Ground leases, transmission easements, interconnection rights, and land use approvals are the hidden infrastructure beneath every energy project. The attorneys who handle them are among the most needed in the market.
Energy projects do not exist in the abstract. They sit on land — usually a great deal of it. A utility-scale solar farm might cover three to five thousand acres. An offshore wind project involves complex seabed leasing and transmission corridor rights. A battery storage facility requires site control, zoning approvals, and often years of land use entitlement work before a shovel goes in the ground. The lawyers who handle this work are real estate attorneys, and the demand for their skills in the energy context has become one of the more underappreciated stories in the lateral market.
What real estate attorneys do in energy transactions
The real estate work in an energy project begins at the earliest stages of development. Before a developer files for permits, before it applies for interconnection, and well before it secures financing, it needs site control — typically in the form of long-term ground leases or option agreements with landowners. Negotiating these instruments requires real estate expertise: understanding lease structures, option mechanics, anti-assignment provisions, landlord consent requirements, and the financing provisions that lenders will insist on before they will make a construction loan against a leasehold interest.
Transmission is a related but distinct challenge. Getting power from a generation facility to the grid requires easements — and often a significant number of them, across multiple parcels, with different owners, recorded in different counties, subject to different state law regimes. This is granular real estate work, and doing it well requires not just the ability to draft an easement agreement but the practical judgment to identify title issues, coordinate with surveyors and engineers, and manage a process that might involve dozens or hundreds of separate conveyances.
Land use and zoning add another layer. A solar project in many jurisdictions requires a conditional use permit, a special exception, or a rezoning. An energy storage facility in a residential or agricultural zone may require years of entitlement work — public hearings, environmental review under state law, negotiation with local governments and neighboring landowners — before it can proceed. Real estate attorneys with entitlement experience and energy project context are particularly difficult to find.
The financing dimension
Real estate finance skills translate directly into energy project finance. Construction lenders and tax equity investors both care deeply about the real estate beneath a project. Lenders will require title insurance, estoppels from landlords, landlord recognition agreements (often called "subordination, non-disturbance, and attornment" agreements), and comfort that the leasehold interest securing their loan is durable. Real estate finance attorneys who can navigate title, survey, and lease due diligence in the context of project financing are doing work that requires both real estate expertise and project finance fluency — a combination that the market values and cannot easily replicate.
Portfolio transactions
The energy sector has also generated a substantial volume of real estate-intensive M&A. Platform acquisitions — where a private equity sponsor acquires a portfolio of operating energy assets — require due diligence across dozens or hundreds of site leases, easements, and access agreements in multiple states simultaneously. The attorneys coordinating this work need to be able to manage complex real estate diligence efficiently, identify material issues across a large portfolio, and synthesize findings for deal teams. Real estate attorneys with M&A experience who have done this work are particularly valuable.
The opportunity for real estate laterals
For real estate attorneys — particularly those at firms where energy and infrastructure work flows through the real estate group — the current market represents a genuine opportunity to position themselves at the intersection of two growing practices. The attorneys who have done ground lease negotiation for solar or wind developers, transmission easement work, or real estate diligence on infrastructure portfolios have skills that are directly sought by energy-focused practices, project finance groups, and infrastructure funds building in-house capabilities.
This is not a pivot that requires starting over. It is a recognition that the skills you already have are in demand in a sector that is growing rapidly and that values them highly.
VortexLegal works with real estate attorneys across the energy and infrastructure sector at every level. Reach out to discuss where your background fits.