Data Doesn’t Lie: Solar Is Profitable for CRE Owners

Kevin Berkemeyer: That problem was, “How do we easily and scalably evaluate buildings and figure out what a customer should do on a given building?” And we were primarily focused on commercial and industrial buildings. That question always required data collection, so understanding a customer’s load data, and a customer’s bill data, and how old their roof is, and all these different data points that would then to go into a proposal and then a financial model, and then ultimately getting to that answer. And that would take months to do, and certainly not scalable.

Sean Swentek: Hey, everyone! Welcome back to The Future of CRE Sustainability. I’m your host, Sean Swentek. I am joined today by a very special guest, Kevin Berkemeyer, Co-founder and CEO at Station A. Welcome, Kevin – thank you for joining me today.

Kevin Berkemeyer: Thanks, Sean. Good to see you.

Sean Swentek: Likewise. Let’s start at the beginning. Why was Station A created? What was the pain you saw in the market that you thought you had an idea on how you could relieve it?

Kevin Berkemeyer: Yeah, we’re kind of an interesting history because we actually started inside of NRG. We were an innovation team, and then we turned into a software team and analytics team. And we largely made that transition because we kept running into the same challenge and problem working with different business units inside of NRG. And that problem was, “How do we easily and scalably evaluate buildings and figure out what a customer should do on a given building?” And we were primarily focused on commercial and industrial buildings. That question always required data collection, so understanding a customer’s load data, and a customer’s bill data, and how old their roof is, and all these different data points that would then to go into a proposal and then a financial model, and then ultimately getting to that answer. And that would take months to do, and certainly not scalable.

I teamed up with one of our co-founders, Manos Saratsis, who has a background in building science and modeling buildings at scale. And I have a background and expertise in product development. And we teamed up in solar product development specifically. And we teamed up to basically fill in all those data gaps upfront, where all we would need is an address. And so we could go from an address to a recommendation instantly. And so we would model the load and predict that, model the bill and predict that, automatically size a solar system, incorporate local incentives and policies to then get to a recommendation again with just an address. That started out in like, one single territory and in southern California. And then that’s, and then we scale that across the U.S. with help from another co-founder, Jeremy Lucas, who’s our head of engineering.

And then we spun out of NRG in 2018 with that technology in hand, really to serve the market more broadly at scale. And so the problem, the original problem that we were solving was like, “Okay, how do we evaluate buildings? Like, what do we do on our building? And if I have 1000 buildings, what do I do on a thousand buildings and how do I prioritize those?” And so our initial application of that was actually to sell that as a lead gen solution to developers and EPCs in the market. And so they were using that technology to find good project sites.

And then an interesting thing happened. About three years ago, we started inbounding the building owners themselves, and they were using our data, but instead of evaluating like what markets to generate leads, they were using the data to actually evaluate their own buildings and prioritize their buildings to then take them to market for solar projects, storage projects, and whatever. And then that kind of naturally evolved to them asking, “Hey, could you refer us to somebody who could do our projects?” And we responded with like, “You know, we could do, like we could take it one step further. We could actually collect a little bit more data about your sites, about your buildings, and then market your projects to this really big provider network that we built up, that’s now over 1000 providers and levelize those bids and enable like a quick and easy comparison.”

So it’s… the problem that we started solving was an evaluation of buildings and portfolio analysis, what to do, where to do it, why, and the problem that we’re solving now is actually then to take that next step towards a transaction. Who should I work with? How do I compare different bids? How do I eliminate surprises downstream? How do I get the best price and the best fit provider to actually execute my project? All that is kind of all along that same spirit of like, enabling more projects, enabling scale, driving transaction costs down, getting more clean energy out there.

Sean Swentek: I love it. It’s like property owners and operators… it’s one thing they have to make the decision whether they even want to invest in these renewable solutions. And then you guys saw that there was so much to do, even after they get to a “yes” there, between that and actually having an operational unit. And you wanted to come to market to just narrow that and make it a lot easier for them to go from a “yes” decision to an operational unit.

