The Role of Private Capital in Emerging Building Technologies

With buildings consuming 48% of all energy generated in the United States alone, "arch-tech" is the next frontier for addressing two of the planet's most critical future challenges - energy consumption and global climate change. The dawn of the 21st Century has already brought with it the most explosive period of technological innovation and change in human history. Technology has more potential to alter the energy performance of buildings at a quantum revolutionary level than any other big energy-consuming sector today. Yet buildings are still remarkably analog devices, lacking basic technology integration that could boost their energy efficiency and performance. This lack of technologic integration presents huge opportunities for interactive systems to exponentially improve the energy efficiency and performance of buildings, both new construction and even more critically - building retrofits. Today new building technology startups are in their most nascent stages of development. It is here that private capital can play a pivotal role in catalyzing and developing this new "arch-tech" sector, just as it has done in computing for two generations. Venture capital and other forms of private equity will be crucial to bringing this emerging technology sector to today's building industry.