Texas Warehouse Electricity Costs Per Square Foot

"Warehouse electricity" is three different businesses wearing the same word. A dry distribution center, a temperature-controlled facility, and a deep-freeze cold store sit under the same roof type and the same zoning code — and use electricity at wildly different rates. EIA's national survey data puts refrigerated warehouse space at roughly nine times the electricity intensity of dry space on a median basis, and about six times on a mean basis.

That is why almost every "average warehouse electricity cost" figure you'll find online is useless: it quotes one number for all three. This guide does the opposite. Below are the sourced benchmarks by facility type, the math to apply them to your own square footage, the six drivers that make two identical-looking buildings bill differently, and a ten-minute check to tell whether you're above benchmark for reasons you can actually fix.

What the Published Benchmarks Actually Say

There are two credible public sources here, and mixing them up is the single most common error in warehouse energy content. They measure different things, in different units, and are not interchangeable.

EIA's Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) reports electricity only, in kilowatt-hours per square foot. That is the number that maps to your electricity bill, so it is where this guide starts. Its 2018 edition — the most recent complete release — breaks warehouse and storage into subcategories:

That is the gap that makes a single blended "warehouse" benchmark meaningless: about 9× on medians and 5.6× on means between refrigerated and dry. Figures are U.S. national estimates from CBECS 2018 Table C22, retrieved July 2026.

Note the refrigerated row rests on a small sample — CBECS estimates roughly 3,000 refrigerated warehouse buildings nationally against 788,000 non-refrigerated — which is why its mean and median sit almost on top of each other. Treat it as directional rather than precise. Note also how far the mean sits above the median in every dry category: the average is pulled up by a minority of high-intensity buildings, so the median is the better starting point for a typical facility.

ENERGY STAR publishes the other set of figures, and they answer a different question. Its Portfolio Manager medians are energy use intensity (EUI) in kBtu per square foot, covering all energy the building consumes — electricity plus natural gas and any other fuel. Site EUI counts energy delivered to the building; source EUI adds the upstream generation and delivery losses behind it:

On that all-fuels basis the refrigerated gap is 3.7× on site energy and 4.5× on source energy — smaller than the electricity-only gap, because dry warehouses burn a lot of natural gas for space heating that never touches the electricity bill. Figures from the ENERGY STAR U.S. National Median Reference Table, retrieved July 2026.

The two sets cannot be converted into each other without knowing your fuel mix. An EUI figure is not electricity, and dividing it by 3,412 Btu per kWh to "get kilowatt-hours" will overstate your electric load by whatever share of the building's energy arrives as gas. For warehouse and storage as a whole, CBECS puts that gas share at 199 of 528 trillion Btu — space heating alone accounts for about 39% of aggregate end-use consumption, and EIA separately reports a space-heating intensity of 15.8 thousand Btu per square foot for buildings that use it (EIA CBECS 2018, warehouse and storage).

One more labelling trap worth naming: self-storage is a separate category in both sources, with its own much lower median. Quote its figures as a "warehouse" benchmark, as circulating content sometimes does, and you will badly understate a real distribution building. If a benchmark matters enough to budget against, it matters enough to trace to the table it came from.

Deep-freeze and cross-dock facilities aren't broken out separately in either source. Directionally, deep-freeze sits above the refrigerated median because holding a space below freezing costs more than holding it at 35°F, and cross-dock sits closer to dry because product moves through rather than sitting in conditioned space — but neither has a published national median, and any specific figure you see for them is somebody's estimate rather than survey data.

Do the Math for Your Own Building

National figures are a starting point, not an answer. Because CBECS reports electricity directly, the math is simply your square footage times the median for your facility type — no fuel-mix assumption, no unit conversion.

For a 100,000 square foot building, the CBECS medians produce three very different starting estimates:

• Non-refrigerated warehouse: 100,000 ft² × 3.4 kWh/ft² ≈ 340,000 kWh per year
• Distribution or shipping center: 100,000 ft² × 4.6 kWh/ft² ≈ 460,000 kWh per year
• Refrigerated warehouse: 100,000 ft² × 30.9 kWh/ft² ≈ 3,090,000 kWh per year

Those are national benchmarking estimates, not forecasts for a particular Texas facility. Operating hours, refrigeration setpoint, automation, clear height, dock activity, occupancy, equipment density, and weather all move actual consumption substantially — the six drivers in the next section are exactly where that movement comes from. If your building is partly conditioned, benchmark the refrigerated and dry portions separately and add them rather than picking a middle number.

