Johnson Controls: Turning Buildings into Climate Champions

Buildings are responsible for nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the IEA, but they often go unrecognised in climate conversations.

For Katie McGinty, Chief Sustainability and External Relations Officer at Johnson Controls, this statistic brings both a challenge and an opportunity. The company, with 140 years of history and 100,000 employees across 150 countries, specialises in technologies that transform buildings from energy burdens into smart, sustainable assets.

"The climate is telling us that until we decarbonise those buildings, we can't effectively decarbonise the climate," she explains. "The great news is that we have a trifecta of technologies today that drives those buildings from being a burden on the climate and the balance sheet to being net zero or even net energy positive."

This trifecta – efficiency, electrification and digitalisation – is changing how organisations view their built environment. When implemented correctly, these technologies can transform buildings into assets that autonomously support operations and even generate revenue by selling electricity back to the grid.

Johnson Controls is implementing this vision within its own built environment. The company is approaching 90% completion of its own science-based emissions reduction targets.

Katie points to Johnson Controls’ factory in Norman, Oklahoma as a prime example. This facility, its second-largest energy consumer, faced the challenge of significantly reducing emissions without interrupting critical operations.

"What we did was to lean into two things: our technologies that drive emission reductions and then frankly, we hired ourselves in 'as-a-service' partnership mode," Katie says. "We minimised or eliminated any need for upfront capital costs and on the backend we delivered significant operating cost reductions."

The results speak for themselves: a 43% reduction in emissions alongside nearly a million dollars in annual operating cost savings. All this while maintaining "nine nines" of uptime in a must-run factory with state-of-the-art equipment.

Read the full story in the August 2025 edition of Sustainability Magazine.

Using energy more efficiently

For decades, energy efficiency has struggled with an image problem. It's difficult to showcase the absence of anything in a tangible, exciting way, let alone something that is already hard to conceptualise like energy. 

"One of the challenges in the energy efficiency space for many decades is that it was hard to make the promise and the possibility tangible because, let's face it, you're talking about achieving the absence of something," Katie explains. "Technology has now emerged that delivers that wow factor."

Heat pumps are one technology that can demonstrate significant energy savings and be seen. Johnson Controls is now manufacturing heat pumps "the size of a small aircraft carrier" that provide impressive visual impact alongside their environmental benefits.

In one Canadian community, Katie explains how a heat pump installed next to a wastewater treatment plant captured waste heat to eliminate 78% of the community's other heating needs.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, energy security became a C-suite level concern for many European facilities. Working with a Danish hospital, Johnson Controls identified an abandoned quarry next door as a potential thermal energy source. Katie says the implementation resulted in "an 80% reduction in energy-related costs and up to 90% reduction in carbon emissions”. 

These dramatic improvements challenge the persistent notion that environmental benefits must come at an economic cost. "Part of our mission is breaking through what has seemed to people for a long time to be inherent – if it's good for the environment, it must be bad for the economy," Katie says.

Existing buildings and retrofits

Not every building project starts from scratch. According to the World Economic Forum, 80% of buildings that exist today in cities will still be in use in 2050. In these urban areas, buildings account for as much as 60% of overall carbon emissions. 

Katie explains that retrofits of older buildings can sometimes deliver even greater improvements in emissions and cost savings because there's "so much more inefficiency to be addressed”. 

The greater challenge, she feels, is often getting executive attention. Buildings typically don't capture C-suite interest unless something goes wrong.

"The bricks and mortar of an organisation aren't typically what is capturing the attention and imagination of the boardroom," Katie explains. "When the CEO shows up and heads for the elevator, she's pushing B for the boardroom, not B for the basement."

She feels that this mindset needs to shift for organisations to recognise that their physical infrastructure can be a strategic asset rather than just housing for their operations. When executives understand this potential, even briefly, transformative projects can take root.

Managing data centre growth

With the explosive rise of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, data centre capacity is expanding rapidly. However, this growth faces four critical challenges: energy, water, space and noise. Johnson Controls is looking to address all four through innovative partnerships and technologies.

"At Johnson Controls, we've been privileged to partner with the data centre companies as well as the chip makers," Katie says. "Only a year ago it was thought that our chillers needed to produce water as cold as 5°C to tackle that heat."

Through collaboration with chip manufacturers, Johnson Controls has engineered solutions that can achieve the same cooling effect with water at 23°C. This seemingly small change translates to massive efficiency gains. "We calculate that we're achieving that cooling with 40% less energy," Katie says.

Submarines are the unlikely source of a solution for space efficiency. Johnson Controls has adapted magnetic bearing technology, originally developed for submarines, to create compressors that are 44% smaller than conventional oil-bearing versions.

This size reduction opens new possibilities for vertical data centre construction. "When we can produce a machine whose weight and footprint is 44% less, that's not just a nice circular economy sustainability story," Katie explains. "That's a machine that now can sit on a roof and be supported by a vertical data centre."

As computing becomes more intensive with each generation of AI technology, heat management becomes more challenging. Katie sees this as an opportunity rather than just a problem. "It drives us to ever greater improvements in the operational capabilities of our chillers," she says. "But it also provides an opportunity to capture that heat and then put it to work for the community as a whole."

This concept is gaining traction in Europe and parts of the United States like Virginia, where data centres are being integrated with district heating systems. Waste heat from computing can be captured by heat pumps and distributed to nearby schools, hospitals or manufacturing facilities.

"That's an evolution that we think changes the whole story about data centres, from being a challenge on community infrastructure to being an igniter of new investment in and strengthening of community assets and competitiveness," Katie explains.

The potential for AI

While AI development drives increasing energy demands for data centres, it also holds potential for optimising building performance. 

Katie explains that during COVID lockdowns, commercial buildings saw occupancy drop by 80% but energy consumption fall by only 20%.

"Buildings are almost all analogue. They are a giant all and off switch, and when they turn off, bad things happen. So we leave them running all the time," Katie explains.

The shift from analogue to digital buildings, powered by sensors and AI, is changing this reality. Johnson Controls' digital platforms can process up to a million data points per minute, allowing buildings to automatically adjust based on occupancy, weather conditions and energy pricing. At Stanford University, Katie explains that this approach reduced peak energy needs by 20% while saving US$500,000 annually. 

"We can achieve on the order of 10% to 20% additional emission reductions, even for brand new buildings and those with the highest level of green certification," Katie says. "When those buildings were inaugurated and initiated, they may have been tuned so that they had the highest level of green performance, but over time those set points get changed or those set points migrate."

From climate culprit to champion 

AI, the energy transition and geopolitical shifts are already happening and, by 2050, will touch every part of life, buildings included. 

Katie thinks that buildings are set to transition beyond digital to become autonomous. 

She says: “When a building is responding instantaneously to command and instruction it can ensure healthy air for occupants, drive operating costs down and talk to the grid, potentially making the building owner money in selling energy capacity or physical energy back to that grid. The trajectory is exciting.” 

“As we do that, the building goes from being a major climate culprit to a real climate champion.” 

Read the full story in the August 2025 edition of Sustainability Magazine.