Kevin Berkemeyer: Exactly. So it’s like… everybody was like, “Oh, maybe I have a concept of a plan or whatever,” and we were effectively, or we are effectively able to make that like a concrete plan. So to go from thousands of buildings and quickly distilling that to, “Hey, these are the top 20 where you would all receive sub-four year paybacks greater than 20% IRRs. And here’s the next batch. And here’s the next batch. And the next batch. Here are the ones that you actually shouldn’t do anything on.”

And by the way, these are dynamic, right? The answers to those questions around, like, “What should I do? Where should I do it?” Those change regularly because incentives change, policies change. As we’ve seen this past year, electricity prices change in an insane way. So these aren’t just like static calcs, right? And so it requires, I think, a more software-driven approach where you can really leverage technology to scale that analysis and to maintain that dynamic view into the outputs.

Sean Swentek: Yeah, that’s incredible. You made me think of that Morgan Stanley report you’ve probably seen where they did analysis of all the rooftops in the U.S., and they’re like, most of these would be in the money within five years for these large REITs with these industrial centers and these other big rooftops, with all the incentives that have come out of the IRA. It’s like, they just got to make a call on it.

Kevin Berkemeyer: Yeah. And they may have actually been using our data for that because, you know, it’s interesting… we, so we’ve now modeled, you know, every building in the United States. And so when I say model, what does that mean? It means that we’ve, you know, identified their… the 3D size and shape of that building, modeled the load, what we think their load is based on what’s going on in that building, model the bill based on which tariff or cost of electricity we think they would have for that building. We automatically size a solar system. We incorporate incentives, especially all the new ones out of the IRA with different ITC adders and things like that. Local incentives, too, which are obviously important, especially like rec pricing and things like that.

So all that goes into our calcs, and what we’ve estimated is that there’s a, you know, there’s about a million buildings in the United States that could achieve economically viable solar. So it’s greater than an 8% IRR. That’s wild. You only see 5% of the market being tapped. So it’s like, what’s up? Like, what’s wrong with that? And I think what’s wrong with that is that it’s too hard to figure. The status quo is terrible. It’s too hard to figure out what somebody should do. It’s too hard to figure out who they should work with. We run into so many customers that have bad experiences with change orders, with surprises downstream, underperforming projects.

And so what we aim to do is really to take that 5% to 100% and unlock scale in that market by again leveraging technology, a better process, automating workflows, all that good stuff to really make this like a pleasant experience that somebody not only does once, but they want to do it again and again.

Sean Swentek: And by the way, getting that 100% gets us a lot closer to saving the planet, too.

Kevin Berkemeyer: Yeah, these are good business decisions fundamentally, right? So it’s… if you don’t care about saving the planet and you care about saving money, like we can help you with that, too. You know, in many respects these are like no-brainer business decisions and that’s like, I think a really exciting opportunity in addition to saving the planet.

Sean Swentek: Yeah, no, you find yourself in a great spot. How is technology and things like AI and all the other things that you put in place revolutionizing the way that these owner-operators are approaching clean energy projects?

Kevin Berkemeyer: I mean, there’s so many ways that we can leverage technology to improve the process to buying clean energy. There’s so much room for improvement purely based on the fact that the current process is actually quite terrible. The status quo process is quite… it’s manual, it’s iterative, you don’t know who to work with. It’s super hard to compare proposals. They all have different assumptions and contingencies. You’re exchanging Excel files and plan sets and as-builts and emailing, tracking down data, all that stuff. So at our core, what we’ve been doing is building software that automates that process. I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily a sexy problem, but it’s a necessary problem that has to be solved.

Now in addition to that, I think the more exciting use of technology would be in that AI bucket that we’re using to accelerate the evaluation of buildings as well as to accelerate the comparison of different proposals. And there’s really three ways that we’re leveraging the more advanced elements of technology. So one is through image processing to just automatically detect obstruction on rooftop, automatically detect parking lots on a parcel, detect other characteristics of a site, that then are inputs into our… factored into our automatic sizing of a solar system or a storage system for that given site. So that’s stuff that is and has been around. Meta uses it. They’ve open-sourced an algorithm around this. Their purposes are to identify your face in photos. Our purpose is to identify skylights and HVAC units so we can then size a solar system. So anyway, that’s one example.