Turning kilowatt-hours into dollars is where published estimates fall apart, and where you should be skeptical of anyone who fills it in for you. Your all-in cost per kilowatt-hour is not a supply rate — it's supply plus regulated TDU delivery plus demand charges plus riders and taxes, and the delivery portion alone varies by territory and tariff. A facility with a low load factor can pay a considerably higher effective all-in rate than a neighbor with identical consumption.

Treat any resulting number as an estimate, never a quote. Its job is to tell you whether your current bill is roughly where it should be or noticeably off — not to price a contract. For the cross-industry view of how warehouse intensity compares against restaurants, hotels, and medical offices, see our guide to the average commercial electric bill in Texas by business type.

Why Two Identical-Looking Warehouses Bill Differently

Two 150,000 square foot buildings on the same road, same year of construction, same tenant profile — and a 40% gap in annual electricity cost. It happens constantly, and it comes down to six things.

1. Refrigeration Load

The single biggest variable, and the reason for the spread above. Even partial temperature control — a cooled staging area inside an otherwise dry building — moves a facility meaningfully up the intensity scale. If any part of your footprint is conditioned below ambient, benchmark that portion separately. Refrigeration also changes the shape of the load, not just its size: our guide to cold storage versus dry warehouse load profiles covers setpoints, defrost, infiltration, and what a flat 24/7 profile is worth when you take the account to market.

2. Racking Height and Cubic Volume

Energy intensity is published per square foot, but you condition and light air, not floor. A 40-foot clear-height facility has substantially more volume per square foot than a 24-foot building, and in refrigerated space that volume is the thing being cooled. Per-square-foot benchmarks may understate the energy a tall building needs, particularly refrigerated or highly automated facilities.

3. Dock Door Cycling

Every door opening exchanges conditioned air for outside air. In a Texas summer, a high-throughput cross-dock operation with doors cycling constantly is fighting a load that a low-turn storage facility simply doesn't have. Infiltration is one of the most underestimated line items in refrigerated operations.

4. Lighting Type and Controls

Lighting is a large share of dry-warehouse consumption, and the range between legacy high-bay fixtures and LED with occupancy and daylight controls is wide. Aisle-level occupancy sensing in a low-traffic storage facility changes the number materially — this is the one driver where a capital fix has a genuinely short payback.

5. Automation and Material-Handling Equipment

Conveyors, sorters, ASRS, and the battery-charging bank for lift equipment all add load — and, more importantly, they add peak load. An automated facility often has higher demand charges relative to consumption than a manual one, because equipment starts in coordinated bursts.

6. Shift Pattern and Load Factor

A single-shift operation concentrates its entire consumption into eight or nine hours, producing sharp peaks against a near-zero overnight baseline. A 24/7 operation spreads the same consumption flat. The second profile is cheaper to serve and usually prices better. Our explainer on load factor and why it drives your effective rate covers the mechanics — for warehouses it is frequently the difference between two otherwise similar quotes.

The Part of the Bill That Isn't Kilowatt-Hours

Benchmarking consumption only gets you to part of the answer, because a meaningful share of a warehouse bill isn't consumption at all.

Demand charges bill your highest measured power draw in a short interval — 15 minutes under Texas TDU tariffs — rather than your total usage. For warehouses this peak is typically set by material-handling equipment, charging, and refrigeration compressors coming on together. The consequence catches operators out constantly: efficiency work lowers kilowatt-hours, the demand line barely moves, and the bill doesn't fall the way the business case promised. Start with what a demand charge is and how it's calculated, and how capacity charges differ from energy charges. To find the specific fifteen minutes that set your demand charge — and check whether a ratchet is still billing you for it — our companion guide to warehouse demand charges and interval data walks through pulling the data and tracing the peak to a shift.

TDU delivery charges are the regulated portion set by your transmission and distribution utility — Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Texas, TNMP — and no supplier can discount them. They are the same regardless of who you buy supply from, which is exactly why comparing suppliers on the headline energy rate alone misleads. Our guide to Texas TDU delivery charges for businesses breaks down what's on that side of the bill.

Signs You're Paying Above Benchmark

You can run this in about ten minutes with one recent bill in hand. Any of these is a signal that the gap between you and the benchmark is procurement, not physics:

