Buildings produce nearly 40% of global emissions. Property owners and facility managers face increasing pressure to lower energy costs and reduce their carbon footprint. Managing energy use across large commercial portfolios often involves complex data and outdated systems. Property teams need a direct way to track emissions and manage their daily operations.
Noda recently launched Noda Energy to solve this problem. We spoke with Kate Henningsen, CEO of Noda, to discuss how this new platform transforms energy and carbon management for the built environment. In this interview, we cover the specific tools Noda Energy provides and how it helps commercial real estate owners meet their sustainability goals.
Q: Why did you decide to launch Noda Energy right now, and what specific problem does it solve for property owners?
Kate Henningsen: Honestly, the timing is less about us and more about where the problem already was. Buildings are responsible for roughly a third of global energy-related emissions, and here’s the thing people miss: the overwhelming majority of buildings that will still be standing in 2050 are already standing today. So this isn’t really a new-construction problem. It’s an operations problem, and it’s one we already have every tool we need to solve.
The uncomfortable part is how much of it is just waste. A typical commercial building loses 15 to 25 percent of the energy it consumes to equipment running when it shouldn’t be, control sequences that have drifted out of calibration, systems working against each other instead of together. Even the most conservative estimates, using Department of Energy data, put unrealized savings in the tens of billions every year in the US alone. None of that is a mystery. Every one of those problems is understood and fixable today.
What’s actually missing is capacity. Commercial real estate spends roughly $150 billion a year on building operations, and only about 15 percent of open engineering roles are getting backfilled. The people who know how to find and fix this waste, seasoned building engineers, are retiring faster than they’re being replaced. If you can only backfill 15 percent of the roles that keep buildings running, that’s not a talent gap anymore, that’s a crisis. And it’s compounding at the exact moment the grid is under more strain than ever.
So the honest answer to “why now” is that the problem is compounding, it needs a technology solution, and AI has genuinely caught up. A year ago, models were about 32 percent accurate on the actual work building engineers do, nowhere near good enough to trust with a chiller plant. That number moved fast, and it’s what let us build AI that diagnoses and fixes energy waste at the root cause instead of just reporting it back to you in a dashboard.
Q: Commercial buildings account for a massive share of global emissions. How does this new platform help facility managers track and reduce their carbon footprint?
Kate Henningsen: Tracking carbon is basically a solved problem at this point. The industry has spent fifteen years getting good at measuring and reporting emissions, and here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud: measurement on its own hasn’t moved the number much. You can measure a leaky faucet all day. It’s still leaking.
What actually moves the number is operational efficiency, and it remains the cheapest, fastest abatement available in this sector. No capital, no retrofit, no waiting on a rebate program or a capital cycle. The equipment is already installed. It’s simply drifting from its intended design, which is the natural state of every controls system and every piece of mechanical equipment, across millions of buildings, every day, and no human operator, however good, has the capacity to catch all of it.
That’s the work Noda does continuously, at the actual scale of the problem, and carbon reduction falls out of that as a direct result rather than a separate initiative we bolt on. I’ll be honest, this is the unglamorous part of decarbonization. No solar panels, no ribbon cutting. But it’s an enormous piece of the equation, and almost nobody is actually doing it.
Q: Property teams often struggle with outdated systems and fragmented data. How does Noda Energy connect with existing building infrastructure?
Kate Henningsen: Here’s another unglamorous but important truth: agentic AI is only as good as the operational data underneath it, and fragmented, outdated systems are a big part of why so many “AI” deployments in this industry have failed so far.
Our approach is to integrate directly with whatever building management systems are already in place, across all the major vendors, without ripping anything out or locking the owner into some new controls layer. What actually matters underneath that is an independent data layer with an asset ontology behind it. Every building shows up with its own tangle of equipment naming and tagging, most of it inherited from whomever commissioned the system fifteen years ago, so the same piece of equipment can carry a dozen different names across a portfolio, sometimes even inside the same building. AI simply can’t reason across that mess. Our ontology resolves all of it into one consistent, machine-readable stream, so the system knows an air handler is an air handler no matter where it sits or what the original contractor called it. That’s the actual prerequisite for everything else. AI cannot reason across buildings it cannot read.
That doesn’t mean we flatten the assets into one another. Each unit keeps its own history and operating context, so we’re never treating two air handlers in two different buildings as interchangeable. We also connect into the work order systems teams are already using, so when our AI flags something that needs action, it lands inside an engineer’s existing workflow and still gets tracked and measured inside Noda.
