Even as the federal government repeals regulations and subsidies aimed at improving energy efficiency and developing sustainable infrastructure, many cities in the U.S. are accelerating ambitious initiatives to create environmentally–friendly urban environments. New York City is a paradigm of these efforts; its current administration pledges to reduce 80 percent of the city’s carbon emissions by 2050 (as expressed in Executive Order 26 of 2017). Accordingly, in September 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new mandate that will require 14,500 high–rise buildings to cap their emissions or face significant fines.
This move is a radical departure from the precedent. In the Big Apple’s previous efforts to go green, the city government had launched programs that were often a mixture of incentives, mandates, and challenges, such as PlaNYC in 2007. This program sought to improve energy efficiency in buildings with incentives such as rebates for green features, requirements for white roofs, and stricter ventilation standards, all of which were usually subsidized by the government. However, the recent mandate will require more expensive upgrades – solar panels, energy–efficient heaters and boilers, windows that retain heat in the winter and block it out in the summer – and set annual penalties on building owners who fail to keep energy use below their allotted threshold. According to the official website of the City of New York, fines will be proportionate to the building size and the amount by which the building exceeds fossil fuel use targets.
Mayor de Blasio stated that owners of smaller buildings will be offered low–interest loans from the Property Assessed Clean Energy program to help pay for the renovations. He did not offer an equivalent for larger landlords, saying that “they can handle it”. It remains to be seen how the city government will differentiate between the two and how it will be able to prevent building owners from passing the costs of the improvements to tenants.
These 14,500 high–rise buildings collectively produce 24% of the city’s total greenhouse emissions. While multifamily properties are more prevalent than office buildings, the latter uses twice the amount of energy per square foot. According to the city’s October 2017 Energy and Water Use Report, office buildings use “more electricity for cooling, lighting, and appliances than do multifamily buildings.” Nevertheless, both use large amounts of energy. Lighting and space heating, in particular, are responsible for almost 50 percent of total energy use in these buildings.
Lighting uses an excessive amount of energy, mainly because a quarter of audited multifamily buildings are illuminated by inefficient incandescent and fluorescent lamps. Local Law 134 of a 2016 mandate already necessitates that these buildings upgrade their lighting to meet the New York City Energy Conservation Code. Beside the requirement for higher efficiency lamps, the law necessitates improvements in lighting systems and controls, such as timers and occupancy sensors.
Improvements to space heating require upgrades and fixes to boilers and furnaces. The 2017 Energy and Water Use Report recommends that buildings also install heat recovery for exhaust ventilation or steam condensate, upgrade envelopes, and add HVAC (“heating, ventilation, and air conditioning”) controls and sensors. It further suggests that commercial buildings could decrease overall energy use by 29 percent by simply installing better controls for lighting and HVAC systems.
The de Blasio administration pledged that it would pass laws to “require all large buildings to limit fossil fuel use below intensity targets by 2030 and 2035” (as expressed in “1.5°C: Aligning New York City with the Paris Climate Agreement,” the publication attached to Executive Order 26 of 2017, produced by the New York City Mayor’s Office of Sustainability). To that end, the city government is now taking an aggressive approach to building owners and enforcing efficiency standards through financial penalties. Given the immediate danger now evident from climate change and with the increasing energy needs of the city population, it can be argued that such drastic action is justified. However, it remains uncertain how the costs of these penalties and efficiency improvements will affect the lives of the building owners and the tenants.
Whatever the outcome, the de Blasio administration’s plan to reduce carbon emissions through improved energy efficiency in the city’s tallest buildings sends a clear message: New York City is picking up the pace of progress, and it isn’t waiting for the rest of the country to catch up.