First green rental a keeper, says developer

 

By REW Staff

 

Fields Development has a priority wait list for Madox, which officially opens next week.

By Caitlin Abdo
Standing at the entrance to his newest apartment building, Madox, at 198 Van Vorst Street in downtown Jersey City’s Paulus Hook neighborhood, James Caulfield, president of Fields Development Group, is like a proud parent.
Designed to be the first LEED certified residential building in Hudson County, Madox is the product of a months-long environmental clean-up to turn the former industrial warehouse that belonged to fuse manufacturer Belfuse into a new, family-friendly seven-story rental building.
Caulfield is, rightfully, proud.
“We believe we’ve created a community that will considerably raise the bar on luxury rental living in Hudson County,” he said.
Fields Development Group — a New Jersey builder whose previous projects have included the Saffron and Waldo Lofts in Jersey City and Fields Crossing in Hoboken – bought the site five years ago.
The building was razed and environmental cleansing began from the soil up. Architect Dean Marchetto designed the new 131-unit building to appeal to young renters who’ll plant roots in a community that dates back hundreds of years.
Currently one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Jersey City, with real estate prices to match, Paulus Hook was originally the site of a revolutionary war fort surrounded by marsh land. It was first developed in the early 1800s by Alexander Hamilton, and its brownstones – later turned into tenements – drew the likes of George Washington and Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steam boat ferry.
It’s location on the Hudson River later turned it into industrial hub for chemical, paint and soap factories and the sign for the Colgate toothpaste company still adorns a giant clock on the riverfront.
As its industry faded, though, local residents rallied to preserve the great houses that proliferated the neighborhood and today it enjoys a reputation as part of Downtown Jersey City’s thriving middle class community that includes Liberty Harbor, Hamilton Park and its own Financial District.
Mindful of a market still festering from the wounds of a financial collapse, Caulfield said the company designed a rental that will encourage people to settle down in the area and commit to the building.
He also believes people are much more conscious of their surrounding environment and have shown an increased desire to live in green buildings.
Rents at Madox start at $1,800 and energy efficiencies and sustainable features are reflective of Caulfield’s own environmentally conscious attitude. Walking towards the development, he reached down to pick up some stray garbage on the street and noted that Madox isn’t just an apartment building.
The company is repaving the sidewalks surrounding the building, planting trees, and returning 50 parking spots to the city. It is also filling nearby commercial space with services that meet residents needs and widen their options. Right now they’re in talks with a coffee shop, a day-care and a liquor store.
The building itself will “deliver a condo style product even though it is a rental,” Caulfield said.Targeting younger renters and starter families who can “grow roots and build a community,” Caulfield said the apartments offer “true dining room and living areas” that provide a number options for renters.
There will be studio, one and two bedroom apartments, some with dens that the developer said gives single professionals the option to add a room-mate. Others have private terraces and all of them have washer/dryers, gourmet, stainless steel kitchens and designer lighting.
Large windows throw light into the homes, which have hardwood floors and 9 ft. ceilings. “There is simply nothing comparable to Madox in today’s marketplace in terms of location, apartment features, amenities and services and intimate, community-oriented environment,” said Caulfield.“Add in the fact that the building is energy efficient, sustainable and on schedule to achieve LEED certification, we fully expect Madox to captivate the market when it officially opens.”
Green features range from motion-senor lights in each hallway and above each doorway, to water-conserving showerheads, to the solar panels on the roof and an abundance outdoor space and greenery.The rooftop offers great community appeal.
Beside the plant-masked solar panels is a deck that will house a fire-pit, grill (fueled by natural gases), tanning area, hammocks, bathroom, and outdoor showers. The third floor common balcony has a variety of amenities, including a playground for children. Caulfield said he was determined to create a “community feel and family atmosphere” and has included advanced amenities such as a library with Mac and PC access, common rooms, a yoga studio, play areas for children, and street-facing gym to “energize the landscape.”
But none of this is set in stone. Depending on who moves into the building when it officially opens for leasing October 15, Caulfield said he is open to making adjustments to common spaces, referring to them now as “flex-spaces”.
The developer is confident not only will renters come, but they will stay.“Madox will offer a unique blend of artistic living and common spaces, exciting indoor and out-door amenities and responsible development practices that will inspire people to set down roots here,” he said.

5 Energy Trends That Will Impact Your Business In 2013

BMO Harris Contributor, BMOHarrisBank

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(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

By Brian O’Connell
If CEOs aren’t focused like a laser beam on energy trends —and on figuring out how those trends might affect their corporate bottom lines — they should be. Truth be told, more and more executives are locked in on the energy market and are promising to leverage that market to improve sustainability at their firms.
The data supporting that notion comes from Accenture and the UN Global Compact’s 2010 survey, “A New Era of Sustainability.” According to the report, 93% of the 766 CEOs surveyed say that energy sustainability is either “important” or “very important.”
The depth of that enthusiasm largely depends on the industries of those CEOs and their firms. The study noted that 100% of CEOs in the automotive and consumer sectors view sustainability as “critical” to their success. But only 68% of CEOs in the banking industry, and just 22% of CEOs from the communications sector, view energy sustainability as critical.

