4 Keys to Decarbonizing Existing US Office Buildings & Companies Making It Happen

The climate crisis takes center stage in Scotland this month, and Bloomberg writer, Marc Champion, astutely noted, “Among top producers of climate-harming emissions that world leaders plan to address at COP26 in Glasgow in November, buildings are the summit’s largely ignored Cinderella.”

Champion supported his statement explaining that “the construction and operation of buildings accounts for 35% of the world’s energy use and 38% of all carbon emissions, according to the 2020 edition of the Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction, produced by a group of organizations that includes the International Energy Agency.”

However, in the US, we need to get much more serious and specific about decarbonizing existing buildings by retrofitting them, particularly office buildings. Not only do the nearly 6 million US commercial buildings emit copious amounts of carbon, if we’re realistically going to expect workers to return to the office after the pandemic, it should be done without further harm to the planet.

According to Yahoo News’ Melissa Rossi, “The U.S. finds itself playing catch-up with the EU in the race to meet the goal of carbon neutrality laid out in the Paris climate accord.” And while there are exciting new embodied carbon technologies that may aid future construction, the US must first focus on the buildings that are already standing. To do so, there are four keys to decarbonizing existing buildings: temperature, lighting, energy sources and how it’s all measured.

Measurement

You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and many office buildings are still lacking sufficient tools needed to measure their impact on climate. Not surprisingly, myriad companies have descended on the market to try and solve this problem, as landlords must be able to demonstrate a baseline in order to prove their progress to tenants, shareholders, and legislators. Brokerage behemoth JLL recently bought Building Engines for $300M. San Diego-based Measurabl turned heads with its $50M funding round in September of 2021. The US Green Building Council has an offering in the space through its affiliation with Arc. Cortex Intel is another measurement startup that purportedly doesn’t require additional hardware components and is exclusively focused on commercial buildings. These are just a handful of the measurement companies, and there seem to be more surfacing each month. There are also much larger companies racing to create offerings in the space, which will be highlighted below.

Their collective emergence is important since a cleantech company can make a bold claim about its product on its website or in a press release, but what really matters in combating climate change is the actual performance in the specific buildings where it’s deployed. Therefore, proper measurement is critical in each building and aggregated across real estate portfolios. 

Temperature

We have to decarbonize temperature technology. It’s probably obvious, but tenants in office buildings have to be comfortable in order to work productively. It can’t be too hot or too cold; it has to be just right. We’ve all been in offices that are colder than a walk-in freezer, and this not only makes us uncomfortable but also wastefully emits carbon. The responsibility of maintaining proper temperature mostly falls on the heating, venting, air-conditioning and cooling infrastructure in the building. More commonly known as HVAC, these products require energy to provide comfortable temperatures. This is a massive, multibillion-dollar industry led by names like Johnson Controls and Siemens, which are getting increasingly sophisticated with their measurement capabilities. Meanwhile startups, like Transaera, have emerged, in hopes of providing more “sustainable cooling systems.” 

An important aspect to building temperature is insulation. For example, single pane windows are terrible insulators. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “windows in the U.S. consume 30 percent of building heating and cooling energy,” because of their inability to contain heat in the winter and let too much of it in during the summer. This specific problem is why Crown Electrokinetics is building Smart Window Inserts to improve insulation and lower carbon emissions, while also reducing HVAC costs.

Lighting

We have to decarbonize lighting. Similar to temperature, the lighting in an office building is critical to tenant comfort. This includes both natural sunlight and artificial lighting, the latter of which requires energy. Most buildings have already made the switch over to LED light fixtures, but need to continue to make efforts to optimize their lighting. Being able to take advantage of daylighting is the ideal choice, but companies can use technology to fully control lighting usage in their buildings. Acuity Brands is the largest lighting company in North America and among the largest players in the world, including building management systems. In May of 2021, Acuity announced the purchase of Rockpile Ventures, an artificial intelligence incubator, which helps bolster its Intelligent Spaces Business. They explained the transaction by saying, “We are building systems to sense, think, and act at scale and to use Acuity’s reach and capability to deploy those systems to make spaces smarter, safer, and greener.” This move has great potential because the lighting giant already possesses a footprint in many existing buildings.

Energy

Of the four items, energy may involve the most variability and could prove to be the hardest to decarbonize in existing buildings in the near term. However, there are promising offerings like windows that can produce solar energy (e.g. Next Energy Technologies and Ubiquitous Energy). Meanwhile, there are other emerging technologies like SkyCool, which claims that its panels can “save 2x – 3x as much energy as a solar panel generates given the same area.” The challenge for energy innovation is scale, and, according to Bill Gates in his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, “Nuclear is the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.” He’s gone so far as to back a nuclear fission company that can convert depleted uranium into electricity, called Terrapower. Such energy advancements may be the best opportunity to reduce carbon until alternatives are proven at scale.

How much stuff does it take to build and run a power plant? That depends on the type of plant. Nuclear is the most efficient, using much less material per unit of electricity generated than other sources do. (US Department of Energy)

(How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, page 85)

Since buildings are major carbon culprits, we must move faster in deploying practical solutions that will decarbonize existing buildings, especially in the US. If we expect people to return to offices, they must be comfortable. But, the net carbon impact of building temperature and lighting must be measurable, and ideally powered by truly sustainable energy sources.