Sitting down with Jeremy McLeod feels less like an interview and more like an invitation to slow down and recalibrate your world’s view.
Jeremy is kind-spoken and doesn’t rush to answers. He doesn’t perform ego. He speaks as someone who has spent decades thinking deeply and wholeheartedly about housing, systems, and the less visible consequences of design decisions on the people who live in these buildings. And while our conversation touched on many aspects of the built environment (dignity, responsibility, long-term thinking), one message came through with particular urgency: electrification is not a future aspiration. It is an immediate structural necessity.
The hinge point
For Jeremy, electrification is not simply about swapping technologies or reducing emissions at the margins. It is about fundamentally rethinking how we power buildings, and what kinds of systems we continue to normalise.
“We can talk about better buildings all we like,” he said, “but if we don’t change the way we deliver power to them, we’re just patching over the problem.”
Jeremy didn’t frame electrification as a technological upgrade, but as a structural shift: the hinge point where values translate into infrastructure. How energy is delivered to buildings must be the first decision, not the last one. If that decision is wrong, everything downstream – efficiency measures, operational costs, comfort, emissions – is compromised from the outset.
Buildings last decades. Energy systems often last just as long. Delaying electrification today means entrenching problems well into the future.
“If we keep building homes that depend on outdated energy models, we’re effectively deciding for people how expensive and uncomfortable their lives will be.”
Why this connects to everything else
Jeremy’s persistence on electrification makes even more sense when you understand his broader worldview, one where housing is never neutral, and design decisions are fundamentally ethical.
Housing, he argues, sits at the intersection of social outcomes, environmental impact, and human wellbeing. What buildings allow or prevent in daily life matters. Thermal comfort, access to light, running costs, acoustic privacy, and durability shape people’s health, stress levels, and financial resilience. When these elements are compromised, the impact is felt “in silence” and over decades.
“We know how to build better. The question is whether we choose to.”
In this context, continuing to rely on combustion-based energy systems isn’t just inefficient: it’s a violation of dignity. Jeremy spoke about how the most vulnerable communities often live with the highest energy costs, the worst thermal performance, and the least agency to change their situation. Locking them into fossil fuel dependency through building design is not a neutral technical choice. It’s an ethical one.
Electrification, viewed through this lens, is about giving people resilience, lower operating costs, and future adaptability. Non-electrified buildings, by contrast, risk becoming stranded assets, both socially and economically.
Not waiting for permission
What makes Jeremy’s argument particularly powerful is his rejection of the compliance-only mindset that dominates the industry.
Meeting minimum standards, he suggested, is a very low bar when you understand the consequences of building decisions. Regulations are necessary, but they are not a substitute for judgement or leadership. Designing to the minimum often means locking in mediocrity for decades.
He talked about the difference between what is allowed and what is right. “Value engineering” takes on a very different meaning when you recognise that removing cost upfront simply transfers it to occupants, to communities, to future generations, or to the environment.
“We tend to optimise for the wrong moment in time.”
It’s a deceptively simple observation. Optimising for capital cost rather than lifecycle performance is not a neutral trade-off. It simply shifts who pays, and when.
This is where electrification becomes urgent. Jeremy was clear.
“This isn’t about waiting for new technology. It’s about deciding to act on what’s already available.”
Electrified buildings – designed to work efficiently with a decarbonising grid – are not experimental. They are proven. The barrier is not capability anymore but willingness.
Systems thinking, not silver bullets
Jeremy is cautious about quick fixes. He doesn’t believe in silver bullets, and he was clear that electrification alone won’t compensate for weak systems thinking.
Housing, he argued, is the result of layered decisions: planning frameworks, financing models, construction practices, procurement choices, and cultural expectations. Improving outcomes requires alignment across those layers, not isolated heroics.
What he advocates instead is consistency: consistently higher standards, consistently applied; consistent attention to lifecycle costs; consistent recognition that people live with buildings long after the ribbon-cutting.
Electrification fits into this framework not as a hero technology, but as a baseline condition for good design. It’s the starting point, not the end point.
“The built environment reflects what we collectively tolerate.”
That observation suggests that systemic underperformance is not accidental, but socially permitted. We know combustion-based systems are incompatible with a decarbonising future. We know they impose costs on the least resilient. We know alternatives exist. Continuing to build with them anyway is a choice.
Dignity in the details
What I found particularly compelling was how seamlessly Jeremy’s argument for electrification connects to his insistence on dignity as a core design principle.
Dignity shows up in ordinary, practical ways: a home that is warm without being expensive to run; a layout that allows privacy as well as connection; materials that age well rather than degrade quickly. These are not luxury concerns. They are the baseline conditions of a decent life.
Electrification enables these conditions. It reduces the volatility of energy costs. It improves indoor air quality by eliminating combustion byproducts. It aligns buildings with the direction of the grid, making them assets rather than liabilities as the energy system evolves.
Jeremy challenged the idea that good design must cost more, pointing instead to misaligned priorities and short-term thinking. When design decisions are guided by long-term performance and social outcomes, many “extra costs” disappear or are revealed as false economies.
For him, poor environmental performance and poor social outcomes are usually symptoms of the same underlying issue: decisions made without responsibility for the full system.
Quiet leadership, clear consequences
What stayed with me after the conversation and made me ponder deeply was Jeremy’s position: there was no grandstanding, no urgency theatrics, no appeal to flashy novelty. Just a consistent, disciplined line of reasoning, returned to again and again during the conversation because the consequences of delay are cumulative and unevenly borne.
In an industry often driven by speed, optics, and incremental wins, Jeremy’s thought leadership feels different. He is not chasing the next idea. He is pressing on the same one, because the current system keeps finding ways to avoid it.
Jeremy doesn’t separate architecture from ethics, or design from consequence. He understands that buildings are not just objects, but frameworks for daily life shaping comfort, emotions, cost, health, and resilience long after the original design intent has faded.
For me, this conversation reinforced why electrification matters not as a technical preference per se, but as an expression of what we believe buildings owe the people who live in them. Comfort, efficiency, durability, and dignity are not abstract ideals. They are lived experiences, repeated every day and, in some countries, a guarantee.
Jeremy reminded us how the most consequential questions in the built environment tend to sit at a systems level, where they are easiest to defer and hardest to confront:
Who benefits from this decision?
Who pays for it and when?
And what kind of future are we normalising through the buildings we allow today?
Electrification may not be the only answer to those questions but it is the one that reveals whether we are prepared to stop patching and start deciding.
Giovanna Toldi, Managing Director, Warmset Australia
Breathe — Australia’s most awarded sustainable architecture & design firm