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That’s hardly a shock. Auto companies and consumer goods firms have to spend larger percentages of their budgets on transportation and fuel than do banks or a technology services providers.
Going into 2013, CEOs of all stripes face a challenging energy market in which costs are rising, and leading energy providers are just as likely to call North Dakota home as they are Dubai or coastal Norway. What are those challenges and how do they rank when it comes to companies’ future energy budgets? Let’s take a look.
Pricing. According to Ernst & Young‘s global annual cleantech report of September 2012, 42% of C-level executives surveyed said their companies spent at least $50 million in energy costs annually, with 27% saying they spent more than $100 million.
Those high prices are triggering a broader re-evaluation process among CEOs going into 2013, said study researchers.
“While cost reduction is cited most frequently as the primary objective of corporate energy strategies, a number of other energy-related risks are also being addressed, such as energy security, carbon reduction and price stability. Regulatory compliance, together with reputational and brand aspects, also plays a part,” noted Gil Forer, the leader of Ernst & Young’s Global Cleantech Center.
Veering toward Renewables. The Ernst & Young study reported that a clear majority of CEOs –- 59% — say their renewable energy purchases will rise over the next five years. To fight back against higher energy prices, those CEOs intend to explore cheaper renewable energy. Right now, only 11% of CEOs in the Ernst & Young survey said that renewable energy comprised more than 5% of their company’s energy budget. But most chief executives estimated that figure would increase over the next several years.
Company-Generated Energy Will Rise. 51% of CEOs in the Ernst & Young study said company-owned renewable energy resources would increase, and 16% claimed that it would “significantly increase.” This from the study: “Company self-generation of energy and integration of renewables into the energy supply have been implemented at significant rates to meet these ends, with these practices set to accelerate over the next five years.”
Commercial Buildings Going Green. More buildings, manufacturing plants and office complexes in the U.S. are going “green,” or at least heading that way.
Clean Edge, a Portland, Oregon-based clean technology advisory firm, reported that 20% of the annual energy consumption in the U.S. is linked to commercial buildings. The firm also says that the federal government is offering big financial incentives to companies to “retrofit” their buildings and make them more energy efficient. The goal is to cut U.S commercial building energy output by 20% by 2020.
Natural Gas Over Oil. With demand for oil slowing across the globe, especially in emerging market countries like China and India, oil prices should rise significantly in 2013. But huge stores of natural gas, especially a burgeoning shale gas supply in the U.S., make natural gas a cheaper and more abundant option.
Expect CEOs to steer energy budget resources away from pricey oil and toward inexpensive natural gas. That’s especially true given the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s recent forecast showing demand for natural gas will rise by about 5% 2012, an output that will reach historic highs.
Typically, natural gas is about 10 times less expensive than crude oil. But these days, it’s trading 35 times cheaper than oil. While that ratio may not be sustainable, high natural gas inventories should keep prices down for 2013. Companies like Waste Management and Cummins have already announced they’re switching from oil to natural gas in their transportation budgets. It shouldn’t be long before other companies, big and small, do the same.
No doubt, U.S. chief executives are increasingly seeing a changing energy industry landscape. They are marshaling resources and establishing battle plans to leverage new opportunities in sustainable energy over the long haul, and cheaper energy alternatives (like natural gas) over the short term.
That’s the picture heading into 2013. Now let’s see if CEOs will adapt to a dynamic energy marketplace.

Developers of Wind Farms Run a Race Against the Calendar

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

A newly finished 126-turbine wind farm in Rosamond, Calif.

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: December 27, 2012   

WASHINGTON — Forget about parties, resolutions or watching the ball drop. To Iberdrola Renewables, New Year’s Eve will mean checking on last-minute details like the data connections between 169 new wind turbines in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and California and its control center in Portland, Ore.

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Iberdrola Renewables’s new Manzana installation is eligible for a federal subsidy, but any such farm completed after Dec. 31 will not be. Turbine construction is expected to decline sharply in 2013.

All over the country, developers are in a sprint to get new wind farms up and running before Tuesday, when the federal wind production tax credit will disappear like Cinderella’s ball gown. After that, the nation’s wind-farm building will be at a virtual standstill.

The stakes of meeting the deadline are enormous. Wind turbines that are connected to the grid and in commercial service before midnight on New Year’s Eve are entitled to a 2.2 cent tax credit for each kilowatt-hour they generate in their first 10 years, which comes out to about $1 million for a big turbine. As it stands now, those that enter service on Jan. 1 or later are out of luck.

The deadline is a bit like the April 15 one for filing income taxes, but “there are no extensions here,” said Paul Copleman, a spokesman for Iberdrola. To reduce the risk of missing it — a risk that increases when managing construction projects on mountaintops in New England in the winter — the company allowed more than a year for what are normally nine-month construction projects.

More than just individual projects are at risk; the wind industry says it expects installations to decline by 90 percent next year, with the loss of thousands of jobs. The erratic pattern of wind subsidies has spawned a boom-and-bust cycle, with supplier companies building factories that run at full production for months and then shut down when demand collapses.

The industry has long experience with drop-dead deadlines: since the tax credit began in the early 1990s, it has expired three times, said Elizabeth A. Salerno, director of industry data and analysis at the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group based in Washington. Each time, new installations fell from 73 percent to 93 percent, according to the association.

Congress, which last renewed the credit as part of the 2009 fiscal stimulus package, balked at an extension this year. Opponents argue that the money spent so far, about $14.7 billion, is enough, and that a renewal could cost about $12.2 billion were it to last for 10 years. They also complain that the credit allows wind machines to be profitable even when there is a surplus of electricity and the market price for it falls to zero.

The tax credit could be equal to one-sixth to one-half of the revenue from the wind turbine, depending on electricity prices in the area of the generator.

Wind advocates say that the wind production tax credit did not cost the taxpayers any money, because it stimulated economic activity, in the form of manufacturing and construction, that was taxed at the federal, state and local levels.

Iberdrola’s wind farm near Rosamond, Calif., with 126 turbines, opened last week. The company said it was “extremely optimistic” that its 19-turbine farm in Monroe and Florida, Mass., and a 24-turbine farm in Groton, N.H., would be up and running by Monday night, but declined to say precisely when.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Energy Department, wind developers were planning to install 12,000 megawatts of wind capacity this year, but as of Nov. 30, only about 6,000 megawatts had been completed.

