James Cahill is a Senior ESG Manager at Aliro Group, where he leads all ESG operations across the company’s industrial and logistics portfolios. With experience spanning consulting, construction, and renewable energy, James works closely with tenants and investors to deliver practical sustainability outcomes, including electrification, renewable energy integration, and future-ready industrial assets.
The transition to electric fleets is creating new demands on industrial property, requiring owners and managers to rethink how they can deliver power capacity, charging infrastructure and asset resilience. We asked James 3 questions on how Aliro is responding to tenant’s needs.
Understanding occupier demand – How are industrial and logistics landlords assessing the EV fleet requirements of tenants, and what trends are emerging across different occupier types?
The pace of EV uptake across our portfolios is very diverse, so the first step for us is engaging with tenant customers to understand their immediate needs and future plans. Some of our logistics tenants have started transitioning their fleets to either light or heavy electric trucks. For example, our TripleTwoNine estate in Caringbah, Sydney is supporting Woolworths with their transition to all-electric, last-mile delivery trucks. This required us to re-design the estate so its electrical infrastructure could accommodate dedicated EV charging ports, allowing Woolworths to recharge their trucks between delivery shifts, as well as future expansion plans. Other occupiers like Linfox and Toll Group are also trialling all-electric alternatives for larger, heavy-rigid trucks and prime movers. These emerging technologies require large amounts of power, dedicated on-site energy solutions, and additional space for charging areas, which is prompting us to re-think how we can optimise the design of our industrial and logistics estates.
Retrofitting existing assets – What are the biggest technical and commercial challenges when retrofitting older industrial facilities for EV charging infrastructure?
Broadly speaking there are three key challenges. First, industrial facilities require access to enough power to cater for the additional energy demands of electric truck charging infrastructure. This becomes even more challenging when those facilities already play host to energy-intensive operations like cold storage or manufacturing. Second, we need to ensure fire safety standards are met, which often means installing these technologies away from the building. This isn’t always straightforward at older estates where outdoor conduits and cable runs might not exist. And third, EV charging units cannot impede the free movement of fleet vehicles throughout industrial estates, which can present challenges at multi-tenant estates with shared internal roads.
Building a future-ready portfolio – Beyond charging stations, what investments in power supply, solar, batteries and energy management systems are becoming essential for the next generation of industrial assets?
The priority for us is provisioning our industrial assets in a way that will accommodate the diverse energy needs of our tenant customers. At new development projects, this means designing oversized electrical boards, running conduits to EV charging spaces, and creating designated spaces for battery energy storage systems. It can be more challenging to retrofit existing assets, but our use of energy management systems at all our assets enables us to partner with tenants on bespoke capital expenditure projects that can lower their cost of operations or pursue new opportunities arising from the energy transition.
James will be sharing even more insights at the Industrial Real Estate Summit on 15-16 September in Sydney. Download the Agenda to view details on his session and the two-day program.
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