• You're on a holdover, month-to-month, or variable rate. This exposes the account to unfavorable or volatile market pricing, and facilities land there by inattention rather than choice. See what happens when a commercial contract expires.
• Your contract expired or auto-renewed without a comparison. An auto-renewal signed years ago is not a market rate.
• Your load factor is low and nobody raised it during procurement. If your profile is flat and steady, that is an asset you should be pricing on.
• There's a demand ratchet on your tariff. A ratchet means a single historic peak keeps billing you long after the event that caused it. In Oncor territory, for example, secondary-service loads whose peak exceeded 20 kW in the preceding 11 months and whose Annual Load Factor is above 25% are billed the higher of the current month's 15-minute peak or 80% of the highest monthly 15-minute peak in those 11 months (Oncor Tariff for Retail Delivery Service). One bad interval follows you for nearly a year. Ratchet provisions vary by utility and rate class — CenterPoint's secondary schedule has none — so check your own tariff, or see our warehouse demand charge guide for the territory-by-territory comparison.
• Multiple sites sit on separate contracts with staggered end dates. Each one gets shopped in isolation, at whatever the market happened to be that week.
• You can't identify the supply, delivery, and demand portions on the bill. Our walkthrough of how to read a commercial electricity bill in Texas is the place to start.

What to Do About It — In This Order

There are two levers, and the sequence matters more than most operators expect.

Procurement first. Shopping supply requires no capital and changes no operations, and a new contract takes effect at the account's next eligible contract start date. If your contract is in holdover or expiring within twelve months, this is the highest-return hour you will spend on the facility. In a competitive Texas territory you can put the account out to bid without any interruption to service and without touching a single piece of equipment.

Operations second. LED retrofits with controls, dock seals and air curtains, defrost scheduling, VFDs on evaporator fans, staggering equipment startup to shave peak demand — these are real and worth doing. They also take capital and quarters. The sensible sequence is to pull the lower-capital procurement lever first and let it help fund the capital one. For the broader operational list, see how to lower commercial electricity bills in Texas.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to power a 100,000 sq ft warehouse in Texas?

It depends almost entirely on whether the space is refrigerated. Using CBECS 2018 median electricity intensities, a 100,000 ft² dry warehouse lands near 340,000 kWh a year, a distribution center near 460,000 kWh, and a refrigerated warehouse near 3,090,000 kWh. Those are national benchmarking estimates, not forecasts for a specific building. Turning any of them into dollars requires your own all-in rate including regulated TDU delivery and demand charges — so treat a published estimate as a benchmark, not a quote.

Why is my cold storage bill so much higher than my dry warehouse?

Refrigeration is a continuous load that dry storage simply doesn't have. On CBECS 2018 electricity intensities, refrigerated warehouses run about 9 times the median of non-refrigerated space and 5.6 times the mean. On ENERGY STAR's all-fuels EUI the multiple is smaller — 3.7× site, 4.5× source — because dry warehouses use gas for space heating that never appears on the electricity bill. Compressors, evaporator and condenser fans, defrost cycles, and air infiltration through dock doors run around the clock, and unlike lighting they can't be scheduled off overnight. Our guide to cold storage versus dry warehouse load profiles breaks down which of those drivers you can actually influence.

Do warehouses pay demand charges?

Most commercial warehouse accounts of any size do. Demand bills your highest measured draw in a short interval — commonly 15 minutes — rather than total consumption, and for a warehouse that peak is usually set by conveyors, material-handling equipment, battery charging, and compressors starting together. Because demand bills separately from kilowatt-hours, cutting consumption doesn't necessarily cut the demand line.

Can a warehouse tenant switch providers, or does the landlord control it?

Whoever holds the meter controls the account. Under a triple-net or most modified-gross industrial leases the tenant typically holds the ESI ID directly and can shop supply in a competitive territory. Under a gross lease the landlord may hold the meter and recover electricity through rent or CAM. Check the ESI ID on the bill and the utilities clause of the lease before assuming either way.

What's a good load factor for a warehouse?

Load factor is average demand divided by peak demand across a billing period, and there is no published national standard for what a warehouse should hit. As the screening rule of thumb in our load factor guide, relatively steady warehouse and cold-storage accounts often fall around 50–75%, with shift pattern driving most of the spread: a single-shift dry facility sits lower because lighting and equipment spike during operating hours then fall away overnight, while a 24/7 refrigerated operation sits higher because the load is steady. Compare the facility against its own operating schedule and load history rather than treating the range as a national benchmark. Higher is generally better in procurement — a flat, predictable profile is cheaper for a supplier to serve.

The Bottom Line

The useful benchmark isn't a dollar figure — it's knowing which of the three warehouses you actually operate, and whether the gap between your bill and the published median is explained by refrigeration, clear height, and throughput, or by a contract nobody has looked at since it auto-renewed. The first set you manage with capital and operations, slowly. The second you address at your next contract start date, without capital.

Operating more than one facility, or looking at a building you don't yet occupy? Our warehouse and storage page covers how multi-site procurement and new-location setup work.

Know other operators in the same position? Property managers, industrial brokers, and advisors who introduce us to businesses earn on every account they refer. Partner with us.