Saudi Arabia can turn efficiency into an energy advantage

Across the Gulf region, many towers may be performing very differently today from how they were originally designed to perform.

The certification plaque tells us what a building achieved at the point of design and delivery. The meter tells us how it is performing now.

The gap between the two is where significant savings, stronger asset performance and long-term value can often be found.

The world’s appetite for energy is entering a new phase. Oil is trading near $100 a barrel, while electricity demand from data centers is accelerating rapidly as artificial intelligence workloads expand.

The International Energy Agency expects data center electricity consumption to grow at around 15 percent a year through 2030, more than four times faster than total global electricity demand.

For energy producers, that represents an opportunity on a generational scale. For energy users, it creates an equally strong incentive to make every unit of energy work harder.

The built environment sits at the center of that equation. Buildings account for roughly 30 percent of global final energy consumption, and in the Gulf region, cooling places particularly heavy demands on electricity systems during the summer months.

That is not a design failure; it is simply the reality of operating buildings in a hot, arid climate. It does, however, mean that improving operational efficiency has a direct financial impact, particularly across large commercial portfolios.

One of the most persistent challenges in the building sector is the performance gap between design and operation.

This is a global issue and is well documented across many markets, including high-performance and certified buildings.

A building may have been designed exceptionally well, but once construction is complete and the asset moves into operation, facilities teams are not always fully aware of every assumption, control strategy and operational characteristic embedded in the original design.

I think of it as the Ferrari problem. We engineer a machine capable of very high performance, but once the keys change hands, it may be driven like an ordinary city car.

The capability is still there, but unless the operator understands how to use it, much of that performance remains unrealized. Buildings are no different.

Certification establishes a strong foundation, but maintaining that level of performance requires continuous attention throughout the life of the asset.

For most of my career, closing this gap meant dealing with an enormous amount of building data and trying to identify meaningful issues manually.

The problem was rarely a lack of information. It was that teams had more data than they could realistically interpret and act on. This is where AI is beginning to change the economics of building performance.

Google’s work with DeepMind is one of the clearest examples.

In 2016, DeepMind applied AI to the cooling systems within Google’s data centers.

By learning from sensor data and predicting thermal conditions ahead of time, the system reduced cooling energy consumption by up to 40 percent.

By 2018, AI was directly controlling parts of the cooling system under human supervision and delivering average energy savings of around 30 percent.

That example matters because it was not a laboratory experiment. It was applied to live, critical infrastructure.

The same underlying principle is now becoming increasingly accessible to the commercial building sector.

AI can analyze thousands of data points continuously, identify patterns that would otherwise be difficult to detect and help operators adjust systems as conditions change.

This does not mean replacing facilities managers or engineers. Quite the opposite. It gives them better visibility and more precise tools to operate the assets already under their control.

The potential savings are significant.

The IEA estimates that optimized HVAC control can reduce building energy consumption by around 10 percent, while broader adoption of existing AI applications across the economy could avoid approximately 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions by 2035.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Lighthouse Network has also shown how digitally enabled operations can reduce energy, water, waste and emissions while improving productivity at the same time.

The important point is that efficiency should not be treated only as an environmental objective. It is fundamentally an operating strategy.

Consider a 50,000 sq. meter office tower consuming around 250 kilowatt-hours per sq. meter each year. That equates to approximately 12.5 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually.

Improving operational performance by 15 to 20 percent could avoid roughly 1.9 to 2.5 gigawatt-hours each year, translating into hundreds of thousands of riyals in annual savings.

Apply that across a portfolio of major assets and the impact quickly reaches millions of riyals, alongside meaningful carbon reductions and lower demand on the electricity grid.

At scale, efficiency does more than improve individual buildings. It frees up energy capacity that can be used elsewhere in a growing economy.

Efficiency also provides a form of resilience that is often overlooked. The European energy crisis of 2022 demonstrated how quickly energy prices can affect operating costs.

Every unit of energy permanently removed from a building’s baseline is one whose future price can no longer hurt the owner. In that sense, efficiency is not simply a sustainability measure. It is also a hedge against cost volatility.

There is growing evidence that the value extends beyond utility bills.

Interface, the American flooring manufacturer, began its Mission Zero program in the 1990s and went on to report hundreds of millions of dollars in cumulative avoided waste costs.

In commercial real estate, CBRE analyzed approximately 20,000 office buildings in the US and found that LEED-certified buildings achieved an adjusted rent premium of around 4 percent after accounting for factors such as location, age, size and renovation history.

Capital markets are moving in the same direction.

Sustainable finance has become an increasingly important part of regional capital markets, and Saudi Arabia emerged as the largest sustainable finance issuer by volume in MENA in 2025, with issuance of approximately $19.7 billion.

This matters because capital increasingly favors projects that can demonstrate measurable performance rather than simply make commitments.

That distinction will become more important over the coming decade.

The strongest sustainability strategies will not necessarily be those with the most ambitious language.

They will be the ones that can demonstrate clear operational results, credible savings and a strong financial case.

Saudi Arabia is particularly well placed to benefit from this shift.

The scale of development under way across the Kingdom means that decisions made today about how buildings are operated will have an impact for decades.

Saudi Arabia is targeting an electricity generation mix of approximately 50 percent renewables and 50 percent natural gas by 2030, alongside its net-zero ambition for 2060.

The strategic direction is already established. The next step is to ensure that the intelligence used to operate buildings matches the ambition with which they are being designed and constructed.

This should not be framed as a choice between energy production and sustainability.

The two are entirely compatible. The Kingdom’s strength as an energy producer can support its leadership in efficiency, technology and asset performance.

Using energy more intelligently does not compete with the energy sector; it strengthens the wider economy by lowering operating costs, improving asset performance and increasing theproductivity of infrastructure.

For executives, the starting point does not need to be complicated.

Alongside strategy and target setting, they need a clear view of how their assets are actually performing.

Start with the meter. Use AI to compare actual performance with design intent, identify where the gaps lie and determine how best to close them.

The Kingdom has led the world in producing energy for generations. The next chapter, already being written here, is about leading in how intelligently that energy is used.