🌐 Remote-Control High-Rises: HVAC That Pays You Back

Climate Archetype: ✅ De-Risked Adoption — Make it credible: buyers say yes when performance is guaranteed.

In 2023, I went to Las Vegas for Blueprint, the largest proptech conference in the U.S., bringing together the built world’s innovation ecosystem—startups, VC investors, and real estate executives from the industry’s biggest developers.

On stage, a panel of corporate executives touted their sustainability strategies. Their companies were viewed as leaders in the built environment, taking action across their urban high-rise portfolios to accelerate the low-carbon transition.

As they discussed their approaches, I remember thinking: That’s it?

I didn’t hear leadership or long-term commitment. I heard low risk tolerance. I heard yes to sustainability, provided the payback is fast. I heard business as usual. Boring. Uninspired. Safe.

Which, while frustrating, is also understandable.

Why Real Estate Often Says No

Real estate developers construct buildings with the expectation that they’ll last for decades. In New York City, the median age of buildings is 90 years old. Those are buildings from another era, pre-dating World War II.

That world is hardly imaginable to us today, save for the fact that we live and work in its artifacts—the buildings that give New York City and other cities their character.

Those old buildings operate old, inefficient equipment. Taking care of it is a pain. Upgrading it is also a pain. Even owners who genuinely want their buildings to run more efficiently hesitate to entrust the job to a startup with a limited track record.

Meanwhile, in proptech, most startups sound the same. Tech-y names. Sleek websites. Big promises. All touting their world-class tech, performance, ease of installation, and (highly caveated) guarantees.

If you’re the owner of a 60-story high-rise and you bet on the wrong early-stage tech company to overhaul your heating and cooling system, you’re not just wasting money—you’re creating angry tenants.

Yet, the upgrade is precisely what the world needs. Buildings account for 40% of global carbon emissions. And the biggest culprit inside them? Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems (HVAC).

If HVAC were a country, it would rank second in global carbon emissions—behind only China and ahead of the U.S.

For real estate companies, addressing these challenges is riddled with risks—cost, climate, and comfort.

And that is the world in which Parity operates.

The High-Rise Specialists

Brad Pilgrim, co-founder & CEO of Parity, had to add one slide to his Series B funding deck: 

"We're not just another energy efficiency company. Don't stop here. Keep going. You’ll be interested."

Investors were lumping Parity in with a sea of other energy efficiency startups. But his tactic worked. They read on. In 2024, he closed the $19 million funding round. 

While Parity is a proptech company with a cool, hipster name, it has little else in common with its peers. Parity provides remote HVAC optimization as a service—and backs every project with a performance guarantee.

It focuses on a specific, often ignored building sub-segment: large multifamily high-rises and hotels. Buildings with central HVAC plants and big utility bills, but lean in-house facilities teams.

Brad's team walks a building in 90 minutes from basement boilers to rooftop cooling towers 60 stories above—and then guarantees exactly how much energy they can save.

If Parity falls short, they cover the difference with their own cash.

But they don’t fall short. Instead, Parity saves its clients up to 30% on their energy costs with payback often coming as quickly as year one.

Here’s what that looks like for Parity’s customers in New York City:

It’s a business model fueling Parity’s growth. Today, the company manages systems for over 100 million square feet of commercial real estate across multiple U.S. markets, with more on the way, including expansion into Denver and Seattle.

And it’s helping Parity land marquee clients, such as AvalonBay, one of the largest multifamily REITs in the country. Parity operates inside the company’s high-rises in New York City and Boston, with expansion set for Washington, D.C.

How Parity Wins in a Risk-Averse Market

So how does Parity stand out in a market that typically says no by default?

It runs the same playbook in every tower. Same walk-through, business case, operating model, guarantee, and standard of proof.

Here’s what that looks like:

1. Choose a narrow segment where the economics work

Parity doesn’t try to sell into “buildings” as a generic category.

