During this session you will learn about an important moderate-income multifamily building in New York City that went through a major transformation to electrify its heating and hot water, resulting in dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Project stakeholders will review the entire project design process, installation process, highlight lessons learned, and discuss the environmental, energy, and comfort impacts to the building and its occupants.

While there is growing adoption of solar and energy storage systems in the US as a whole, there are still significant and unique challenges that are preventing New York City from achieving widespread implementation. The city is held back by numerous regulations, metering arrangements, complex carbon accounting, and a litany of other design constraints.

Central ventilation systems in multifamily buildings are a critical health and safety system, with significant energy and carbon ramifications.

Data-driven decision-making is the process of basing operational and investment decisions on actual data, rather than intuition or observation alone. With an 11,500-unit portfolio stretching across 14 states, we develop operational and design strategies around energy and water usage, costs, and tenant comfort for each building. Our data sources are public, invoice-derived, meter or sensor-derived, along with human observations and interactions, and range from continuous to quarterly.

Dual temperature buildings utilize a hydronic loop for both heating and cooling and typically rely on steam boilers or utility steam and steam-fed chillers. These buildings typically use at least 20% higher energy use indexes (EUIs) with 15% higher carbon emissions than similar buildings that lack central cooling. Dual temperature buildings will need a capital plan for complying with LL97, which requires 88% reduction of carbon emissions through 2050.

To accelerate deep energy efficiency retrofits, cities need better collaboration and international knowledge exchange. Strict building codes, energy labeling, and an innovative retrofit industry have made Denmark a world leader in energy efficiency. The historic CLCPA and LL97 climate laws put NYS and NYC at the forefront of the building retrofit industry. During this session, Danish and American specialists will exchange ideas on how to leverage building retrofits and public-private partnerships to support economic development and innovation.

How do we get lenders to fund high-performance construction and developers to drive adoption? With data. While the Passive House design movement has been active in the US and Canada since 1973, it has only recently gained considerable attention in the multifamily affordable housing sector.

Let’s make the multifamily affordable housing synonymous with healthy building construction. Many of us already seek out healthy materials for our projects, and all of us can with the right information. This session will build skills and confidence in healthy material selection, improve our ability to talk about the potential health benefits of high performance construction, and distinguish the myth from the realities of healthy material cost, performance and availability.

Recent legislation passed by the New York City Council (Local Law 97) is putting tremendously strict new requirements on commercial buildings (including non-rent controlled multifamily) to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) was adopted by the City simultaneously (Local Law 96) to act as a “carrot” for property owners to have a source of funds available to make the necessary capital improvements to meet these requirements. The City is expected to launch its C-PACE program in H2 2020.

As members of the AEC industry, it is our responsibility to understand and champion low embodied-carbon building materials. Concurrently, mass timber products such as cross-laminated timber have opened the door to many new opportunities for construction.