The remaining 6,000 megawatts works out to more than 3,000 turbines: if they are all operating by late Monday night, the wind industry will have added 12 percent to its capacity in a single month. (A megawatt is the power required by, say, everything in a full-size Walmart with an included supermarket. Over the course of a year, however, a turbine produces only about one-third of its theoretical maximum capacity.)

Iberdrola did not disclose the price of each wind farm, but the industry average is about $2 million per megawatt, meaning that the three projects may have cost a total of more than $500 million.

Wind advocates say they will seek to revive the tax credit when a new Congress convenes next month, but it will not be at the top of Congress’s agenda.

With the tax credit due to expire, few developers are now taking the early steps required to establish a wind farm, like negotiating deals to sell the power and ordering the equipment. Mr. Copleman, the Iberdrola spokesman, said his company had a variety of projects “at various stages” but was “unlikely to be pouring any concrete next year.”

For projects being wrapped up now, Ms. Salerno said, developers lined up power purchase agreements with utilities and then arranged financing a year and a half to two years ago, with the economics predicated on the tax credit.

The start-and-stop pattern of recent years has repeatedly affected companies up and down the chain, especially the highly specialized ones that make towers, blades and generators. Robert Thresher, a wind expert at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, Colo., said manufacturers were “trying to run down their inventory so they wouldn’t be caught holding turbines” after the market collapsed in January.

A study commissioned by the wind industry predicts the loss of 37,000 jobs as a result of the credit’s expiration. For example, the Spanish company Gamesa, which built the giant blades for the New Hampshire project at its factory in Ebensburg, Pa., has announced the layoffs of more than 150 workers.

Some members of Congress have proposed that the credit be renewed, perhaps with a phaseout over a few years. A one-year extension would be of little use: Ms. Salerno said it would not give developers enough time to get new projects financed, built and put on the grid before the expiration date, even if they had already completed environmental studies and obtained the various permits required.

A one-year extension would work for developers, she said, but only “if you knew 24 months ahead of time that this was going to happen.”

Chrysler Building More Energy Efficient than World Trade Center

December 27, 2012 by Energy Manager Today Staff

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Energy efficiency data from some high-profile buildings in New York City shows that some old structures, such as the Chrysler Building, have higher Energy Star scores than some newer so-called “green” buildings.
For example, the 1.7-million-sq-foot, 52-story skyscraper at 7 World Trade Center opened in May 2006 touts its LEED gold rating. But when it comes to energy efficiency, the tower scores only a 74 by the EPA’s Energy Star standards. A building must score at least 75 for the Energy Star high-efficiency-building label.
The energy data is recently mandated to be made available from the New York City Energy Benchmarking Report that shows the Energy Utilization Index and Energy Star ratings of commercial buildings. But while 7 World Trade Center falls short of Energy Star, two 1930s-era buildings – the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building – receive an 84 and an 80, respectively, according to The New York Times.
The fine scores are attributed to extensive upgrades of insulation and mechanical systems. Also, older buildings tend to have thicker walls, fewer windows and less ventilation, resulting in better thermal envelopes.
But not all older New York buildings scored well. Most notably, the Seagram Building on Park Avenue posted a score of 3, largely due to its single-pane glass curtain walls and fluorescent lighting.
As for modern buildings with less-than-stellar scores, such as 7 World Trade Center, their lower ratings could be partly attributed to their tenants, including financial firms that use a lot of energy for computers and other high-tech gear.
The top 2 percent of New York’s largest buildings account for 45 percent of the energy expended by the total building stock (about 1 million structures) in the city, so there is considerable focus on improving the energy efficiency of these behemoths. Of the more than 2,500 commercial structures that disclosed energy use this year, the median score was 68.
More understanding of discrepancies in energy use will emerge as New York’s commercial buildings undergo required energy audits and inspections of their HVAC systems in 2013. In addition, large residential buildings, which have been exempt from the disclosure requirements, are required to begin reporting in 2013

Wind Power Generation Beating Natural Gas in U.S. in 2012

By Ehren Goossens & Christopher Martin - Dec 22, 2012 12:01 AM ET

 

Ariana Lindquist/Bloomberg

Workers climb a Polaris Industries Inc. wind turbine installed by Renewable Energy SD in Elgin, Minnesota, on Feb. 15, 2012. To qualify for a tax credit, which pays owners of U.S. wind farms 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of power they produce over 10 years, projects must be online and producing power by Jan. 1, 2013. Photographer: Ariana Lindquist/Bloomberg

Wind-turbine installations are poised to exceed natural gas-fueled power plants in the U.S. for the first time this year as developers race to complete projects before a renewable energy tax credit expires.
New wind capacity reached 6,519 megawatts by Nov. 30, beating the 6,335 megawatts of gas additions and more than double those of coal, according to data from Ventyx Inc., which is owned by the Swiss power transmission equipment maker ABB Ltd. (ABBN) The company plans to release final tallies in January.
“Wind will very likely beat gas, but it may be close,” said Amy Grace, who leads North American wind industry analysis for Bloomberg New Energy Finance in New York. “It’s very likely that we get over 8 gigawatts for 2012.”
Congress has yet to renew the production tax credit, which provides incentives for wind farms completed before Dec. 31. Efforts to take advantage of the subsidy trumped interest in gas-fired stations, which are supported by a plunge in prices for the commodity resulting from added production through hydraulic fracturing.
A surge of wind-farm connections in November and December may double the amount of wind capacity added this year to as much as 12 gigawatts, outpacing the additional gas turbines, according to New Energy Finance.