The second example would be with LLMs, so large language models. And that’s what you see with ChatGPT, and some of that stuff is where we can take PDF proposals from providers and we can automatically just pull out data points from those proposals and then input that into effectively like our calcs, to then compare proposals on an apples-to-apples basis. So what that does is that makes providers’ lives easier because they can follow the same thing that they’ve been doing from a proposal standpoint. It also makes the customer’s life easier because then they can see the outputs on a levelized playing field more efficiently.

And then the last is, which I’m particularly excited about is we’re getting tons and tons of market data coming out of our marketplace now. We’re starting to leverage that market data interesting ways. And so that market data is like pricing data, it’s provider profile data and information, so track record, change orders, where they have licenses, where they don’t. And we are leveraging that specific data to basically create a better picture and to learn from around where certain projects are better than others or more likely to proceed than others. So anyway, so we can start to like predict the likelihood of a project being built versus not being built. And that just helps with that qualification upfront to again, drive costs down, drive time down to ultimately to implementation.

And just to give you some numbers, like, we’ve now marketed a little bit north of 200 MW just in the last twelve months. So that’s around $400 million of project value. That’s across 467 sites, across 22 different states. So really starting to amass a really interesting data set around not just price points and all that good stuff and components used and things like that, but also track record of providers.

Sean Swentek: How are data and analytics changing the game, really, for these owners and tenants who are considering renewable energy?

Kevin Berkemeyer: I mean, the biggest piece is like accessibility. So, you know, generally speaking, in the past, you instill status quo for some. It’s like you need expertise in the space to really evaluate different proposals. You kind of need to know what you’re looking at. You know, you would have had to have like, not only familiarity with project finance, but also just the technical details of like construction projects for a given site, and solar projects as well, specifically. And so you would need time and you need to know, like, who to talk to. Most of the people we work with, like, solar is just one remit, you know, one piece of what they do, right? It’s not everything that they do, or storage or EV charging.

And so there’s just a need for a more accessible way to answer this question of like, “Which building should I pick to market and who should I work with?” And so I think a lot of what software and technology and analytics do – and this is the history of technology, right, in software specifically – is put tools and expertise in the hands of folks so that they can actually make decisions themselves. And so accessibility, I think, is like the number one point. So one of our goals, core missions, is to bring transparency, make these resources more accessible so that people can better understand where there are good opportunities, where there are bad opportunities, and actually move something forward.

Sean Swentek: What do you think is the biggest misconception around implementing clean energy in the built world?

Kevin Berkemeyer: I think what we run into a lot is somebody is like, “Oh, it’s too expensive.” And what that typically means is that somebody got a proposal five years ago, even three years ago, sometimes eight years ago, and they’re applying like eight-year-old assumptions or three- or five-year-old assumptions today’s market, which is fundamentally different and distinct from the market then. And it’s different and distinct because costs are a lot lower. The provider network is a lot larger and bigger. There are more people who can actually execute on these products and do it really well… more standardized, lower just transaction costs as well. So the market has just matured in a way that most people have not necessarily kept up-to-date with. Understandably so.

And so I think the big, yeah, that’s probably the biggest thing that we learn is someone’s like, “Oh, I looked at this eight years ago and it didn’t work.” It’s like, well, panel prices have come down like 80% since then and power costs have gone up, and et cetera. And there’s a new incentive program in Illinois, for example. And it’s typically just around that point of thinking it’s more expensive than it is.

Sean Swentek: Can you share maybe a story, a client success story, where there were some hurdles to overcome or some barriers to entry and success story around that?

Kevin Berkemeyer: Yeah, probably not specifically in terms of client name, but it’s really interesting. You know, everybody we work with is, you know, we work with the largest real estate investment trusts, you know, in the world. We work some of the largest corporations in the world. We’re a 14-person team. And you kind of have the same conversation with everybody where it’s like, “I, not only I have a lot of buildings and I need help prioritizing those, but I’ve done projects in the past and I tried sole-sourcing that, and I entered into master terms with some provider, but then that provider ultimately could not execute on all of my projects or they just cherry-picked like the biggest projects and then kind of left me at the altar on the smaller projects.”

