In decades past, a warehouse was simply a large building used for storing goods and materials you didn’t need to access anytime soon. The best place to build these facilities was in rural areas far from cities, where land was cheap and back roads were good enough to support the occasional truck making a delivery.But today, those facilities are more often known as distribution centers, and they’re located near major highways close to the urban areas in order to support high inventory turnover and enable lightning-fast deliveries to homes and stores. And one more thing has changed: They increasingly need access to large amounts of electrical power to run the automated systems and robotics inside that allow them to operate at such high speeds.In fact, commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield has pointed to the cost and availability of electrical power as a growing concern for companies seeking sites for modern DCs. Meanwhile, logistics real estate giant Prologis recently boasted of building a DC in the Netherlands that was designed to solve that problem by making and storing much of its own energy on site through a large-scale solar network. In Prologis’ words, “Across the world, companies are running into the same problem: They want to grow—but the power grid can’t keep up. From the U.S. to Europe to Asia, grid congestion has become a barrier to progress, slowing projects that could bring jobs, innovation, and investment to local communities.”However, even a widescale shift to solar won’t provide nearly…