‘Valuable Energy’

“It shows that wind has firmly planted its foothold as a valuable energy source,” Jacob Susman, chief executive officer of New York wind developer OwnEnergy Inc., said in an interview. “Five years ago we had to drag utilities in kicking and screaming. Now they’ve got teams of experts who understand its value.”
To qualify for the tax credit, which pays wind farm owners 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of power they produce over 10 years, projects must be online and producing power by Jan. 1. Unless Congress extends the incentive, wind turbine installations may fall 88 percent next year to as low as 1.5 gigawatts, New Energy Finance forecasts.
A bill to extend the wind production tax credit was approved by the Senate Finance Committee in August and promoted by Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who sponsored the first wind energy tax credit in 1992.
In an effort to head off opposition to an extension, the American Wind Energy Association this month proposed a six-year phase-out of the credit, ending the subsidy at the start of 2019. The Washington-based industry group says 37,000 jobs will be lost if the credit lapses now.

‘Historic Year’

“The reason we’re having an historic year is because the incentives are in place,” said Elizabeth Salerno, chief economist at AWEA. “There’s more at stake now than there ever has been.”
Some utilities oppose the plan, noting that the strength of installations shows wind can survive without subsidy, according to Joseph Dominguez, a senior vice president of Exelon Corp. (EXC), the largest owner of U.S. nuclear power plants.
“The wind energy industry has matured and is thriving today; the PTC is no longer needed,” Dominguez said in a Dec. 13 statement criticizing the group’s proposal. “Rather than a reasonable phase-out, AWEA is essentially asking for a six-year extension of the now 20-year-old” tax credit.
An increase in gas prices may make wind more competitive. Gas futures have risen almost 15 percent this year, which would be their first annual increase since 2007.
Utilities in 29 states are required to get an increasing amount of their supplies from renewable resources such as wind and solar, whether or not Congress renews the tax credits.
General Electric Co. (GE), the largest supplier of wind turbines to the U.S., has benefited from the surge in orders, said Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt.
“We’ll probably make more money this year than the rest of the industry combined in renewables,” Immelt said on a Dec. 17 conference call with analysts. “We can’t control how the PTC works or doesn’t work, but we have a very strong competitive wind business that basically has done the job.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Ehren Goossens in New York at egoossens1@bloomberg.net; Christopher Martin in New York at cmartin11@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net

2013: Year of the Water-Energy Nexus?

Water has always been linked to energy, but the bond between the two is becoming increasingly important.

Katherine Tweed: December 18, 2012

Water and energy production have always been inextricably linked, but the amount of water needed to power our lives is increasing, according to the latest forecast from the International Energy Agency.
The role of water in energy, often referred to as the water-energy nexus, is getting more attention than ever before, and last month’s report from the IEA was the first time that the report has given water issues related to energy production its own section.
Energy production sucks up about 15 percent of the world’s total water withdrawal, which could increase by about 20 percent between 2010 and 2035. Much of the increase will be driven by higher-efficiency power plants and expanding biofuels production, according to the report.
“In an increasingly water-constrained world, the vulnerability of the energy sector to constraints in water availability can be expected to increase, as can issues around how the quality of water is affected by energy operations,” the IEA’s report stated.
The water-energy nexus will be a central focus at the inaugural International Water Summit, which is to be held during the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week in January and hosted by Masdar. For the companies that provide energy infrastructure and the governments that regulate that infrastructure, now is the time to take an increasingly holistic approach wherein water and energy are seen not just as intersecting, but rather are recognized as two equal parts of the same whole.
A holistic approach means looking at every aspect of water use in energy. Sometimes, energy efficiency requires higher energy use, such as with some high efficiency power plant technologies, according to the International Energy Agency. In the U.S., water continues to be the second biggest concern of utilities.
But there are technologies that can vastly reduce carbon emissions and water at the same time. A new coal plant in South Africa, the Kusile project, will use 5 percent of the volume of water compared to a conventional new coal-fired power plant (thanks to dry cooling), according to Dean Oskvig, CEO of the energy division at Black & Veatch, a consultant and project manager for the Kusile power station.
Renewable energy sources, not including large-scale hydro, use far less water than fossil fuels and nuclear power. But solar and wind still make up a very small percentage of the overall energy picture, and coal continues to dominate in many regions, including the U.S., China and India. Retiring older coal power plants and limiting water-intensive biofuels are two of the most important changes that could stop the growth of water use in energy production. In areas of the U.S., some farmers are already competing with gas companies for water rights because of the significant requirements for hydraulic fracturing of shale gas wells.
It will not only be power producers that will need to think more critically about water -- water producers will need to think more seriously about energy, as well. In the U.S., for instance, drinking and wastewater systems account for up to 4 percent of the total energy use. That figure is expected to grow in the U.S. and worldwide as populations grow. More water-efficient irrigation also often involves more energy for pumps.
But systems-level thinking, which has been suggested as a method for improving electricity efficiency, can also apply to the water-energy nexus. There are a variety of technologies, both software and hardware, that can increase efficiencies in everything from energy production to agriculture.
Before water can be thought of as part of energy production, water itself needs to be thought of as a single sector, according to a contention in Black & Veatch’s first U.S. water utility industry survey. From 2005 to 2015, there will be a 25 percent increase in the use of treated wastewater or salt water in agriculture and aquaculture, according to the U.N.
“One water qualification that must be eliminated from the water industry vernacular is ‘waste’ water,” the report authors state. “It is time to shift our focus away from the elimination of something undesirable to the opportunity to recover valuable resources such as water, energy, nutrients and beneficial products.”

City’s Law Tracking Energy Use Yields Some Surprises

By MIREYA NAVARRO

In courting tenants over the last six years, 7 World Trade Center has trumpeted its gold LEED rating, an emblem of sound environmental citizenship.

But when it comes to energy efficiency, the young 52-story tower is far from a top performer, according to data released under a city law that tracks energy use in New York buildings. It had a score of 74 — just below the minimum of 75 set for high-efficiency buildings by the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program.

On the other hand, two venerated show horses from the 1930s, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, sailed to an 84 and an 80 as a result of extensive upgrades of their insulation and mechanical systems.

