Mason Miller, the CEO of St. Louis-based Centerstream, believes the district energy sector is undergoing a transformation, on college campuses and beyond.

The old model, Miller says, often centered around monetizing an asset to fund an endowment. Campuses would separately procure energy P3s and housing P3s, Miller says. The result was a zero-sum dynamic between the parties, rather than a cohesive approach.

“District energy isn’t just about operating those legacy systems or acquiring attractive assets,” Miller told this publication. “It’s opportunities arising in new mixed-use developments, campus redevelopments, where the future tenants of a campus are changing. It’s much more of a master development, master planning exercise.”

In late 2024, real estate-focused investor Greystar acquired a controlling interest in Ashley Energy, which was led by Miller and Amir Memic, a former director of development at NextEra. Ashley Energy became Centerstream last year.

With Greystar’s backing and experience in real estate, Miller sees the firm as well suited for what he describes as campus energy 2.0 or 3.0.

“What I was looking for was a platform that could let us scale into what we see is really the future, which is the convergence of energy and real estate,” he said. “So Greystar made a heck of a lot of sense.”

In the 15 months since the deal, Centerstream has built out a team of industry veterans. In January, the company hired John David Long, who served as associate vice chancellor of facilities planning and management at Washington University in St. Louis, as director of construction and capital projects.

Last month, Centerstream announced two more senior hires. The company brought on vice president, development engineering Thomas Pike, who served as a vice president focused on public-private partnerships (P3s) for QIC- and Ullico-backed CenTrio after previously working for Engie. Then Wayne Barnett was brought on as vice president of corporate development, strategy and external affairs after seven years at KKR-backed Cordia.

Campus Energy 2.0 

The campus energy P3 space has seen fits and starts since The Ohio State University reached a USD 1bn deal with Axium Infrastructure and Engie nearly a decade ago. Many processes that launched since that 2017 deal have been pulled before reaching financial close, while a P3 at the University of Iowa resulted in litigation.

But in Miller’s opinion, “the processes didn’t fail, the structure did.”

“They were still stuck in 1.0 and now you find out why 1.0 didn’t work,” Miller said. “You have to move on to 2.0.”

He points to campus housing as having followed a similar path, from an emphasis on monetization and availability payments to something more comprehensive.

An investment driven model starts with determining whether a project is ready to be financed, Miller said.

“We engage earlier. We deal with things like land use, site planning, plant locations, tenant mix, construction sequencing, development questions as much as energy questions,” Miller explained. “That’s what I think is a significant difference.”

The Centerstream team also sees energy deals linked – often inexorably so – with real estate, as campus housing and even data centers become tied to a campus’s energy system.

“Real estate is going to play a major part in how this market evolves,” Barnett posited.

When a real estate asset and the energy asset have unaffiliated owners, it sets up another potential zero-sum scenario, Miller believes. That is where being under the Greystar umbrella becomes an advantage.

“It changes everything,” said Miller. “Because we have the ability in a financial situation to restructure the energy returns to make the housing project feasible. We can change around how the housing project is financed to make the energy component feasible.”

“When the energy system fails because the housing was misdesigned from a passive housing standpoint, it may be the housing’s fault, but it’s still our problem to solve collectively,” he continued. “The alignment that you get is much better than the paper battleground you have from a teaming agreement.”

Michael Hoverman, Greystar’s executive director of infrastructure, said the firm also sees a convergence between real estate and energy, particularly as power becomes a significant constraint on development.

“District energy solutions can help bridge that gap by providing more resilient, flexible supply and enabling better load management across assets,” Hoverman said in an email.
“We believe that an integrated approach to campus development that considers both energy and real estate better facilitates planning and collaboration, which unlocks innovative solutions which are important in complex environments where coordination across systems is critical.”

Centerstream plans to be aggressive in the campus P3 space, Miller said, with Greystar’s capital behind it.

The firm’s target markets extend beyond campus energy to also include municipalities and hospitals.

Lessons from St. Louis  

Though formed last year, Centerstream’s history traces back to 2016, when Miller founded Ashley Energy and the next year acquired the Ashley heat and power plant in downtown St. Louis from Veolia subsidiary Trigen-St. Louis Energy Corporation. Ashley Energy secured a 20-year partnership with the city in 2017.

“They had an issue with their district energy system and operator at the time, and the issue was one of a structural nature,” Miller said. “As I dug in I started to understand how the P3 relationship was structured.”

It was here that Miller saw what he described as an “untenable situation,” he said, the zero-sum logic that he believes has held back district energy.

“It was built around zero-sum push and pull between the private operator and the public governor, instead of being a synergistic, mutually beneficial structure,” he noted. “The effect of that was, you build a relationship that’s zero-sum, you get a zero-sum push and pull, and every dollar that the private operator took came from the public pockets of the city, and vice versa.”

As a result, the city tasked him with restructuring the system, he said. In 2025, he extended it to a 90-year agreement with an initial 35-year term. The P3 agreement was expanded to include the construction of a brand-new chilled water plant.

“It totally restructured the way they look at district energy there,” he said. “The city passed legislation that provided customers tax incentives if they joined the system, and we entered into an agreement to share that revenue with the city from those customers that joined.”