I'm now thinking that you aren't familiar with any large multinational real estate corporation and how they run their business. They frequently have to "keep the lights on" in an unoccupied spaces for various reasons: marketing, general safety, technical impossibility of not air-conditioning a fraction of a shared space, long term contracts, etc. It is not only theft, it is actually a win-win and overall savings.
Here's an example from a nearby location managed by
www.cbre.com : A specialty grocery/supermarket closed and with it two nearby specialty restaurants. Discount grocery/supermarket is going to move in after remodeling the main spaces and ramps to their specification. The restaurant spaces will be used only as a temporary storage of the fixtures of the anchor store while remodeling is done. Meanwhile megawatts of power and a/c are sitting nearly unused and cannot be completely turned off because the remaining local businesses are "open while remodeling".
You only pay for the power you use. If you have a 1 MW transformer connected and energized, it only uses about 10-15 kW of power (the so-called no-load losses due to imperfect magnetic properties of the iron in the transformer). At $0.10/kWh, that might cost you $1000 a month. If you connect 200 kW of bitcoin miners, it then costs you about $15,800 per month. Add in the air conditioning costs for those miners, and you're looking at something in excess of $20,000 per month.
The amount of power used by an air conditioner is related to the load. Many people calculate A/C load in terms of square footage, but that is only accurate when the load is mostly conductive losses through walls and ceilings plus typical office-type equipment. Once you start adding loads like Bitcoin miners, the amount of time your A/C unit has to be on goes way up.
"Keeping the lights on" uses a very small amount of power. Typical lighting loads might be 1.5 W per square foot. Our server racks, once full, will use about 500 W per square foot. One server rack full of SP30s uses several times as much power as all the lights in our building.
If a real estate agency is paying for this while a building is between tenants or up for remodeling, they are either going to be pissed off or they are not paying attention. My guess is the latter.
I have seen some rate schedules for power usage that are use-it-or-lose-it, or where you get a sudden decrease in price if you use a little more power. In a case like that, I can see how it might make sense to consume more. For the real estate case, though, I'm either not following your argument or not agreeing with it.
From your comments about the hanging Ethernet cables I can surmise that you have an experience with catering to the OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) end of the spectrum of customers in the data center businesses.
Nope, but poorly arranged cables impede airflow. The power cables (not pictured) are a more significant contributor to airflow resistance. Also, haphazardly wired network cables result in mistakes during maintenance.