Brookfield Properties Goes Nuclear For 40-Building D.C.-Area Office Portfolio

Brookfield Properties’ 8M SF office portfolio across D.C., Maryland and Virginia is now being operated by nuclear power.

The firm has transitioned 100% of the electricity usage for the roughly 40 office buildings it manages in the region to nuclear power, it told Bisnow Wednesday. 

Brookfield says it is the first commercial real estate company to buy nuclear electricity directly, allowing it to control where the power for the entire portfolio comes from.

“It not only sets a new standard for how owners can purchase clean energy, but it's also a very scalable model that other property owners can follow,” Brookfield Properties Senior Vice President of Sustainability Michael Daschle told Bisnow.

The company is sourcing the energy for the region from the PJM grid, an electric grid that serves as far east as New Jersey and as far west as Illinois. It made the transition through a contract with Calpine Energy Solutions. The energy will be coming from three or four different nuclear plants at any given time, Daschle said.

Brookfield says the move to nuclear reduces the mid-Atlantic portfolio's greenhouse gas emissions from purchased energy by north of 85%.

The move is the first milestone in the real estate giant’s initiative to transition its 70M SF U.S. office portfolio to zero-emissions electricity by 2026, a goal it announced last summer.

The cost to the building owner of transitioning to nuclear power is marginal — under 1% of a building’s operating expenses — which is mostly from buying credits to prove the environmental benefits, Daschle said. But it makes an outsized impact on the portfolio’s marketability to tenants that are looking for ways to reduce their environmental footprints.

“Talking about the largest 2,000 companies in the world, half of them have made net-zero commitments,” said Cy Kouhestani, who heads Brookfield Properties’ mid-Atlantic and southeast region. “So this is a great example of where we can align what we're doing and the services we provide with what our clients are looking to do in terms of their own business goals.”

To get to its 2026 goal, Brookfield Properties has different plans for each region. In New York, the company is planning to purchase electricity from the hydropower facilities in the state, while in Los Angeles and Houston, Brookfield said it will facilitate the construction of new solar power plants to harness energy.

The move to nuclear power is launching only in the mid-Atlantic region, which already has access to the PJM grid and where Brookfield is also able to purchase the energy.

But the property manager hopes to activate the model in additional markets in the future. And it is looking to other commercial real estate owners to follow suit, which will not only help environmental goals but will also help make the case for more infrastructure to be developed around nuclear energy. 

“We want as many people as possible to do this so that it sends this clear signal to the people who are in charge of these grids and the energy developers, to say, like, ‘build more clean energy as soon as you can, as fast as you can and get it onto the grid right now,’” Daschle said.

The Biden administration has been targeting a ramp-up in nuclear energy as a sustainability initiative. 

The administration laid out a roadmap last month to triple U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050. But with President-elect Donald Trump taking office in just under two months, it’s unclear where that initiative will land.

Nuclear energy has the lowest carbon footprint of any source of electricity, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and it uses the least amount of materials and land.

The fast-growing data center industry has been moving aggressively toward nuclear energy this year as a solution to its power shortage. 

In September, Microsoft announced plans to recommission a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station for artificial intelligence data centers, one of several deals to use existing nuclear power facilities for the industry. Big Tech companies are also working to develop small modular reactors to generate nuclear power on data center sites.