And the MetLife Building, a 1963 hulk looming over Grand Central Terminal? It scored 39. Still, solace is at hand for MetLife’s owners: the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe’s bronze-toned 1958 masterpiece on Park Avenue, posted a 3.

“I was probably as shocked as you are,” said Gerard V. Schumm, executive vice president of RFR Realty, which owns both the Seagram Building and Lever House, another glassed-in Park Avenue landmark. (It earned a 20.)

The Bloomberg administration has zeroed in on energy use by the city’s largest buildings with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warmingand sea level rise.

In New York, the heating and cooling of buildings produces most of those emissions. Hurricane Sandy has underscored the urgency of such efforts, and continuing climate change is expected to result in more severe storms and flooding.

While the city’s biggest commercial structures have been required to report energy use since 2010, this is the first year public disclosure has been mandated under a 2009 law that is among the first in the country to follow how buildings use energy. Big residential buildings will face the same disclosure requirement next year.

City officials said explanations for the sharp discrepancies may not emerge until buildings began undergoing required energy audits and inspections of their heating, cooling and other systems in 2013. Still, the numbers already offer some insights into patterns of energy use.

For example, it is not necessarily older structures that pose the biggest energy challenge.

Older buildings tend to have higher Energy Star scores because they have thicker walls, fewer windows and less ventilation — superior “thermal envelopes,” as a report on the early results puts it. They are also less suited to energy-gobbling activities like computer data crunching, the downfall of some youthful but middling performers.

“Some scores will not be flattering, but identifying buildings with the most opportunity to improve is a big part of driving energy savings,” said Andrew C. Burr, a performance expert at the Institute for Market Transformation, a Washington advocacy organization promoting energy efficiency, which advised New York City on analyzing the results. “It does put energy on the radar of real estate consumers.”

The stakes are considerable. Unlike cities that depend heavily on automobiles, New York racks up most of its carbon dioxide emissions — nearly 80 percent — in heating and cooling buildings. Tracking this energy use is deemed crucial to meeting the city goal of cutting overall emissions by about a third by 2030, to slash costs and fight climate change.

New York’s largest buildings — just 2 percent of the roughly one million buildings in the city — account for 45 percent of the energy expended by the entire building stock.

Owners of more than 2,500 nonresidential structures disclosed energy use this year, but there were truants that did not submit their 2011 data by the required deadlines and thus face fines of $2,000 a year. The disclosure law exempts buildings in which more than 10 percent of the space is devoted to trading floors, data centers and other energy-intensive activities.

Yet work spaces that hum 24/7 seem nonetheless to have played into the results, including 7 World Trade Center’s score.

“Seventy-four is good, but I was initially surprised that three of our older buildings scored higher than 7 World Trade Center, and it had to do principally with tenancy,” said John Lieber, who oversees buildings at ground zero for Silverstein Properties. He noted that 7 World Trade Center’s tenants included firms like Moody’s, the financial rating agency.

The higher-efficiency-scoring properties he alluded to — 120 Wall Street, the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway and 570 Seventh Avenue — house nonprofit groups, modeling agencies and other tenants whose needs are of the basic light-switch variety, he said.

As for the less-than-stellar performance of some LEED buildings, it was not altogether unexpected.

For one thing, LEED, a program of the United States Green Building Council — the title is an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — evaluates buildings not just for energy efficiency but for the environmental soundness of their construction materials and their water systems and even proximity to public transportation.

And the Green Building Council itself has drawn criticism in the past for evaluating buildings before tenants moved in and not following up to see how they performed.

“It’s disappointing, but at the same time, it’s not surprising because there are so many things that could be happening,” Scot Horst, senior vice president for the LEED program at the Green Building Council, said of some scores.

He said energy waste could be linked to owners’ failing to set building controls to minimize the use of power, or to lax habits by occupants, like leaving lights or computers on when they are not in use.

The median score for commercial buildings that reported their data was 68, city officials said.

Missing from the ratings are some prominent commercial buildings that are not due for disclosure until 2013 because they have residential units or are classified as “commercial condominiums” for city tax purposes. Among these are The New York Times Building, at 620 Eighth Avenue in the Times Square district, and the Hearst Tower, on West 57th Street, another LEED building.

As for the Seagram Building’s very low score, Mr. Schumm said RFR was investing more than $12 million on general upgrades like motion sensors for lighting, new mechanical equipment, monitoring controls for elevators, and fans and water pumps that operate only when needed.

Still, the biggest drain could be the International-style landmark’s most lauded features. The Seagram’s single-pane glass curtain walls, far less efficient than treated or double-pane windows, and its luminous fluorescent ceilings work against energy conservation, he said.

Mr. Schumm said his company was exploring alternatives like applying an insulating film to the glass and switching more than 9,500 lighting tubes to more efficient LED lights.

Some property owners are also negotiating with tenants to retrofit entire floors or offices during a move or lease renewal to increase energy savings.

“Depending on your lease term, it’s a very wise investment,” said Greg Hale, director of efficiency finance for the Center for Market Innovation at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. He said some buildings could lower energy use by as much as 30 to 40 percent.

But Mr. Schumm said there was only so much a landlord could ask of tenants who were paying top price — about $145 per square foot, in the Seagram Building. “How can you tell a partner in a law firm to turn off the lights at 6 o’clock when they’re working on a major case?” he said. “We can’t assume they’re wasting energy. They’re running their businesses.”

Emma Bryce contributed reporting.

