To amend the old adage, the road to hell is paved with good intentions that can't be financed. What does this have to do with making energy efficient building New York's "new normal"? Since the City's greener greater building legislation does not directly require building owners to undertake energy-efficiency upgrades beyond lighting systems, skeptics have said not much will change. Even optimists like me, who point to the new requirements for alteration work to comply with the energy efficiency code, have to admit that the Building Department's enforcement resources will be limited. But I'm still an optimist — grim real estate market and the great loan drought aside — because of the potential game-changing power of building benchmarking and PACE financing.

Our carbon-constrained future requires that we improve the energy efficiency of our building stock in order to achieve comfortable spaces at a minimum environmental and financial burden. Smart building technology has been developed and popularized as the key ingredient to achieving this scalable building energy-efficiency, but there are several key challenges to building energy efficiency that remain unresolved by smart building technology. By recognizing and embracing these challenges, we may avoid the pitfalls of a misplaced faith in technology, and generate solutions to the true underlying causes of buildings’ energy inefficiency.