Most owners are carrying twenty-plus years of accumulated systems from a dozen different vendors and eras. We built for that because that’s the actual job.
Q: Cost reduction is a major priority for commercial real estate. How does the platform translate energy management into direct financial savings?
Kate Henningsen: It starts with the energy itself. Noda finds ways to run equipment more efficiently, which lowers what a building consumes, what it spends, and what it pays for demand at peak, usually with zero capital expenditure because the equipment is already in place.
Energy is one of the largest controllable line items on a building’s operating budget, so those savings don’t just sit in the utility bill. They flow straight through to net operating income, typically 0.5 to 2 percent NOI growth. That sounds small until you remember how commercial property actually gets valued. Buildings trade on a multiple of their NOI, so at prevailing rates, a dollar of recurring NOI is worth somewhere between 14 and 20 dollars of asset value. An efficiency gain that looks modest on a monthly utility bill can turn into something real the day that building gets refinanced or sold.
Then there’s the labor side, which I’d argue is the more interesting story. No human operator can manually watch every piece of equipment across every building in a portfolio, all the time, catching the small or invisible drift that quietly burns energy in the background. It’s not that people aren’t good enough. It’s a data processing problem at a scale no team could ever staff for, and that is exactly what AI is built to do. On top of that there’s a throughput piece: work that used to sit in a queue for weeks, waiting on an engineer’s schedule or a contractor to show up, now gets done quickly, sometimes automatically. For a team running dozens or hundreds of assets on fixed headcount, that throughput is often the difference between savings that are theoretically possible and savings that actually happen.
That’s the thing I’d underline: the climate case and the financial case aren’t two separate arguments; they’re the same argument. The NOI we generate comes directly from the energy and emissions a building was able to stop wasting. Efficiency that pays for itself in year one doesn’t need a mandate or a subsidy to scale, and that’s why I think this is one of the only decarbonization levers that can actually move at the speed the problem demands.
Q: With increasing regulations around carbon reporting, how does Noda Energy ensure accurate data collection and compliance for large portfolios?
Kate Henningsen: Regulations like Local Law 97, BERDO, SB 253, and the EPBD in Europe all share a requirement most reporting infrastructure was never built for, which is defensibility. Estimated, normalized data was fine when disclosure was voluntary. It stops being fine the moment there’s a regulatory penalty attached to it.
Our view is that compliance data should be a byproduct of running the building well, not a separate annual scramble. Because we’re integrated at the system level and we verify the outcome of every change we make, the savings record inside Noda is continuous, traceable down to the individual action and piece of equipment, and it holds up to an audit. When a portfolio sustainability team needs to file, they’re pulling together something that already exists instead of reconstructing a year of operations across buildings, teams, and systems after the fact.
The other half is forecasting. Owners with real penalty exposure need to know, with enough lead time to actually act, where a building will land against its performance threshold, and which interventions genuinely close that gap. Reporting what a building consumed after the fact is the easy part. Knowing exactly what to do about it, at scale, across a portfolio, is the hard part, and that’s where we spend almost all our effort.
Q: What is the next step for Noda as you roll out this new platform across the US and European markets?
Kate Henningsen: Right now the priority is depth: expanding inside the relationships we already have. That’s where both the economics and the emissions reductions actually get meaningful. One optimized building is a case study. An entire portfolio continuously optimizing itself is a real contribution to an owner’s net-zero commitment.
Europe is structurally a great story for us. Energy prices are high, the EPBD is prescriptive, the building stock is older, so there’s a lot of operational waste sitting there to recover and real macro urgency to go get it. We’re actively building out that side of the business now.
We’re also spending this fall in front of owners directly, in their own markets, because this is a category people need to see running in their own buildings to believe. There’s been no shortage of unfulfilled “AI” promises in this industry, and we want to show that, maybe for the first time, the technology actually backs up the claim.
And we keep hiring: building systems engineers, energy engineers, controls specialists, AI engineers, and people who think a little sideways and want to help solve one of the most urgent problems out there, all on one team. The AI is the visible part but the domain expertise and the culture we’ve built at Noda are what actually make it work.
Our conversation made it clear that effective carbon management requires accurate data and smart automation. Noda Energy gives commercial real estate operators a practical tool to reduce emissions without sacrificing operational performance. The platform addresses the immediate financial and environmental pressures facing the built environment.
The demand for efficient building operations will continue to grow as energy costs and regulations increase. Platforms that simplify carbon tracking offer a necessary upgrade for property managers. Noda Energy provides a direct, scalable solution to modernize commercial real estate.
To learn more visit https://www.noda.ai/
