puget Sound are now conducting active procurements for 1-5 MW batteries that occupy less than a quarter acre beside detention ponds and are electrically disconnected from the buildings on the same parcel. Demand from utility companies already outstrips the number of sites Prologis can offer.
Perlman's takeaway for other owners is about the meter. As long as a tenant holds the utility account, the owner isn't the party the utility deals with, so the DER revenue stays out of reach no matter how good the technology is. Prologis is now working to make that standard in day-to-day leasing, adapting the ULI green lease into an addendum so energy rights travel with every deal rather than surfacing as one-off exceptions.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
Prologis owns roughly 3,800 logistics buildings in the US, and across hundreds of them, the local utility had no idea the company existed. Because tenants held the utility accounts and paid the bills, the real estate owner was invisible to the people running the grid. That invisibility quietly blocked Prologis from utility programs now generating new revenue.
Speaking at NexusCon 2025, Alex Perlman, who has focused on energy solutions at Prologis for six and a half years, traced the fix to a single operational change. About two years ago, the company started moving utility accounts into its own name. "Most of the utilities where we have hundreds of buildings had no idea who we were," Perlman said. "We're not on the utility account. We don't pay the utility bill." Once Prologis flipped the accounts, "they took notice." Utilities began focusing on load growth and distributed energy rather than treating each building as an isolated tenant meter.
That access reframed energy as what Perlman calls "another tenant opportunity," a new occupier type that leases land near grid nodes rather than space inside the warehouse. In Oregon and Washington, Portland General and Puget Sound are now conducting active procurements for 1-5 MW batteries that occupy less than a quarter acre beside detention ponds and are electrically disconnected from the buildings on the same parcel. Demand from utility companies already outstrips the number of sites Prologis can offer.
Perlman's takeaway for other owners is about the meter. As long as a tenant holds the utility account, the owner isn't the party the utility deals with, so the DER revenue stays out of reach no matter how good the technology is. Prologis is now working to make that standard in day-to-day leasing, adapting the ULI green lease into an addendum so energy rights travel with every deal rather than surfacing as one-off exceptions.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
This is a great piece!
I agree.