The Missing Piece in Building Performance Is Not a Technology
Three days at the 2026 Energy Efficiency Exchange in Boise, and one overarching observation: the industry has built a lot of good pieces. What it has not yet built is the layer that connects them.
In May, Pilotlight Co-founder Jeff Nichols spent three days at the 2026 Energy Efficiency Exchange in Boise, hosted by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance. The conference brought together utilities, program managers, service providers, technology companies, and policy leaders from across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and the broader Pacific Northwest.
He came back with one overarching observation: the industry has built a lot of good pieces. What it has not yet built is the layer that connects them.
The pieces are genuinely strong
The sessions at EEX made clear that real, substantive work is happening across the building performance ecosystem.
Clark Korbisch from Power TakeOff made the case that the compliance conversation tends to start in the wrong place. When building owners face a BPS deadline, the instinct is to jump immediately to capital retrofits. But many buildings can achieve meaningful energy reductions through low-cost or no-cost operational improvements before any significant capital work is needed, and starting there reduces the scope of what comes next. The smarter first question, Clark argued, is not what needs to be replaced but what can be optimized within what already exists.
Chris Hanson from Allumia addressed what happens when capital investment is required. The conventional framing treats that investment as a pure cost, a budget line that most building owners approach as an expense. Chris laid out how capital projects can instead be structured to be cash-flow supportable through early adopter incentives, well-modeled savings calculations, financing structures, and private capital. That reframing changes the entire conversation.
A panel featuring program leaders from Seattle City Light, Snohomish County PUD, Puget Sound Energy, Energy Trust of Oregon, and Calico Energy showed what cohort and accelerator programs have produced at scale. PSE's Clean Buildings Accelerator alone has run 23 cohorts, guided more than 220 participants, and helped move over 330 buildings toward compliance. The cohort model works. But two cracks were visible in the conversation: engagement is getting harder, particularly for nonprofits and smaller portfolio owners without dedicated facilities staff, and Tier 2 changes the scale equation entirely. The model that served larger Tier 1 buildings does not yet have an answer for the dramatically larger number of buildings coming next.
The AI keynote from futurist Steve Brown surfaced a question that ran through conversations all week: if data center growth is increasing electricity demand across the Pacific Northwest, can AI also be part of what accelerates energy efficiency at a scale the industry has not yet been able to reach? There is no clear answer yet, but the fact that the question is being raised seriously inside an energy efficiency conference feels significant.
The problem is not the pieces
What Jeff noticed across all of it was not a failure of any individual program, technology, or organization. Operational support, capital structuring, cohort programs, technology tools, utility incentives, benchmarking. Each piece has been built by people doing serious work.
The problem is that they were built largely in parallel, and they still largely operate that way. A building owner trying to navigate compliance today has to find their way across all of those resources independently, often with no clear path from one to the next and no one holding the full picture of their journey.
What does not exist at scale is the connective tissue: the layer that takes those separate resources and turns them into a coherent, navigable experience for the building owner going through it. Getting there is not primarily a technology problem. It is an organizational and relational one, about how the different parts of the ecosystem are designed to work together, not just alongside each other.
Where Pilotlight fits
That gap is the reason Pilotlight exists. The work of connecting building owners to the right resources at the right stage of their compliance journey, and making the full path navigable rather than fragmented, is what the company is built around.
The conversations at EEX reinforced that the individual pieces of the ecosystem are strong and getting stronger. The opportunity now is in the coordination layer that ties them together. That is the work Pilotlight is focused on.