Business energy for warehousing and logistics

Last reviewed 2 September 2026 by Utilities Made Simple · independent, whole-of-market, supplier-paid — how we are paid

Lighting and heating a big box

Lighting a high-bay space is a substantial continuous load, and the payback on LED with proper controls is strongest exactly here — high mounting, long hours, and zone or occupancy control that turns aisles off when nobody is in them. Heating a large volume for a small number of people is similarly worth reviewing: destratification, dock door discipline and setting heating to the work rather than the ceiling.

Charging load is the new variable

Electric forklifts, MHE and increasingly vans and HGVs put a large, controllable load on the site. Two things follow:

• It is flexible. Charging outside red-band hours reduces distribution costs directly, and on a half-hourly supply that is a real saving for a scheduling change.
• It eats capacity. A charging installation added to a site with no capacity headroom triggers excess penalties or an expensive connection upgrade. Check the available capacity before the chargers are ordered, not after — see capacity charges and kVA explained.

Cold storage changes everything

A chilled or frozen facility is a different business from a dry warehouse: continuous heavy refrigeration, a high load factor, and defrost cycles worth understanding. It also usually means reactive power charges worth checking. If you have both dry and cold on one site, look at whether they are separately metered.

Contracts and long leases

Warehousing tends to come with long leases, which makes longer energy contracts more workable than in most sectors — the usual objection, that you may not be in the building, does not apply. Price one, two and three years on the same day and compare total cost across each period rather than the headline rate.

Multi-site operators should be staggering end dates across the year rather than renewing everything in one month, and consolidating onto a single supplier where the price is competitive — standing charges at 45–65p a day a day across a network of sites add up quietly.

Watch for

Sites taken on from a previous occupier arriving on deemed rates at 35–45p per kWh, and units sitting empty between tenants still accruing standing charges. Both are common in this sector and both are fixable in a morning — see why am I paying a standing charge when the premises are empty?

What a warehouse or distribution centre typically uses

We publish consumption benchmarks only where we can stand behind the figure, and the honest answer for this sector is that the spread between sites is wide enough that a single national average would mislead you more than it helped. Building age, occupancy, plant and hours drive far more variation than sector does.

What is useful is your own number against comparable sites. Send us twelve months of bills for one site and we will tell you where it sits — free, and with no obligation to do anything about it.