MIT Sloan Management Review

How AT&T developed a scorecard to monitor water and energy use

By Nina Kruschwitz

Published December 14, 2012

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Tags:Business Operations, Energy Efficiency

Editor's note: This interview excerpt is adapted from “Making Data Visible So You Can Act On It,” an article originally published Dec. 11, 2012 by MIT Sloan Management Review. It is reprinted with permission.
As part of AT&T’s corporate sustainability group, John Schulz works closely with several business units on integrating sustainability into their operations. He talks with MIT Sloan Management Review about managing water and energy use, and how AT&T frames sustainability in a business case.
Nina Kruschwitz: Are you focused partly on making AT&T’s own operations more efficient, and partly on making large customers’ data usage more efficient and useful?
John Schulz: Yes. Let’s start with the first part, our own operations. We manage thousands of facilities across the nation. They’re made up of tall administrative buildings in downtown areas like Dallas and Chicago — there are a great number of those.
Those facilities make up a little less than 50 percent of AT&T’s energy usage. So we did your classic Pareto analysis to figure out which 20 percent of our facilities were representing 80 percent of the usage. We needed to get more visibility to data that was useful for those 1,000 facilities — so we developed a scorecard that included questions such as: What types of projects do you have funded for that facility? What have you completed? Have you done Energy Star training? Do you have renewable energy at these facilities?
We ended up getting these very direct, I would say pretty efficient in terms of the information that they use, scorecards that grade these facilities, A through F.
The visibility of that data is what really drives behavior, because it’s shared with their peers -- who the facility managers want to do well among -- and with upper management. We found the scorecard model to be very useful, both for choosing the right points of data and then for making them visible. That was a real turning point for us.
NK: I love the connection between making something visible and then being able to do something about it. Until it’s visible, what were they supposed to do? They could go off on their own and try X, Y and Z, but they wouldn’t necessarily be the most high-leverage actions, or what senior management would want.
JS: Exactly. We looked at water, too. People might say, “Why is AT&T talking about water?” but while we recognize that we are not water-intensive like the food and beverage industry or heavy manufacturing or processing or agricultural, we do use a fair amount of water.
But we didn’t know how that broke down — where or in what kind of buildings we were using water or for what purposes. So we did a similar evaluation as we did with energy and what we found was that about 125 of our buildings represented half of our water use.
That’s a nice targeted collection of buildings, and so we dove into those buildings to find out what was going on in each facility, what kind of awareness there was for the water use, what kind of water use efficiency efforts were in place. What we found was, and I think you’ve probably guessed it, was that these buildings had cooling towers that use water to cool the environment, and they were either heavily populated with people or they were a technical space, like central offices or data centers that needed that constant cool temperature for the equipment.
So we focused on water efficiency in that cooling process. Earlier this year, we announced that we’re working with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) on some pilot projects at a collection of these sites to get even more detail at that level and really build the business case. The business case for water efficiency is very challenging, because water is cheap in the United States.
NK: Right now it is, yes.
JS: It’s undervalued right now. The cost of it is so low, it’s difficult to justify an investment in water efficiency. And that was the challenge that we and EDF decided to take a look at.
What we found was that you needed to marry this together with the entire cooling process. You’ll notice I didn’t say water efficiency, or water process, or cooling tower process even; it’s the whole thing. And then you can integrate energy savings related to the chiller, you can integrate potential chemicals reductions and chemical savings, because you use chemicals to treat the water. If you can reduce your chemical use, you’re not blowing those chemicals down the drain to the sewer, and also there’s savings.
So if you look at the whole process holistically, suddenly it becomes more compelling from a business case perspective. And that’s the nut we’re trying to crack with EDF.
Read more about how EDF Climate Corps worked with AT&T to reduce its water use here.
Photo of a smartphone in water provided by Evgeny Korshenkov/Shutterstock

Nina Kruschwitz is the managing editor and sustainability editor for MIT Sloan Management Review. Nina has been a writer and editor of books, magazines, and journals in the management and sustainability fields for many years.
Read more from Nina Kruschwitz

Obama Signs Energy Efficiency Legislation

Eureka! A bill passed in Congress.

Katherine Tweed: December 19, 2012

President Obama signed the American Energy Manufacturing Technical Corrections Act (H.R. 6582) on Wednesday after the bill received bipartisan support in Congress.
The law is a modification of the Enabling Energy Savings Innovations Act (H.R. 4850) and includes elements of the Shaheen-Portman Senate bill.
Energy efficiency enthusiasts hailed the move, but also cautioned that there is far more work to be done.
“At a time that Washington is gridlocked, it is notable that the only energy bill with enough bipartisan support to pass is one that targets energy efficiency,” noted Steven Nadel, Executive Director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “This bill is a modest but bipartisan step forward, one we hope the next Congress can build upon.”
The bill had mostly minor changes to the current way of doing business. The highlights of the bill, which were listed by the Alliance to Save Energy, include:

• Coordination of research and development of efficiency technologies for industry;
• A study of barriers to industrial electrical efficiency;
• Best practices for advanced metering in the federal government;
• Disclosure of energy and water usage by federal facilities;
• Technical corrections and specific fixes to recently-enacted standards;
• Uniform treatment of conventional and tankless water heaters;
• Clarification of periodic review of commercial equipment standards and of DOE’s response to petitions regarding standards.

The bill also relaxes some standards, including rules for walk-in coolers, over-the-counter refrigerators and water heaters.
Energy efficiency advocates hope that this bill has laid the groundwork for more significant bills, such as the Shaheen-Portman bill, which call for stronger national model building codes, more loan guarantees for efficiency upgrades and increased research and development on energy efficiency. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy supports the bills, but would also like to see changes to the tax code to spur investment in manufacturing efficiency.
"We commend the President on approving today important improvements to the nation’s energy efficiency laws,” said Graham Richard, CEO of Advanced Energy Economy. “The bipartisan support this legislation enjoys underscores that energy need not be politicized. Americans overwhelmingly believe that advanced energy is important to our economic future. The bill signed into law today points us in the right direction."
It’s not a stretch of the imagination that more energy efficiency legislation could pass in the new Congress. The Obama legislation is also working on its own front; the president is trying to pass HOMESTAR legislation that would help homeowners finance retrofits and a $4 billion “Better Building Initiative” that would make commercial facilities 20 percent more efficient by 2020. The president’s first term was also noted for its significant improvements in fuel standards in cars and trucks.
Even with a hopelessly gridlocked Congress, there are interesting actions happening at the city and state level. Energy benchmarking rules continue to find new markets. Low-cost software solutions are everywhere in the market to help building owners tackle wasted energy.
On the local and federal level, it’s hard to argue with the fact that energy efficiency is not just a money-saver, but also a job creator. It is that message that will be key in pushing through legislation amongst politicians, who love to toss around jobs numbers. After all, you can’t outsource retrofitting a window.

