Climate change and the extreme weather that comes with it has become a concern for building operations. Heat waves last longer, grids are facing more strain and buildings that were never designed for today's climate are being asked to perform in it anyway.
For facility leaders and executives alike, that shift turns climate risk from an environmental talking point into a business continuity issue with real financial consequences, according to Trane’s Neil Alexander.
Neil has spent 15 years at the intersection of energy strategy and infrastructure building. He started his career as a mechanical engineer designing HVAC systems. Today he sits at the center of some of the most complex conversations in the industry, from how to navigate complex utility constraints, building-related policies and regulations to how to fund critical facilities improvements by translating technical risk into financial business cases that CFOs can act on.
Here, he explains why many building owners are underprepared for climate risk without realizing it, what's often failing inside buildings under climate stress, and how facility leaders can take the climate resilience into the boardroom.
Neil: Climate risk means your building is operating outside the envelope it was probably designed for, on both sides of the meter. The changing climate is presenting acute extreme weather events and higher temperatures that can have a direct impact on building infrastructure.
On the demand side, HVAC and electrical equipment was likely sized against an expected number of peak heating and cooling hours. Those assumptions were reasonable at the time, but they aren't now. You get capacity shortfall under conditions the system was never sized for, and runtime accumulating faster than the depreciation schedule assumes.
Also, most people miss the supply side. The grid is under the same stress at the same moment you are. Your building's worst day and the utility's worst day are increasingly the same day. Most haven’t considered or designed for that.
Buildings that never needed cooling now do, especially older buildings, northern markets, and schools not built for summer use. Adding HVAC load to buildings that were not designed for it can create real habitability and liability concerns.
For growth, the constraint is no longer just capital. It is also power and capacity, and that is becoming a critical issue for any organization with a growth plan.
Q: What are building owners most likely to underestimate or overlook?
Neil: Most owners still haven’t put a real number on what their building is worth to the business—or what one hour of downtime actually costs. Until they do, every resiliency decision is basically an educated guess. In some buildings, an hour down is an inconvenience. In others, it’s a six-figure hit.
Q: How should owners think about the difference between acute events and chronic conditions?
Neil: Acute events reveal weakness. Chronic conditions create it.
Acute events are shocks. They test whether a building and the business it supports can remain operational and recover quickly. Because they're visible and memorable, they usually have owners, budgets and response plans.
Chronic conditions are different. They're ongoing stressors like higher ambient temperatures, sustained humidity, water constraints and grid instability that erode performance and ultimately consume operating margin over time.
Everybody has a plan for hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods, or at least they should. But far fewer have planned for a building to operate 40 days a year in conditions the equipment was sized to handle only a handful of times. A storm is a discrete event that you recover from. This kind of climate drift is not. It never resolves.
Q: Can you walk us through what might happen inside a building during a realistic climate-stress scenario?
Neil: It often looks less dramatic than people expect. Start with a heat wave and a grid constraint. As ambient temperatures rise, condenser performance drops at the same time building load is climbing. Capacity falls just when demand peaks.
Then the grid event hits. In many commercial buildings, the plant drops, controls reboot, and sequences restart unevenly. Backup power may protect IT, but likely not the full building system. Recovery becomes disordered and different systems need different amounts of time to reboot.
That’s where the real operational loss shows up. After even a short utility disruption, systems don’t just snap back to normal. They restart cold, indoor conditions drift, moisture can hang around, and the building often comes back online slowly and inefficiently, triggering another demand spike as everything tries to recover at once.
That’s why a brief power disturbance can turn into a multi-day operational problem. They usually don’t fail all at once. They lose resilience first, then performance, and finally the ability to operate normally.
Q: How does a technical building failure become a business loss?
Neil: In multiple ways, and the repair bill is rarely the biggest one.
First is direct interruption: lost tenant activity, missed production or spoilage, disrupted service, reduced occupancy. Second is financial penalty: increased demand charges, lease exposure, compliance fines, insurer repricing. Third is the slow-burn effect, like reputation damage, lower lease renewal rates, reduced staff productivity, weakened tenant confidence.
Most organizations still treat building issues as maintenance events but, in reality, they often become revenue, risk and workforce events.
Q: What's a practical way for an owner to translate broad climate projections into a real risk assessment – and build a plan around it?
Neil: Most of these efforts die because someone hands the facilities leaders a 2050 projection and there's nothing to act on inside it.
Start with your own data instead. Look at hours-over-design and benchmark against yourself or others: how often are you running past the condition your equipment was sized for, and is that number moving?
Look at demand peaks month over month: when did they hit, and why?
Pull your failure history by asset: what's breaking, how often, and is the interval shrinking? And be honest about response readiness: what visibility, control, and service coverage do you have today?
In the next 12 months, you can do a lot without capital investments. Model the cost of doing nothing over five and 10 years.
Start by quantifying downtime. Put a real number on an hour offline and write the emergency plan against it: what gets shed, what gets protected, who decides.
Also, revisit controls and sequencing. Most buildings are still running sequences written at commissioning for a building that no longer exists.
Then, the capital cycle is where the bigger moves happen. Every replacement is a chance to re-size for the conditions you operate in now rather than the ones from 20 years ago.
Q: Where do intelligent building systems fit into a resilience strategy?
Neil: They create value before, during and after an event.
Before, they can make hidden risk visible by exposing degraded assets, controlling drift, and managing abnormal loads. These are the conditions that signal rising exposure.
During, they support faster, more consistent response through automation, sequencing, and load management.
After, they provide the record needed to understand what happened, quantify impact, and justify future investment.
Intelligent building systems often don't create resilience by themselves. What they can do is make the building data legible enough for teams to act earlier, respond better and make stronger capital decisions afterward.
Q: How should facilities leaders make climate resilience a board-level business conversation?
Neil: It takes a mindset shift first. Your job in that room isn't to explain the building.
It's to explain how the building serves the business, and what happens to the mission when it doesn't.
So, stop bringing facilities language into a finance room. If the conversation starts and ends with sustainability, it feels optional. If it starts with uptime, cost exposure, and continuity, it's immediate.
Lead with the exposure number, not the project. For example, “An hour of downtime costs us X, we have Y hours of exposure over five years, here's what it costs to remove most of it." A board knows how to have that conversation more than “we need to replace the chillers.”
Bring the cost of doing nothing, too. Boards say no to spending comfortably. They're much less comfortable saying no once someone has quantified what the “no” costs.
Lastly, connect it to the growth plan. If building capacity constrains business operational or growth goals, that's not a facilities issue, it’s a board priority.