And I think what we run into constantly is just the fact that like, hey, buildings are different. There’s no like same building necessarily, but buildings are different. Construction is different by geography, and the expertise of the folks executing products is different by geography, and by project size as well. So the sole-sourcing strategy doesn’t really work that well or doesn’t work as advertised. And I’ve been on the sole-source side of that table, like trying to get the sole-source deal. I know the incentives behind that, but just the reality from an execution standpoint is that you can’t rely on just one entity to execute a diverse set of projects.

What we’ve done with our customers is help partner with them to find the right provider in the right market who can execute, or providers who can execute, on different types of projects in those specific markets or geographies, so that they’re not left at the altar, so that they have like, managed business continuity risk, so that they ultimately achieve their goals and get like least-cost best fit for the execution of their ESG plan and decarb plan.

Sean Swentek: Who are some of the leading organizations, whether they’re your clients or not, that organizations who may be on the fence around these, making these renewable investments, who can they look to for sort of like inspiration, who are really leaning into renewable energy investments in CRE?

Kevin Berkemeyer: Probably one of the leaders and innovators as well is Prologis on the larger side of the equation. They’re one of the biggest, if not the biggest, industrial distribution center, warehouse logistics, real estate company. They, you know, buildings everywhere. They, from a very early point in time said that, like, “We have this rooftop that is empty; it is an underutilized asset. We can put solar on that where it makes sense, and we can then sell discounted electricity to the tenants. It’s good for the tenants and it’s good for Prologis.” So they launched this solar smart program, top effectively do just that. So I think they created like a really novel structure where it’s really simple for the tenant then: it’s just a lease amendment for the tenant to then purchase cheaper electricity and get the benefits of that solar.

And then for Prologis, you know, they’re utilizing, you know, an underutilized asset, that rooftop, by deploying solar on it. I know that Prologis is deployed, you know, it’s like over 500 MW to date on their rooftops, which is pretty astounding. And they’ve got a gigawatt target that they’re going for right now. And I’ve no doubt that they’ll be able to achieve that. And they’ve added hundreds of millions of dollars of EBITDA to their business. So it’s a real business opportunity that is not only helping them, but it’s helping their customers, too. So I think they’re kind of the exceptional example. But then there’s a lot of like, really great corporations who are really leading the way from like an ESG standpoint and doing whatever they can on their buildings.

So like Nestle is a great example, where, you know, they’ve implemented a lot of efficiency improvements in their facilities in the US and globally. They purchased community solar subscriptions where they can’t do rooftop solar, for example, but they want to support like a local community solar farm and they also want to capture some bill savings from that. So a no-brainer from their ESG perspective. So I think there’s a lot of different solutions out there to hit people’s goals. And a lot of really great examples of companies not just like stopping, let’s say, if on-site solar is not an option, because there are a lot of other options available to them.

Sean Swentek: Really nice to see owner-tenant win-win scenarios. How are your clients and partners approaching the issue of system performance, O&M, and ensuring, you know, long-term asset uptime and ROI ultimately on their investment?

Kevin Berkemeyer: Yeah, so we have to do a little bit of education on this. A lot of people, I mean, Prologis of the world, they’re advanced, right? Like they’ve got 500 MW operating. So they place like, a heavy emphasis on operating, maintain those assets. Folks who are newer to the game, they’re just so focused on getting the transaction done and getting the solar installed, that the O&M of that system or the operation/maintenance of that system can often be like an afterthought. We do emphasize like the importance of thinking about that, you know, long-term operation, you know, that asset and making sure that it’s operating well, it’s maintained well, it’s performing according to spec and all that good stuff.

So I think that, you know, as people get more experience with solar, for example, you know, they know that, okay, this is something that’s going to be on this rooftop for like 15, 20, 25 years. We need to make sure it actually does what we thought it would do, and that it’s in fact generating the electricity that it’s supposed to generate. So I think people are getting smarter and smarter around that and like they have to, and we’re helping them do that as well.

Sean Swentek: How do you see the role of energy storage evolving in commercial real estate over say the next decade?

Kevin Berkemeyer: Yeah, I think for many years, like, storage has been probably more of a discussion topic than an execution topic. And so what I mean by that is there’s just been a lot of talk about storage and there are only a few markets where it really makes sense. But we’re starting to see more markets open up for storage, especially with some policy changes in California. You saw this change. I’m sure some folks have potentially heard about this from net energy metering 2, or NEM 2 to NEM 3, where you don’t get compensated at your retail rate for any exported power from that solar facility. You just get compensated by the avoided cost. So it’s a significantly lower price point.