Christopher Helman, Forbes Staff

 

Why It's The End Of The Line For Wind Power

 

Wind power generation in the United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s the end of the world as we know it. That’s what the U.S. wind power industry is saying to itself these days. And they aren’t talking about some Mayan doomsday nonsense.
On Jan. 1 the federal production tax credit on wind investments expires. For the past 20 years the credit has offset about 30% of the cost of building wind turbines. Add to that the “renewable portfolio standards” for green energy mandated by 29 states, and as a result we’ve seen wind farms spring up across the country. Since 2007 nearly 40% of all the new electricity capacity built in this country has been wind. Wind now generates roughly 3.5% of U.S. electricity.

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Don’t expect wind’s share to climb beyond that level any time soon. The end of the tax credit could very well mean the end of the wind industry.
According to the federal Energy Information Administration, the “levelized cost” of new wind power (including capital and operating costs) is 8.2 cents per kWh. Advanced clean-coal plants cost about 11 cents per kWh, the same as nuclear. But advanced natural gas-burning plants come in at just 6.3 cents per kWh.
But it could be getting a lot worse for wind. A fascinating new report by George Taylor and Tom Tanton at the American Tradition Institute called “The Hidden Costs of Wind Electricity” asserts that the cost of wind power is significantly understated by the EIA’s numbers. In fact, says Taylor, generating electricity from wind costs triple what it does from natural gas.
That’s because the numbers from the EIA and wind boosters fail to take into account a host of infrastructure and transmission costs.
First off — the windiest places are more often far away from where electricity is needed most, so the costs of building transmission lines is high. So far many wind projects have been able to patch into existing grid interconnections. But, says Taylor, those opportunities are shrinking, and material expansion of wind would require big power line investments.
Second, the wind doesn’t blow all the time, so power utilities have found that in order to balance out the variable load from wind they have to invest in keeping fossil-fuel-burning plants on standby. When those plants are not running at full capacity they are not as efficient. Most calculations of the cost of wind power do not take into account the costs per kWh of keeping fossil plants on standby or running at reduced loads. But they should, because it is a real cost of adding clean, green, wind power to the grid.
Taylor has crunched the numbers and determined that these elements mean the true cost of wind power is more like double the advertised numbers.
He explains that he started with 8.2 cents per kWh, reflecting total installation costs of $2,000 per kw of capacity. Then backed out an assumed 30-year lifespan for the turbines (optimistic), which increases the cost to 9.3 cents per kwh. Then after backing out the effect of subsidies allowing accelerted depreciation for wind investments you get 10.1 cents. Next, add the costs of keeping gas-fired plants available, but running at reduced capacity, to balance the variable performance of wind — 1.7 cents. Extra fuel for those plants adds another 0.6 cents. Finally, tack on 2.7 cents for new transmission line investments needed to get new wind power to market. The whole shebang adds up to 15 cents per kwh.
Ouch.
As Taylor figures it, natural gas would need to cost upwards of $20 per mmBTU before gas-fired power would cost as much as wind.
Granted, the American Tradition Institute is a right-wing nonprofit that in the past has railed against climate scientists and sought to discredit Global Warming fear mongering. That doesn’t mean Taylor’s calculations are wrong, just that everyone on the pro-wind side ought to read the report and chime in with their critiques.
The American Wind Energy Association says that the wind sector employs 37,000 and boasts 500 factories building components. Even with new anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese makers of wind turbines, the AWEA says that if Congress fails to extend the production tax credit for wind, many of those jobs could be eliminated and factories closed in early 2013. That’s how important these tax credits are to wind’s viability.
Taylor and Tanton figure that at the current price of natural gas, and before counting any subsidies or transmission costs, ratepayers are paying about $8.5 billion more this year for electricity from wind than they would have paid if it were gas-fired power. That amount doesn’t even include the cost of the direct federal subsidies.
What’s more, ratepayers will have to shoulder that cost for as long as the turbines are in operation. That’s $8.5 billion a year that ratepayers are forking over to subsidize a less efficient, more expensive technology; $8.5 billion that could otherwise be invested in natural gas electricity, or better yet, nuclear.
Just think, in South Carolina, power company Scana and its partners are investing about $11 billion to construct two 1,100 mw nuclear reactors on roughly 1,000 acres. To get the same amount of electricity out of wind (remember that turbines operate at an average of less than 50% capacity because of wind’s intermittancy) and you’d need more than 1,700 turbines stretched across 200,000 acres, for an upfront investment of $8.8 billion. The nukes might cost more upfront, but they last longer, they provide reliable base load power and they emit zero carbon.

