- Nonresidential construction evolves as new sources of demand for construction arise to displace some of the old drivers.
- The shift from traditional projects focuses on high-tech facilities, clean energy, advanced logistics, and emerging space infrastructure.
- While change is inevitable, have things stayed the same, as the saying goes?
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
You’ve heard that saying, right?
I’ve discovered much truth in that old chestnut during my more than half-century career. As just one example, while we may now be doing our jobs with the help of personal computers and the channeling of cyberspace, the primary function for many of us remains to write about and disseminate information to co-workers, customers, governing agencies, and/or the public.
The means have evolved, encouraged, and facilitated by speeding up processes, but the goal has remained largely unaltered. It’s too easy to be confronted with that aphorism and have one’s excitement dampened. The way the phrases are arranged causes too much weight to accrue to the back half. All the joy, glory, and surprise ‒ as well as the stress and worry ‒ lie in the first half.
Scientific discoveries and technological advances are in the vanguard of ‘the more things change” portion of the maxim. In essence, the rest of this article will draw on my experience of continually assessing building prospects to highlight where new sources of demand for construction have arisen to displace some of the old drivers.
No one ever heard of data centers back in the day. Now, they make up a big part of the commercial building category, especially given the drop-off in office tower assemblies, with a shift to working from home sending vacancy rates to unprecedentedly high levels in many cities. Large data centers as big as football fields are needed to house the computer hardware ‘servers’ that incongruously, but poetically, make up what is known as ‘the cloud’.
In another development, the burgeoning of artificial intelligence (AI) is not only offering support to ever more data center building, but also the need for structures even bigger than the previous norm. Except there may be a qualification. While the ChatGPT version of AI in America requires huge amounts of processing capacity, the competing Chinese DeepSeek variety uses modeling language that is more streamlined and doesn’t necessitate as much backroom floorspace.
The race for leadership in the digital world emphasizes who in the global arena is making the premier semiconductors, and the U.S. has been exerting a strong effort to restore computer chip manufacturing. Contractors engaged to build these tens-of-billion-dollar plants have learned about ‘clean rooms’ – i.e., confined interiors with no airborne contaminants. Whereas resource and utility projects used to account for the largest total dollar construction projects, they’ve been supplanted by some of these other high-tech undertakings.
Speaking of which, the Internet and the ease of shopping online have completely overturned product delivery systems, pumping up the importance of giant fulfilment and distribution facilities. The enormous box-like nature of these structures may not be that dissimilar to the warehouses of the past. Still, their need to accommodate interior robotics and the vast arrays of cargo portals at shipping bays is unmatched.
There’s a thread related to logistics, a topic area that has taken on considerably more importance in the past decade or so. A consensus acknowledges that the best economies deliver goods and people faster, safer, cheaper, and greener. One initiative garnering a lot more attention is high-speed rail, especially given its successful deployment in Europe, Japan, and China.
China has upgraded the ‘bullet’ train concept to magnetic levitation or ‘maglev’ airplane-like speeds. The dearth of such projects in the U.S. will soon be overcome in at least one of several locations ‒ Texas, California, and/or along the Atlantic coastline. And prototype hyperloops have leapt from the pages of science fiction into reality.
The U.S. construction industry was previously lifted by greenfield manufacturing and resource projects. Some of that work, such as pulp mills and coal mines, has receded into memory, but other such activity has morphed in another direction. Car, truck, and parts plants still account for voluminous capital spending. Still, battery plants ‒ mainly for vehicles, but also for all manner of tools and accessories ‒ loom large on the construction scene.
Many of the new sources of construction demand have an energy bent. At the forefront of additional electricity generation in the U.S. in most recent times have been the two renewables, solar and wind power, with the growth of the former outpacing the latter and being more suitable for small-scale applications, such as rooftop panels. The advancement of clean power solutions that depend on the vagaries of sunlight and brisk breezes is being immeasurably assisted by the coincident appearance of utility-sized (i.e., in the sense of many megawatts) battery storage units.
If nuclear power is what you would like to see, know that there is a likely next wave coming in other countries of what are being termed small modular reactors (SMRs), which require sophisticated prefabrication engineering skills. China and Russia have been the leaders in this area, with Russia even operating a floating SMR off its far northeastern shoreline. The U.S. and Canada are getting into the game with projects underway or planned in Wyoming and Ontario.
Nor have investors in some traditional fossil fuel areas (e.g., refineries and petrochemicals) thrown in the towel, believing that accompanying carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) projects will move their operations to the acceptable side of the CO2-reduction scale.
There’s also a sidebar that points to the building up of hydrogen and ammonia production capacity, since both are cleaner feedstocks in heating processes than oil or natural gas.
Finally, there’s demand for a new type of structure category of construction that is in its infancy, but perhaps to satisfy the adventurous nature of all humanity, which has unlimited possibilities. Have you guessed where I’m going with this? To the stars, my dear reader, to the stars! And, of course, I mean the compelling need for space stations as Earth-based planetary and interstellar launch sites.
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