So now there’s an interesting incentive really, based on which tariff you’re on, so what your electricity cost structure is in California to add or attach storage to a solar installation. In speaking with Energy Toolbase recently – so Energy Toolbase is an analytics platform for solar and storage… ubiquitous – they’re seeing much higher energy storage attachment rates, especially in California, and getting modeled in their platform compared to like a year ago. And so that’s kind of a bullish, I think, leading indicator. I was just looking at the California solar stats data; that’s showing a 12% attachment rate from this past year. That’s probably for those NEM 2 projects. I think that’ll be closer to two times that in the, like, in the next year or two. But economics can vary. But you gotta, it’s like storage only makes sense if you’re leveraging it for other value streams.

So those value streams could be something grid-related or VPP-related, demand response-related, demand charge management-related, shifting solar-related. And you kind of have to aggregate and stack all those value streams to make that value prop for storage to make sense. I’d say there’s still a ways to go for more universal adoption of storage.

Sean Swentek: Interesting to see, like your average California homeowner or small business owner all of a sudden understanding peak shaving.

Kevin Berkemeyer: Or maybe they don’t need to understand it, but they just at least need to understand that, you know, there’s a business case there where they could be saving money, you know, on their power price, and we can help simplify, like, how you evaluate that.

Sean Swentek: What are you seeing in relation to EV charging deployment in CRE?

Kevin Berkemeyer: I’d say lots of hype the last two years, and then all of a sudden, you’re starting to read articles that fewer people are buying EVs, but actually the market’s continuing to grow. California, 26% of all new car sales were EVs this year. I think this past quarter, nationwide growth was up 11%. So it’s happening. It’s absolutely coming. More and more of our customers who have new builds, so, like, real estate companies or corporations who are building new buildings or are more like, retail-focused are all asking about, like, amenity charging. So for customers or clients or even employees.

And so we’re starting to run more of those projects through our marketplace as well and see that as a growing opportunity. So, absolutely something that is coming, and we’re starting to run those projects through our marketplace.

Sean Swentek: What emerging clean tech are you most excited about for commercial space?

Kevin Berkemeyer: Boring answer, but I’m squarely in the camp of we do not need miracle technologies. We do not need to chase bright, shiny objects. We got everything we need to solve, I think, the climate crisis that we’re facing and make good business decisions. And so I think that the most exciting stuff is probably the most boring. It’s like inventing new, more efficient ways to deploy as much of the available tech as possible.

The energy space is kind of an engineer space. We focus so much on the technology and the bright, shiny object, and we forget that you got to sell that thing, you got to deploy it, you got to pull permits, file interconnection, and that process now takes up more of a project cost, like, it takes about 60-plus percent of the project costs than the actual hardware and components do. So do we need to continue to invest in making more efficient hardware? Like, absolutely. But I think the underinvested area, the most exciting area is all about deployment. And so this means, like, driving down origination costs, driving down transaction costs, everything in that soft-cost bucket. And that’s, I’d say, why I’m, like, particularly excited about what we’re doing. But I really do believe it’s like, we have what we need, we just need to deploy it faster.

Sean Swentek: Do you have any data that shows, like, reduced development timelines or cost timelines based on whether or not someone engages with product like yours?

Kevin Berkemeyer: So since like, we started marketing projects like, two and a half years ago, we’ve cut the time it takes to go from like, a project in the marketplace through to like, a signed agreement between a buyer and a provider, we’ve cut that in half. If you compare that to the status quo… that is now cutting the status quo by two-thirds, so I think that we’ve really driven efficiency in this process and we’re just scratching the surface, frankly. There’s so much more to be done.

Sean Swentek: You mentioned the IRA and REITs specifically. Have you seen a growing appetite with the changes in the tax credit transferability and some of those roles for the REIT market specifically?

