Cleaning Up

The trend towards mapping big data by the city government of New York continues, this time with respect to the new laws to reduce greenhouse gases and energy use by large buildings. Because NYC relies more heavily on mass transit than any other city in the country, buildings represent a disproportionately large percentage of our GHG production and energy use.

The data that has already been collected, since benchmarking began a few years ago, is available via a map interface. Here’s our office building’s energy use:

And here’s our greenhouse gas emissions:

Both bell curves are skewed, so that we’re towards the lower (better) end of both scales even though we’re more or less in the middle of the pack. We’re well below the 2025 GHG target, but will need about a ten percent improvement to meet the 2030 target. Our energy use, similarly, is okay, but an 85 Energy Star score is not exactly earth-shaking.

What I find most interesting is that these pretty good results come with no particular effort. The original single-pane windows were replaced some years ago with double-pane insulated windows, but honestly they’re not very good insulated windows. We have steam heating system for the winter and forced-air ventilation and cooling in the summer. If our windows were better, we cold open them three or four months out of the year, maybe more, but they’re awkward and operating them is discouraged. In other words, we have the opportunity for some easy gains in using natural ventilation. Also, our lights are fluorescents and our energy use could surely be improved with a switch to LEDs.

If you stroll around the map for a while, it becomes clear that the masonry-walled office buildings built before 1940 – like ours – do fairly well. Buildings constructed since the energy code went into effect do well. And the glass-walled buildings of the 1960s and 70s do horribly.

I wonder if we’re going to see a wave of curtain-wall replacements, with solid wall and punched windows replacing glass curtain wall.