News
GREEN BIG APPLE: Empire State of Mind
May 9, 2011
| Welcome to Real Estate Bisnow New York’s first-ever Green Big Apple, a special issue on the second Monday each month that'll focus on green and sustainability trends impacting the metro area. Send your story ideas and feature suggestions to Amanda Marsh for next month’s issue. A big shoutout to Monday Properties’ Aaron Twersky for coming up with the fantabulous name! |
| “Green” has been hijacked as a marketing tool, and many of the features of green buildings have no impact on foreign energy dependence, consumption, pollution, or the tax, which energy costs really are to our economy, says Malkin Holdings’ president Anthony Malkin. And "green" isn't enough in a city where commercial buildings account for 75% of total carbon dioxide emissions. |
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| Existing buildings should be focusing on incorporating energy efficiency whenever money is spent on retrofits, Anthony tells us. At the 80-year-old Empire State Building, Malkin Holdings supervised ownership in a well-known partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative, Jones Lang LaSalle, Johnson Controls, NYSERDA, and the Rocky Mountain Institute to reduce the building’s energy consumption. After an eight-month modeling and analysis, a project has been implemented that's guaranteed to reduce the building’s watt and BTU consumption by more than 38%, or $4.4M annually at April 2009 energy costs. The project refurbished on site the building’s 6,514 windows, installed reflective insulation behind the radiators, upgraded the chiller plant, upgraded the building energy management system, and installed submeters on each floor along with separate submeters for each new tenant space. |
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| New full floor tenants now consume fewer than three watts of energy per SF, including air conditioning, half that of a comparable office tenant installation in a normal building, Anthony says. Even densely packed tenants, like the FDIC (which occupies more than 100k SF at the building) see this energy savings. The goal was to create a toolkit that other building owners can easily replicate—for free—to promote energy efficiency in their buildings, and a wealth of information can be found here. “High-quality tenants want to control consumption,” he says, and this not only reduces cost, but increases competitiveness for landlords. In addition to the other buildings in Malkin Holdings’ portfolio, 101 Collins in Melbourne, Australia, several other buildings in NYC, and a few corporate HQs have adopted the model, Anthony reports. |
