By Mauro J. Atalla, SVP and Chief Technology & Sustainability Officer, Trane Technologies
Climate Week NYC offers leaders across sectors an opportunity to step back from day-to-day work and consider what becomes possible when we bring our different perspectives and areas of expertise together. The 2026 gathering’s call of Energy. Impact. Action. creates a clear imperative for us all to move beyond ambition and accelerate practical solutions that create real-world value.
As we work to strengthen sustainability, energy security and resilience, leaders have an opportunity to leverage technology to help manage energy demand and reduce resource use. To maximize this opportunity, we will need to collaborate across value chains and sectors, learn from proven solutions and break down barriers to adoption. By combining technological innovation with systems-level thinking and identifying and learning from proven models, we can scale the approaches that work and amplify our impact.
Energy innovation is accelerating sustainability progress
Technological advances put more sustainability capabilities at our disposal than ever before, creating new ways to reduce waste, manage energy and use resources more efficiently. From AI-powered tools that can help decrease a building’s power needs to solutions that can help data centers become good citizens of the grid, the possibilities are expanding rapidly. These innovations can create value for businesses and communities while advancing sustainability outcomes.
The choices we make now about how we leverage these tools and build the critical infrastructure that supports our energy needs will shape economic and environmental outcomes for decades. Sustainability and business performance cannot be treated as separate considerations. Both must be integrated into those choices from the start.
Powerful strategies for real-world impact
Many conversations about energy focus on increasing supply. But managing demand more intelligently is an equally important part of the equation. New technologies that help manage energy and resource demand are already delivering real-world results, creating models that we can build on.
Innovative approaches to reducing resource use and leveraging energy that would otherwise be wasted are delivering powerful sustainability outcomes. In Switzerland, an underground data center is providing heat to nearby homes using Trane® high-efficiency heat pump technology. At full capacity, the system can heat up to 6,000 homes throughout the winter or provide enough hot water for 20,000 five-minute showers each day during the summer months. This is a compelling example of energy circularity, showing how digital infrastructure can become a community energy asset.
New technologies are also giving us significant opportunities to optimize existing infrastructure to better manage energy demand. For example, in a 32-story building in New York City, BrainBox AI’s AI Control solution reduced the energy needed for heating and cooling by 15.8%, avoiding more than 37 metric tons of CO2e over 11 months while cutting costs. And in Amazon’s North American fulfillment network, a BrainBox AI implementation at three Amazon Grocery fulfillment centers reduced energy use by nearly 15%, demonstrating how AI can help reduce the resources needed by logistics infrastructure.
Together, these examples show how technology and systems-level approaches can have deep sustainability impacts while creating business value. By studying what made these successes and others like them possible, we can identify what is replicable and explore how to scale proven solutions more broadly.
The time to take action is now
We’ve made commitments and defined our ambitions. Now, we need to center ourselves squarely in the zone of action and results. As a collaborative sustainability community, we are positioned to do exactly that.
In our work with customers, we begin by listening to the challenges they’re facing, then bring together experts across the value chain to develop solutions. If we apply that same blueprint to our most complex global energy challenges and work in a systemic way across the entire ecosystem, learn strategically from successful examples and work to remove barriers together, we can create better solutions and scale them faster.
Sustainability and business value do not have to compete. The time is now, and the tools are available. Let’s take action and combine our expertise to scale sustainable solutions that create business value while making our world a better place.