Browsing by Subject "NYC"

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Open Access
NYC Co-op and Condominium Board Guide to Energy Efficiency Upgrades in Buildings
(2012-04-27) Opp, Thomas; Jia, Yuan; Smedick, David; Symonds, Jason; Smykal, Allison
The purpose of this project is to help Better Buildings New York (BBNY), a non-profit organization focused on increasing energy efficiency and decreasing energy bills of NYC buildings, educate multifamily co-op and condo boards on energy efficiency upgrades and retrofits available for their buildings. The current market for these technologies and opportunities is vast, and at times, overwhelming. Various energy efficiency technologies exist with different costs, energy savings and impacts. Therefore, there was a need to create a medium for which these technologies and benefits could be communicated in a quick, non-technical, and easily understood manner. BBNY’s audience for this project is co-op and condo boards in multifamily apartment buildings. In these types of buildings, they are the decision-makers who are responsible for making renovation/retrofit choices. Therefore, this project focuses around the myriad of energy efficient technologies that are applicable to multifamily building environments, and how to convey this information to this type of audience. The research team used literature review, NYC building data sets, and Department of Energy modeling software (eQUEST) to vet a list of technologies BBNY was interested in presenting to board members. Each technology was researched to find information relating to five areas: capital costs, energy efficiency gains, payback periods, consistency of payback periods, and difficulty of installation. Once this information was collected, the team decided that there would be two main deliverables for the client. The first deliverable is a full academic report that delves into the intricate methodology and technical analysis used to evaluate each technology. This report serves as a reference for understanding the various types of technologies available for multifamily retrofits, and a breakdown of their functionality. However, due to the background of the intended audience, the team wanted to create a way for the technologies to be easily understood and compared to one another. Therefore, a second deliverable was developed with a ranking system to rate each of the technologies within the five previously defined areas. The ranking score used quantitative and qualitative information from the original research, and provided a way to compare the technologies against each other. The first part of the second deliverable is a condensed brochure that takes each technology and evaluates it on a single page, with a chart displaying the ranking score it received when compared to the whole list of technologies covered. The second part of the second deliverable is MS Excel tool that offers a dynamic ranking system to provide a personalized list of technologies related to user preference and building attributes. From these two deliverables, BBNY has the means to provide co-op and condo boards with guidance on energy efficient, retrofit technologies. The decision-makers in thousands of multifamily buildings now have a starting point to learn what technologies may be appropriate for further investigation. It is through these types of grassroots, information campaigns that energy efficiency gains and carbon footprint reductions in multifamily buildings can become a reality in New York City.
Open Access
Radical Decarbonization: A Guidebook for Centering Equity and Climate Justice in the Built Environment
(2023-04-27) Sarveswaran, Sunitha
Urban centers are the intersection between climate and humanity. Home to an ever-growing portion of the world’s population, cities are at the forefront of climate change, contributing about a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Urban populations face poor air quality, increased and prolonged heat waves, and infrastructural threats from rising sea levels and flooding from extreme storms. However, these impacts are not often felt equally among urban populations; inequities are embedded into the very design and structure of our built environments. While discourse often centers solutions for climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions, solutions addressing inequities in the built environment and how they are fundamental to climate solutions remain relatively unexplored. This research examines New York City as an example of an urban environment with strong policies for climate mitigation through a critical lens, analyzing the climate justice potential for the city’s goals. It aims to support practitioners in NYC’s built environment to center climate justice principles in their work, using decarbonization as an opportunity to address the embedded barriers to equity in the built environment. It incorporates qualitative data analysis through semi-structured interviews to identify the key practitioners in this work and determine the resources they require to center climate justice in decarbonization work. The result of this study is a guidebook to aid in this effort.