A couple of years ago, sustainable architect Ed Mazria uncovered a surprising shift in America. Even as developers construct billions of square feet of new buildings across the country in the coming decades, electricity use in the built environment will decline.
According to Mazria, 60 billion square feet of new homes, offices and other structures will get erected in the U.S. by 2030. But in a 2013 report, the Energy Information Administration projected that energy use in the built environment would barely budge in the coming decades — or could even fall drastically under the right technology and policy conditions.