Cadillac, Michigan is putting solar, battery storage, new HVAC, lighting, EV charging and microgrid capability into seven municipal buildings, including city hall and the wastewater treatment plant. The city is paying nothing up front.
Budderfly is investing roughly $4.4 million and recovering it out of the energy savings the upgrades produce. Schneider Electric supplies the energy management and building automation layer that monitors and controls the sites. Council approved the deal in late July and it was announced August 5.
How energy-as-a-service moves capital off a city’s books
The model isn’t new, but the shape of this one is worth understanding. Under energy-as-a-service, the provider owns the equipment and carries the risk. The city buys an outcome rather than a chiller. If the savings don’t show up, that’s the provider’s problem, which is a very different risk allocation than a conventional performance contract where the municipality still finances the work.
Cadillac City Manager Marcus Peccia described it as “taking a smarter, more resilient approach to serving our community” without requiring upfront taxpayer investment. For a city that size, the realistic alternative isn’t a slower retrofit. It’s no retrofit, because the capital request never survives a budget cycle.
Budderfly CEO Al Subbloie made the same point from the vendor side: “Cities shouldn’t have to choose between modernizing critical infrastructure and managing limited budgets.”
Resilience is doing the selling, not carbon
Notice what’s driving the pitch. The microgrid capability exists to keep essential services running when the grid drops, and the wastewater plant is in scope for exactly that reason. A treatment plant that loses power becomes a public health event within hours.
Schneider projects the U.S. grid could hit a supply and demand inflection point by 2028, and puts the annual cost of outages to the U.S. economy near $150 billion. Whether or not those figures hold, they show how these deals now get sold. Decarbonization is the byproduct. Uptime is the product.
That reframing matters for anyone bidding municipal work. The scope items are the same ones a green retrofit would carry, but the memo going to council is about continuity of operations, and that clears political hurdles a carbon argument does not.
What Schneider is actually building
Cadillac is an early municipal deployment under Schneider’s Accelerating Resilient Infrastructure Initiative, launched in fall 2025 with more than 20 partners and $7.5 billion in available financing. The group now runs past 40 members, including Microsoft, Arcadis, Sunrock Distributed Generation and Zurich Resilience Solutions.
Schneider says the project went from first engagement to council approval in roughly six months. That’s the number to watch. Municipal energy projects usually die in procurement rather than engineering, and six months from conversation to approval is faster than most cities can run an RFP.
Budderfly serves more than 9,000 customer locations nationwide. If the aggregated-savings model works at municipal scale, small cities become a volume market, and the binding constraint stops being capital and becomes how many electricians and controls technicians are available. That’s the same constraint sitting under every other kind of project right now, including net zero targets on new federal buildings like the Flagstaff federal courthouse.