Kevin Berkemeyer: We’re seeing more and more interest in what is the transferability of tax credit look like and you know, how can we access that? And so we have channel partnerships with all the big tax credit transfer marketplaces, as well as like brokers who do, like, most of the business in that space. And so we’re starting to like refer customers and bring customers like, into those markets and, you know, compare bids actually for tax credit transfers. And so starting to see that pick up more and more. I think to date, it’s largely been in really large projects, but now we’re starting to see it pop up more with some of the more distributed building, on-site building projects as well.

Sean Swentek: Any macro influences that you’re tracking and any impacts or changes you’re expecting around, say, interest rates or the coming election cycle, things like that?

Kevin Berkemeyer: I mean, interest rates are coming down. We’ve been in a world where most of the projects that we’ve run through our marketplace are all cash capex deals, so, meaning like payment upfront for a project. We’re now seeing more openness and more interest in financing projects, and so having a third party own that system, and that’s been a more recent development where we’re seeing more and more interest in that model. We’ll see how that develops as interest rates come further down. I feel like we’re feeling the effects of higher interest rates and that’s finally trickled down. But I think that from our perspective, we’re completely agnostic. We could do a PPA project. We’ve done rooftop lease projects and we’ve done a lot of all-cash capex projects. And so it’s really about meeting the customer where they’re at and helping them find what they need in the market in the most efficient way.

I think that we operate in a very immature business, like industry, but it’s also actually a pretty mature industry in the sense that costs are well understood, the execution pathways are well understood. The business case is well understood. We rely on a lot of, like, state and local policy and incentives. And so in some states, we actually don’t, you know, like, you can deploy solar projects without like, really rich state and local incentives. So I think that whatever happens at the federal level isn’t really going to impact, I think, what we do at the building level and at the more local level. Because at the end of the day, these transactions are all good business cases. Every project is saving our customers money and, in many respects, millions of dollars.

So that is a good value prop, regardless of what happens in the political climate in the U.S. That being said, I believe that we have a climate crisis on our hands and we need to push faster and further and harder. And I think that’s where it matters. I think having somebody who believes in climate and who is policy-forward with respect to incentivizing more clean energy deployment, incentivizing these technologies that are readily available to be deployed faster and more efficiently, I think that stuff does matter. And so I think we can accelerate things based on who’s controlling federal policy, but I think things are moving fairly based on the market.

Sean Swentek: If you had to make a bold prediction for what clean energy looks like in commercial real estate in, say, year 2030, what do you think the future of CRE sustainability is?

Kevin Berkemeyer: I mentioned before, there’s about a million buildings that you could deploy economically viable solar on today. Current market conditions, current pricing, and only 5% of that market is tapped. So I think 2030, our goal is to help change that 5% to 50%. But get it to a point where you’re really seeing scalable volumes of onsite and distributed solar deployed across not just the main solar states, but everywhere. Again, we’ve marketed products in 22 different states. And so I’d like to see projects in all 50 states.

And the reason that 2030 is actually interesting is because a lot of companies have based their ESG targets and their renewable energy targets on this 2030 goal, or on some 2030 goal. And so I think we’re really driving today… It’s like to build the toolset, to build the infrastructure, build the process that then enables that scale and enables our customers to be able to hit those 2030 goals and even exceed them. So aside from the solar space, I also think we’re going to see just ubiquitous EV adoption. And then you’re going to start to see just interesting additional value streams associated with the dispatch of different things. But anyway, that’s getting more in the weeds.

Sean Swentek: That is all the time I have for today. Kevin, this was really a pleasure. I think you and I are going to end up talking some more on this in the future because what you’re doing in the space is so needed. I’m glad that MIT Sloan popped you out and you birthed this idea because it was obviously what the marketplace was demanding based on the success you’ve had to date. If people want to learn more about you, Station A, where should they go?

Kevin Berkemeyer: You can email me, [email protected]. So you just email me directly, and then you could also, obvious first step is just go to StationA.com and you can review the different steps that we take and the process we take. And you can even create a login account and start to evaluate buildings too, for free, at no cost. So I encourage you to get in touch and we’d be happy to help you understand new, different options for your buildings.

Sean Swentek: All right. Thanks again for joining me, Kevin.

Kevin Berkemeyer: Awesome. Thanks, Sean.

Sean Swentek: And thank you for joining me on another episode of The Future of CRE Sustainability. See you next time.