GreenSage E-zine 04/2009

Empire State Building Gets a Green Makeover. SL Green Realty Follows
Courtesy By Ilaina Jonas, Reuters and Ed Pilkington, guardian.co.uk New York

The Empire State Building, the symbol of New York's pre-eminence that held the title of the world's tallest skyscraper for 41 years, is seeking to pierce through the pall of economic gloom that has descended on Manhattan, by turning green.

Completed in 1931, the Art Deco building immortalized in the film "King Kong" has been named by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. It is currently undergoing a $500 million renovation, including $100 million to go "green".

The Clinton Climate Initiative is putting up $20 million for the first five stages of a $100 million project to make the skyscraper a model of energy efficiency and conservation. The technology was devised as a model to retrofit other buildings. The Clinton Climate Initiative, founded by President Bill Clinton, works with cities on programs to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The owners of the building announced they were investing an additional $20m to reduce its carbon footprint and energy consumption. The retrofit is being added to a renovation of the art deco structure that starts this summer already costing half a billion dollars.

It takes a certain pluck to announce such a substantial investment in the middle of a recession. But then the Empire State Building was born in hard times.

Work on the site in midtown Manhattan began in January 1930, months after the Wall Street crash. It went up as the New York and US economies went down.

Now the current owners of the 102-story office block, Wien & Malkin, hope to buck the economic trend again by improving the building and charging higher rents. Part of the hard sell to potential new clients will be its "greenness" once the work is completed in 2013.

Commercial buildings are responsible for 79 percent of all carbon emissions in New York City. The Empire State Building plan aims to cut the use of their energy by almost 40%, which would in turn reduce the emissions of CO2 from the building by some 105,000 metric tonnes a year. That is no easy feat, bearing in mind that the Empire State has some 6,500 windows, 73 elevators and a total floorspace of 2.6 million square feet. lts planned renovations should save about $4.4 million a year on energy.

All the windows will have an extra layer of insulation added by secreting a coated film between two glass panes - done in situ to avoid pollution caused by transporting the glass from an outside destination. Insulation will be added behind radiators, and the cooling system in the basement will be replaced with new more efficient machines.

Individual workers in the office spaces will be encouraged to take responsibility for their own emissions by being given access through their computers to monitors which will tell them how much energy is being expended in their part of the building.

Most of the changes though will not be visible to the outside world. However, the owners have decided that the famous colored lights - the top of the Empire State turns green, for instance, on St Patrick's day and was a patriotic red, white and blue for several months after 9/11 - will remain intact, arguing they are responsible for relatively little energy consumption.

Hot on the heels of the Empire State Building retrofit announcement, SL Green Realty, which says it’s the owner of New York City’s largest commercial office property portfolio (29 New York City office properties totaling approximately 23,211,200 square feet), has announced its own energy savings initiative.

Upon completion in late 2009, SL Green believes that the efficiency program will cut steam use at 13 properties by an average of up to 10 percent and save as much as 35 cents per square foot in utility costs overall.

The company recently received an Energy Star Challenge Award bronze plaque for its efforts in reducing energy consumption at 625 Madison Avenue. In 2008, SL Green reduced the property’s carbon footprint and energy consumption by more than 10 percent. At that property, the company installed monitoring equipment on high pressure steam traps, made stairwell lighting technology upgrades, installed variable frequency drives, and upgraded tenant and main building cooling towers with more efficient units.