From the start, the focus has been multifamily and hospitality towers with central plants: condos, multifamily REITs, and hotels with boilers, chillers, cooling towers, and hefty utility bills—but lean facilities teams.

They skip buildings where the economics and staffing model don’t fit. That’s why the 90-minute promise is credible: they’re only walking into buildings where their model works.

The Upshot:
Owners see a specialist, not a generalist proptech vendor. Parity’s team isn’t chasing assets they can’t materially improve.

2. Sell a deal that works for all the stakeholders

Parity enters every deal recognizing there’s more than one buyer: finance, asset management, sustainability, operations, and the on-site facilities team.

The value proposition is designed for every conversation—spend less on energy, cut carbon emissions, keep tenants and guests comfortable, and don’t add staff to make it all work.

Then they make that value-prop super simple:

• How the building’s heating and cooling sytems runs today

• How much energy and money they expect to save

• When the project pays back

• Backed with an ironclad performance guarantee

The Upshot:
Sustainability teams get a path grounded in numbers. Finance leaders get a deal they can defend on cost, savings, and risk.

3. Offer an end-to-end service

Many proptech companies deliver software and hardware and put the onus on the site’s staff to figure it out. The dashboard looks impressive, but the plant keeps running the way it always has.

Parity takes the opposite approach. They connect into the existing HVAC system and take over day-to-day operation as a remote facilities team:

• Adjusting schedules and setpoints
  

• Coordinating equipment so comfort holds
  

• Troubleshooting and tuning from afar
  

Then they report back on the metrics that matter: fewer alarms and comfort issues, lower utility bills, and steady performance.

Parity doesn’t add another tool to the stack. It takes over the stack.

The Upshot:
Lean facilities teams get capacity. Owners get financial return and better performance.

4. Turn HVAC control into a grid and revenue asset

Once Parity is running the building’s plant remotely, the control layer becomes a path to partnering with and earning from the grid.

Many of Parity’s customers already participate in demand response and other grid programs. Before Parity, that meant manual scrambles. A notice from the utility during a heat wave, a rush to figure out what to shut off, and often an uncomfortable afternoon for residents whose thermostats were no longer under their own control.

Parity uses its building-wide visibility and remote control capabilities to fine-tune and automate that process:

• Precondition the building ahead of an event
  

• Shed load quickly and precisely during peak windows
  

• Avoid overcorrecting when resuming normal operations, so comfort holds and costs don’t spike

Now, Parity is enabling its customers to participate in additional grid programs, such as peak curtailment, in which Parity optimizes the buildings' energy consumption, reducing it during periods when energy prices are high.

The Upshot:
Owners receive a second source of financial value in addition to savings. The grid gains flexible, predictable capacity.

Supercool Takeaway

Parity innovates on three fronts: the technology, the business model, and the offer. That's an excellent prescription for how climate tech companies can sell into complex markets to scale solutions that accelerate revenue growth and impact.

Operator Takeaways

Specialize in one pattern. Build expertise on a single, repeatable asset type to know the mechanics, economics, and savings well enough to predict and prove them.

Turn tools into ongoing service. In many industries, companies are trimming staff. Offering to run the ops instead of just selling the software can address core customer pain points.

Guarantee what you can meter. If you can directly measure your impact, tie your promise to that number, and back it in the contract.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

Remote-Control High-Rises: HVAC That Pays You Back

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

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Stat of the Week: 35%

The percentage of energy devoted to heating and cooling buildings in the U.S. That’s the largest share attributable to any end use.

Quote of the Week:

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🌐 The Climate Adoption Playbook

At California’s ports, a billion diesel miles are driven every year. Most of those miles come from small, independent carriers hauling containers from ship to warehouse.

The work is essential. The pollution is constant.

Many see electrification as the future. Electric trucks are quieter, cleaner, and cheaper to operate than diesel. But each truck costs nearly $400,000 upfront. Add in chargers and depots, and the economics shut small carriers out.

The adoption barrier ins’t unproven technology. It’s the price tag.

