Boston, MA – October 18: A curtain wall passive house facade looking up from ground level. The world’s largest passive home/office building Winthrop Center is one of growing number of buildings in Massachusetts that are designed to be highly energy efficient and reduce the needs for cooling or warming. (Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Boston Globe via Getty Images
On a busy weekday in downtown Boston, a glass-and-steel tower quietly does something most buildings never do: it gives energy back. Schneider Electric’s future North American headquarters at Winthrop Center uses digital controls to consume 60% less electricity than a typical Boston office building, easing strain on a grid already buckling under the weight of data centers, electric vehicles, and electrified heating.
That matters more than it sounds. That’s because buildings, long treated as secondary concerns, may offer the quickest way to provide more usable electricity without constructing expensive new infrastructure.
As electricity demand surges, the country faces a growing “time-to-power” problem. AI-driven data centers, electrified transportation, and the push to decarbonize heating are colliding with a grid that was never designed to handle this level of load growth. New generation takes years to permit and build. Transmission takes longer. But roughly 30% of U.S. electricity flows into buildings—and about 40% of that is wasted.
The result is a massive pool of stranded capacity, already paid for and generated, quietly lost every day.
The scale is hard to ignore. Buildings consume roughly 4,000 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, equivalent to powering about 300 million homes. By comparison, data centers alone may require 300 to 400 terawatt-hours annually by 2030—the equivalent of 30 million homes. Even modest efficiency gains in existing buildings could materially change the energy equation.
“Energy saved is energy generated,” says Manish Kumar, executive vice president of digital energy at Schneider Electric, in a conversation.“That saved capacity can directly help solve today’s biggest roadblock—time to power.”
The technologies involved aren’t futuristic. They are extensions of tools many homeowners already use: occupancy sensors, automated lighting, smart HVAC controls, and demand-response systems that coordinate with utilities during peak periods. The difference is scale and orchestration.
What’s changed is that those systems no longer operate in isolation or on fixed schedules. New software platforms continuously learn how a building is actually used—adjusting lighting, heating, cooling, and ventilation in real time based on occupancy, weather, and grid conditions. Instead of small efficiency gains over time, these systems quickly free up real power that utilities can use right away.
The Real Challenge Isn’t New Buildings
Kumar compares it to the quiet transformation underway in residential neighborhoods, where homes are increasingly both consuming and generating electricity. Commercial buildings, he argues, are moving in the same direction—becoming active participants in grid stability rather than passive loads.
That shift is already visible in places like Winthrop Center, which was designed from the outset to integrate power, mechanical systems, and digital controls. The result is a building that dramatically reduces energy consumption while remaining more resilient to grid stress.
But this story isn’t just about shiny new construction.
At Boston University, Schneider Electric is retrofitting Warren Towers—one of the school’s largest dormitories—into a fully electric, net-zero facility, applying the same digital tools to an aging structure. Hospitals offer even sharper proof points. At Penn Medicine, building systems were integrated with operating room schedules, automatically lowering ventilation rates when operating rooms are unoccupied. The change is expected to save nearly $1 million per year in energy costs—without compromising patient safety.
If the case is so compelling, the obvious question is: why isn’t this happening everywhere already?
The answer lies in how buildings are still designed, financed, and valued. Construction remains siloed—mechanical, electrical, plumbing—optimized for the lowest upfront cost rather than long-term performance. That focus ignores how buildings actually function over the course of decades.
As Chris Collins, senior vice president of digital buildings for North America at Schneider Electric, told me: “We are not going to solve this with the supply side alone. The capacity we can unlock today is the waste already in the system.
“The problem is that buildings are still designed around first cost, even though that’s only about 25% of what you’ll spend over the building’s life,” he adds. “When you focus instead on operating cost, resilience, and efficiency, the economics change completely. You’re going to spend the money anyway—either on wasted energy or on systems that lower your costs every month.”
The Energy Payoff Is Worth
For owners of older buildings, retrofits might seem optional, especially during tight financial times. However, this mindset is becoming outdated. Most digital efficiency upgrades deliver paybacks of two to five years, often faster than many traditional capital investments. Financing options—such as performance contracts and shared-savings agreements—allow building owners to upgrade with little or no upfront costs, offsetting expenses through reduced energy bills.
None of this eliminates the need for new generation or new transmission. But in an era defined by energy scarcity and speed, the fastest capacity gains may come from places the country already controls. Buildings—once dismissed as boring—are emerging as one of the most practical tools for addressing America’s power crunch.
“The United States has to address the energy demand challenge,” Kumar says. “And part of the answer is already sitting in our existing infrastructure—paying for itself in less than five years.”
The broader implication is hard to ignore: while policy debates fixate on what to build next, one of the most immediate energy strategies available is to stop wasting what the system already produces. In a grid under pressure from AI, electrification, and climate extremes, efficiency is no longer a sideshow—it is a form of capacity, available now, hiding in plain sight.