NYSERDA’s Empire Building Challenge: “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere”
Earlier this month, Blueprint attended the launch event for NYSERDA’s Empire Building Challenge educational series, High Rise / Low Carbon. The Empire Building Challenge is a competitive grant program focused on funding creative decarbonizing retrofit solutions for New York’s built environment - so, naturally, we love it! This launch event showcased the planned projects of four Empire Building Challenge awardees: Hudson Square Properties, Empire State Realty Trust, L&M Fund Management and Omni New York. In the interest of full disclosure, Blueprint is a proud technology partner for the Hudson Square Properties project.
In order to meet the state’s lofty 2050 decarbonization goals, there is a particular focus on buildings. At present, 40% of New York state’s greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings - this figure is 70% in New York City! This massive undertaking would be impossible without recognizing and addressing the unique challenges of the older buildings that make up the majority of NYC’s building stock. Put simply, NYC has a lot of older buildings. Those buildings are the opposite of “green” (“brown”, maybe?). Making them “green” without spending an impractical amount of time and money, especially in a city where construction is notoriously challenging, requires innovation.
The Empire Building Challenge is dedicated to supporting innovative new models in decarbonization for exactly these types of buildings: older, existing high rises in NYC. And by encouraging the adoption of new technologies, the Empire Building Challenge also provides a showcase for new NYC-based climate technology companies like Blueprint, which are tackling the challenge of decarbonizing existing buildings.
Blueprint was particularly pleased to see the presentation of Michael Izzo, Vice President of Carbon Strategy at Hines (the operating partner of Hudson Square Properties). We’ve had the pleasure of working with Mike and his team to integrate building load flexibility into their Empire Building Challenge project at 345 Hudson as a Solution Provider. Blueprint used a combination of real-time and historical utility data to (i) establish the building’s baseline load profile and (ii) simulate the techno-economic performance of solar and storage DERs across a range of sizes coupled with the building’s current and future flexible loads. Real-time building baseline data was supplied by Blueprint’s DIGBOX hardware installed at the site (which will also help monitor the site’s ongoing electrical load profile). In total, Blueprint performed over 80 simulation runs over a broad range of DER sizes to estimate the performance of those DERs in different energy markets and their impact upon the building’s demand requirements and energy consumption, which directly translate into asset cash flows as well as reduced electrical needs from the grid and reduced carbon emissions. From these results, the different scenarios can be evaluated and compared to identify the tradeoffs with project economics.
Ultimately, we feel that the Hudson Square Properties project, which embraces a variety of decarbonization strategies (including thermal networking) presents a highly innovative, holistic, and scalable approach towards decarbonization that simultaneously presents building owners and tenants with a way to approach ESG in a profitable manner. Other presenters included: Omni New York, which is demonstrating how to leverage a recapitalization to finance energy retrofitting in affordable housing; L&M Fund Management, which is fully electrifying all loads at one building in a mixed-use complex as a pilot project prior to expanding to the other buildings; and Empire State Realty Trust, which is collaborating with its office tenants to pilot several different projects at the Empire State Building with the hope of replicating successful solutions throughout its portfolio.
An oft-repeated phrase at the event was, “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” If these buildings - all with different construction vintages, end uses and energy challenges - can achieve carbon neutrality, all buildings can do it.
Learn more:
Hines and 345 Hudson: https://be-exchange.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/COM-EBC-ps-hudsq-fs-1-v1_acc.pdf
Blueprint Power: https://www.blueprintpower.com
NYSERDA’s Empire Building Challenge: https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Empire-Building-Challenge
High Rise / Low Carbon Series: https://be-exchange.org/high-rise-low-carbon-series/
