Almost as soon as the Clinton Foundation launched its building retrofit program, Bloomberg announced his support for its goals. Part of the foundation's mission is to show hard-nosed building owners that energy efficiency is a shrewd business decision. However, part of the problem is that large buildings have multiple renters -- who often don't know their energy costs -- and landlords who normally take care of the problem by raising the rent.
"We are not motivated by 'doing the right thing,'" Malkin explained to the Joint Economic Committee. The motivation, he said, comes from "making money."
Energy efficiency and profit are not always in the same basket, at least not within a time span many businesses are willing to consider. A successful retrofit project has to have significant reductions and be able to pay back the capital costs within a reasonable time frame, notably, less than five years.
The Clinton Foundation brought in the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado-based energy research group, to help design the strategy for upgrading the Empire State Building. Jones Lang LaSalle manages the project, and Johnson Controls Inc. was awarded a competitive contract to oversee the project installations as well as ensure that the energy savings materialize.
Aiming high by combining low-tech methods
The team now had a major question in front of it: What could it afford to retrofit?
Throwing every "green" idea at a single building to see what sticks can quickly cripple a project financially. Accounting for the age of the building and a host of local environmental factors will determine how much insulation is needed, whether solar panels are a worthwhile investment and what kind of air-conditioning system is best.
After months of analysis, considering 66 energy-efficiency measures and combining them into different "packages" to determine which would work best in tandem, the team ultimately decided to enact a package with eight measures.
The window upgrades will both increase the building's heat retention in the winter and, through the use of a suspended film between each pane of glass, reflect heat in the summer without reducing the amount of visible light. This portion of the upgrade, however, only represents about 13 percent of the project's reduction.
Other improvements to the building include radiator insulation to prevent heat from escaping the building and an upgrade of the chiller system that runs the air conditioning. Five of the eight projects will be completed by the end of the year, representing more than 60 percent of the planned savings. However, none of the upgrades sounds particularly remarkable on its own. In fact, the "most high-tech things" in the building, Malkin said, were the wireless thermostats that improve temperature management.
"But look," he said after the JEC hearing, "it's all innovation." Malkin recalled something his grandfather once told him in the 1970s: "Hardly anything gets invented. But people combine stuff together which had never been combined, and it's in a new way, and it creates a different result."
Strategies abound; implementation is rare
Richard Leigh, director of research and advocacy for the Urban Green Council, the New York chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, said he admires the ongoing renovations at the Empire State Building. The retrofit planning strategy has been known to the academics for many years, he said. What has been missing is practical implementation.
"To change the city's energy consumption," Leigh said, "we have to go after the existing structures."
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4 Comments
Add CommentI remember looking out one of those double-hung windows on
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe 63rd floor - and looking straight down the side of the building. They don't make 'em like that anymore.
Isn't it great that this project shows that one can in fact make relatively low-tech and reasonably low-risk changes to a building to start saving energy in only a few years? I don't think the project would have been better showcasing super-high-tech changes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's more than a little ironic that so many hard-nosed building owners focus so narrowly on the bottom-line that they end up hurting it. Tunnel vision and navel-gazing are bad strategies, here or elsewhere.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHopefully this example will help them look at the bigger picture, helping themselves and everyone else.
Here's a suggestion to improve the energy efficiency of tall buildings. All space in tall buildings is expensive so instead of using a lot of it ducting air at only slightly above atmospheric pressure ( to allow it to flow ), compress the air to two or three atmospheres. The pipes that then carry that compressed air require no more metal , but take up much less space. When the air is vented at room level it will experience a drop in temperature, thus fulfilling the air conditioning requirements without needing large heat exchangers which require cleaning and sterilisation ( to prevent legionaires disease ). Compressed air mains could transport the air from some distance away and be more economic with large industrial plant serving the needs of several large buildings and storing air at night using of peak power. Pushing large volumes of low pressure air through the ducting of buildings is not very efficient.
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