NYC Co-op and Condominium Board Guide to Energy Efficiency Upgrades in Buildings
Abstract
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.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5325Citation
Opp, Thomas; Jia, Yuan; Smedick, David; Symonds, Jason; & Smykal, Allison (2012). NYC Co-op and Condominium Board Guide to Energy Efficiency Upgrades in Buildings.
Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5325.Collections
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