Rooftop transition

In 2008, Warehouses de Pauw (WDP), a leading logistics real estate company based in Belgium, installed its first solar panels on the roofs of its warehouses. “The dimensions of the installations that we were putting in were rather small and did not cover the entire rooftop,” says Charlotte De Troyer, WDP’s corporate finance manager, who explains that tenants were not using as much electricity back then.

But when demand for electricity surged, fuelled in part by the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, WDP decided to change its strategy.

“Logistics operations are electrifying, but more specifically transport is electrifying,” De Troyer says. “As this transition is happening, the electricity demands will triple or quadruple in the years to come.”

To meet this demand, WDP is mounting solar panels on the entire surface of its warehouse rooftops in Romania, Belgium and the Netherlands. The installations will increase WDP’s solar production to as much as 350 MW by 2027 from 180 MW at the start of 2024.

In addition to solar panels, WDP is installing an estimated 480 charging stations for electric vehicles at its warehouses, to power trucks ferrying goods to and from its logistics centres.

This kind of infrastructure is expensive, so the European Investment Bank signed a €250 million loan with WDP in July to finance the project.

When WDP produces green energy on its roofs, it sells it to tenants. Surplus energy is sold to local utility companies and fed into the electrical grid.

“We are contributing to the electrification of the supply chain,” De Troyer says. “If they are logistics customers, the energy produced on the site is not that big, but the transport – that’s huge. They have trucks coming in and coming out, so if we can help those customers in electrifying their transport, that’s significant.”

Projects like WDP’s will play a critical role in helping Europe to slash carbon emissions and reach net zero by 2050, as it pledges to do in its European Green Deal. WDP is one of several solar installation projects that the European Investment Bank has signed recently with logistics companies.

“Clearly there is a trend,” says Matei Anghelescu, loan officer for Central and Southeast Europe at the European Investment Bank. “Logistics players realised that there was an opportunity with their relatively large rooftops, combined with the price of solar panels, which has decreased steadily over time.”

David González García, lead engineer for energy transition programmes at the European Investment Bank, agrees. “What makes it special is that you’re using land that is already in use, so you’re not occupying additional land,” he says. “You have the warehouse and you just put rooftop solar panels on it. It also has the capacity to actually help the electricity grid.”

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• Read how CTP logistics centre rooftops become solar fields in Central Europe

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It’s a win-win-win situation. The solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations fight climate change by reducing emissions. WDP tenants who opt for a green energy contract decarbonise their operations and save money on electricity. And WDP makes itself more attractive than competitors by offering affordable green energy and electric vehicle charging stations, while diversifying its operations and increasing profitability.

“Being able to produce energy locally just makes a lot of sense,” De Troyer says. “We do business with a lot of international clients who have decarbonisation targets themselves, so being able to help them by investing on our side is very important.”