Forum Mobility changes the math.

Instead of buying a new truck, trucking companies pay one monthly fee that covers everything—truck, charging, depot access, and maintenance.

As co-founder and CEO, Matt LeDucq put it: 

“By bundling trucks and charging into one subscription, we make running electric cheaper than diesel. That’s something small carriers can finally say yes to.”

In 2024, Forum opened the world’s largest electric truck charging depot at the Port of Long Beach in Southern California.

Forty-four fast chargers. Nine megawatts of capacity.Built to keep hundreds of trucks running every day.

Operator takeaway: climate solutions scale when subscriptions replace upfront costs.

From Module 6 of Supercool’s Climate Adoption Playbook: Financing as the Unlock. Learn more about our course designed to help operators scale climate solutions.

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Related

Virtual Power Plants and the Grid We Already Have

Parity is turning multifamily and hotel high-rises into grid-interactive buildings that can flex when the system is under stress and get paid for it. It’s one more sign that the grid of the future will come from the buildings and devices we already have, not just from additional power generation.

On average, the U.S. grid uses only about 40% of its generating capacity. We’ve built a system big enough to survive peak spikes and worst-case days, which means most of the time, much of that capacity sits idle.

That’s the opportunity: we don’t just have a “build more power plants” problem. We also have a “use the grid we already built more intelligently” problem—and that’s where virtual power plants come in.

Parity is laying the groundwork to build a virtual power plant by weaving together the energy loads of big multifamily and hospitality buildings. Across other building asset classes, we’re seeing virtual power plants gain market adoption.

Budderfly – fast food and small commercial
Budderfly retrofits and runs HVAC, lighting, refrigeration, and controls for restaurants, gyms, manufacturing plants, state buildings, and other small commercial sites. It now manages energy for around 8,000 commercial locations with about 340 megawatts of load under management. In 2025, Budderfly switched on a virtual power plant that began linking hundreds of those sites into real-time demand response across multiple U.S. regions, with plans to bring thousands more into the program.

Sunrun – homes with solar and batteries
In California, Sunrun’s CalReady program has grown into one of the largest virtual power plants in the country. It connects about 75,000 home batteries from more than 56,000 customers, providing up to 375 megawatts of capacity—enough to power around 280,000 homes during peak events. Last year, CalReady paid out more than $1.5 million to participating customers; this year Sunrun expects that figure to reach nearly $10 million.

Renew Home – devices as a demand-side power plant
Renew Home, born from the merger of Nest Renew and OhmConnect, calls itself the largest residential virtual power plant platform in North America. It now has 5+ million households on the platform and controls close to 3 gigawatts of flexible load, with a goal of scaling to 50 gigawatts by 2030. That’s thermostats, water heaters, EV chargers, and other devices making small, automated shifts that add up to the output of multiple traditional plants when the grid is stressed.

Base Power – home batteries in Texas and beyond
Base Power was founded in Texas in 2023 to install whole-home backup batteries and operate them as a fleet to support the grid during peak periods and outages. So far, it has deployed over 100 megawatt-hours of home battery capacity and uses those systems to sell grid services while giving customers multi-day backup power. In 2025, the company raised $1 billion in Series C at about a $3 billion valuation and began turning the former Austin American-Statesman building into a battery factory, with a second, larger factory planned to support expansion beyond Texas.

Taken together, Parity’s towers, Budderfly’s restaurants and small-box retail, Sunrun’s home batteries, Renew Home’s device fleet, and Base Power’s residential storage all point to the same idea: we can get a lot more out of the grid we already built by turning loads into “mini power plants,” instead of treating demand as fixed and uncontrollable.

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

PODCASTS

Life Engineering: From Panic to Possibility—Why Fear Doesn’t Change The World But Agency Does

Marketing Over Coffee: Green Energy Update with Josh Dorfman

RPOAM Real Estate Investor Podcast: Building Wealth with Sustainable Materials: Climate Innovation in Real Estate with Josh Dorfman

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