At RMH, our long-term partnership with DEN has offered a front-row seat to the evolving challenges airports face: balancing rapid growth with sustainability, providing passenger comfort while modernizing aging systems, and planning infrastructure that must remain adaptable for decades to come.
Airports as Small Cities
The scale of DEN is hard to overstate. Covering approximately 34,000 acres, DEN covers more land than Manhattan and the city boundaries of Boston, Miami, and San Francisco. Like a city, the airport must manage critical systems such as energy, water, safety, technology, and transportation, all while serving millions of people every year. Unlike a city, however, it operates on an unforgiving 24/7 schedule with little room for error.
This reality shapes the way engineers approach design. Every building system, from HVAC to electrical to communications, must perform at scale and meet the diverse needs of terminals, concourses, security, loading gates, baggage handling, crew and maintenance facilities, lounges, secure communication rooms, and restaurants. These systems also require redundancy and backup power so that mission-critical operations never falter.
Retrofitting these systems in a non-stop airport environment poses challenges that are very different from those of new construction. As airports outgrow older central plants or stretch the capacity of existing systems, engineers must find ways to integrate new technologies without disrupting daily operations and maintaining energy consumption profiles. That balance of growth, adaptability, and resilience is a defining trend in aviation infrastructure today.
Engineering for Growth and Efficiency
Passenger volumes continue to rise at DEN and across the aviation industry. Meeting this demand requires more than additional square footage; it demands smarter, more efficient systems.
Airports are under pressure to electrify heating and cooling systems, reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, and prepare for emerging technologies such as microgrids and renewable energy integration. Cities like Denver are accelerating this shift through codes and regulations that drive toward higher efficiency and electrification. For engineers, this means designing building systems that strike a balance between sustainability, resilience, and grid capacity.
When people think about aviation and sustainability, the conversation often begins and ends with airplanes — which are undeniably large fossil-fuel systems. But what many don’t realize is that airports themselves are leading the charge in sustainable, electrified design. From energy-efficient central plants to electrified heating and cooling, airports like DEN are pioneering strategies that will define the future of resilient infrastructure.
Increasingly, airports are also exploring bold alternative energy sources. As Denver International Airport announced in a 2025 article, it has issued an RFP to study the feasibility of a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) as a potential clean baseload energy source. This underscores how airports must prepare not only for incremental upgrades in solar, wind, or battery systems, but also for entirely new energy paradigms that could transform their long-term infrastructure planning.
Each decision, whether for a control center relocation, an office expansion, or a concourse retrofit, becomes a case study in weighing cost, resilience, sustainability, and future readiness. Should a system maximize existing equipment for affordability? Should it prioritize cutting-edge electrification and energy recovery? Should it emphasize modularity to accommodate unknown future needs? These are the kinds of trade-offs that define the future of aviation facilities.
Lessons from the Field
Working at DEN highlights several broader lessons that apply to airports—and large-scale facilities—everywhere:
- Flexibility is essential. That means designing automation and control systems that are scalable, adaptable, and future-ready. Airports increasingly rely on integrated platforms that connect HVAC, lighting, and communications across vast campuses. For these systems to remain effective, they must allow for modular expansion, seamless retrofits, and quick adoption of new technologies as they emerge, including potentially transformative energy sources like SMRs or hydrogen,
- Sustainability and resilience go hand in hand. Energy-efficient systems, central utility plant upgrades, electrified heating, and controls upgrades are as much about long-term operational resilience as they are about environmental goals. As DEN’s recent alternative energy initiative demonstrates, sustainability now means thinking beyond renewables and considering how clean baseload power, microgrid readiness, and grid resilience can be combined to support future passenger growth.
- People remain at the center. Infrastructure ultimately serves human comfort, safety, and productivity. Today, that extends beyond temperature control to measurable design factors, such as indoor air quality, acoustics, and circadian lighting.
Designing building systems for airports is about more than comfort; it’s about resilience, adaptability, and efficiency at a scale few other facilities demand. Every system, from HVAC to communications, must be expandable and integrated so that new technologies can be layered in without disrupting operations. At DEN, we’ve seen firsthand how flexible, future-ready systems are essential to meeting both today’s needs and tomorrow’s demands.
Designing for People, Planning for the Future
At RMH, we view every project at DEN as more than an upgrade; it’s an investment in Colorado’s identity and in the future of aviation. Airports shape first impressions, drive local economies, and connect communities across the globe.
The future will demand even more ambitious strategies. Airports are preparing for electric aircraft, hydrogen fueling, autonomous ground support equipment, and now, potentially on-site clean power generation through nuclear or other advanced technologies. Infrastructure must keep pace. By helping DEN modernize, expand, and operate more efficiently, we’re not just designing building systems. We’re helping chart the path for airports of the future: places that are sustainable, resilient, and designed with people in mind.