Episode
SMP 282: How Commercial Real Estate Became One of Solar’s Biggest Opportunities
- Podcast
- Solar Maverick Podcast
- Published
- May 19, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2785
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
In this episode, Benoy Thanjan sits down with Victoria Stulgis, President of Black Bear Energy, to explore one of the most underrated opportunities in the solar industry: commercial real estate. Black Bear Energy acts as an owner’s representative for institutional property owners, helping them deploy on-site solar and battery storage across their portfolios at scale. Victoria discusses Black Bear’s recently published 2025 Real Estate Solar Leaderboards Report, a first-of-its-kind dataset tracking energized on-site solar across major U.S. real estate owners and managers. The numbers are eye-opening. Prologis leads with 309 MW deployed in the U.S. alone and more than 1 GW globally. Public Storage has quietly completed more than 1,100 projects totaling 111 MW. According to Morgan Stanley, there is still 326 GW of untapped solar capacity sitting on commercial rooftops across the country. The conversation gets into the real mechanics of how large REITs and institutional landlords are approaching solar today, why most deals are front-of-meter rooftop leases, what is driving community solar adoption in Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland, and what the ITC phase-out means for lease rates and deal economics going forward. Victoria also makes the case for why battery storage is the next major frontier for commercial real estate and what it will take for the capital markets to catch up.