Energy analytics firm WegoWise buys Melon Power

By Derek Top

Published December 19, 2012

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More Stories On:Buildings, Energy Efficiency, More...Buildings, Energy Efficiency, Intelligent Buildings, VERGE

Finding tools and software for energy management can be challenging as building owners have to navigate an ever-growing market to track and analyze energy use in commercial buildings.
The latest vendor is WegoWise, which offers a Web-based platform to analyze water, gas and electricity data, mainly targeting multi-tenant apartment building owners. The Mass.-based company has acquired Melon Power, a startup that leverages Green Button and other utility data to help commercial buildings target Energy Star benchmarking.
The pairing makes sense as Melon Power, a recent winner at the U.S. Department of Energy's contest to build apps for energy efficiency, helps commercial building managers input their energy usage to benchmark against other buildings.
WegoWise CEO Andrew Chen says adding Melon Power's benchmarking analytics brings domain and technical expertise best suited for the commercial and industrial market.
"Our approach is focused on the value of data and capturing a lot of business intelligence from property management," says Chen. "It was a natural decision to combine our collective innovations and target the commercial market."
But making a dent in the ever-growing commercial market for energy software and services will be a challenge. Chen points to key differentiators in WegoWise's more "universal solution" -- the platform tracks water and natural gas data as well as electricity -- and the company's sizable database of 165 million square feet of property from more than 11,000 buildings.
WegoWise, which raised $1.9 million in Series A funding round last year, plans to make the commercial building offering available in the first quarter of 2013.

How smart buildings become radically efficient

By Casey Talon

Published December 19, 2012

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Tags:Buildings, Energy Efficiency, More...Buildings, Energy Efficiency, Facilities, Intelligent Buildings, Renewables, VERGE

At last month's VERGE conference, a clear message stood out: Data has the power to transform the future of sustainability.
Data, however, is only as transformative as the tools that make it actionable. If data is to define the future of sustainability, then the future of information technology will define how facilities become radically efficient (i.e. true smart buildings).
IDC has projected that social business, big data analytics, cloud computing and mobility are coming together in an unprecedented way to create solutions with entirely new business value. Indeed these pillars of future information technology will enable intelligent industries, solutions and, most importantly, innovation. These are the characteristics of intelligent IT tools that can transform facilities into smart buildings and directly align with the VERGE message of data-enabled market transformation.
Social Business: At the conference, Facebook's Bill Weihl spoke to the reality that energy efficiency and conservation efforts go largely unseen, and furthermore, he suggested social networks can be the mechanism to "surface largely invisible behavior to make it part of the social norm."
An afternoon panel on platforms for energy efficiency took this question to the test. It became apparent that social networking, whether on a peer-to-peer community or customized building management forum, can help decision-makers tackle the big questions that hinder smart building technology adoption. These forums can be the engine to accelerate the industry by showcasing case studies, best practices and the value proposition of these emerging technologies.
Big Data Analytics: The VERGE theme on "big data" fueled further discourse around the future of buildings and again highlighted a parallel with the future of IT. VERGE explored the opportunities for smart buildings as resources, looking to a future vision in which facilities have integrated mature energy management solutions and become effective nodes on the smart grid. This reality will require the utilization of big data analytics.
As suggested by Kyle McNamara from Verizon, demand response could be the "killer app" of the smart grid as utilities will rely on big data analytics to leverage buildings as energy resources. With the growth of automated demand response programs, smart buildings will provide dynamic response to utility feedback when high demand puts constraints on the grid. In this scenario, the utility must be able to process and utilize real-time data to call on the resources that will most effectively support grid stability and reliability.
Next page: Cloud computing as a VERGE enabler
Cloud Computing: The vast majority of the innovative energy management solutions showcased at the VERGE conference offer lower upfront costs aiming for early adoption because of their "software-as-a-service" design. The optimization of a smart building relies on adaptive building management directed by the insight from analytics and data management. As seen at Hack City, a hackathon hosted the weekend prior to the conference, third-party applications, such as those found in Johnson Controls' Panoptix app marketplace, demonstrate the importance of cloud computing for the future of smart buildings.
Mobility: The fact that facilities managers are widely offline is one of those central personnel challenges hindering the development of smart buildings. If the industry is to succeed in transforming facilities into smart buildings, not only will facilities managers need to build skillsets around using information technology but vendors will need to bring mobility into their solution design.
An optimized smart building will have not only a smaller environmental footprint but the tools to enable sustainability executives to monitor and verify the impact of their business objectives in a way that can be economically quantified. This ability to translate actions into dollars makes the sustainability message resonate far beyond corporate marketing and communication and up the C-Suite to the topline enterprise decision-makers. This new level of transparency and measurability will reshape the future of sustainability and generate the radical efficiency envisioned by VERGE.
This article is a brief overview of an analysis published to IDC Energy Insights' Smart Building Strategies Program. More information about this program and report can be found here.

On-Site Windpower Generates Electricity for Manufacturer

December 18, 2012 by Energy Manager Today Staff

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SC Johnson, a maker of household cleaning products, today activated two new wind turbines at its Waxdale manufacturing facility in Mt. Pleasant, Wis.
The wind turbines will produce about 8 million kWh of electricity annually. Combined with two cogeneration turbines that have been in place since the mid-2000s, the facility is now able to produce an average of 100 percent of its electrical energy onsite.
The 415-foot wind turbines at Waxdale support 135-foot-long blades. Each turbine features a permanent magnet, gearless generator which means less maintenance and higher energy yields than the more traditional gearbox-type system.
In the mid-2000s, two cogeneration systems were put in place that use waste methane gas from a nearby public landfill and clean burning natural gas to generate 85 percent of the facility’s electrical energy. The new wind turbines will provide the remaining 15 percent.
A 262-foot-tall wind turbine in the Netherlands helps power the SC Johnson European manufacturing facility, in addition to SWIFT mini turbines at its Racine, Wis., headquarters and Lowell, Ark., sales office.
Since 2000, SC Johnson has worked to cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 26 percent. In Bay City, Michigan, nearly half of the electricity needed to operate the SC Johnson plant now comes from offsite wind power.
At the SC Johnson plant in Medan, Indonesia, waste palm shells are used as a replacement for diesel fuel. It transfers a waste product back into the value chain with minimal impact and has reduced local diesel fuel use by 80 percent.
In May 2012, the company launched a new biofuel initiative at its factory in Surabaya, Indonesia using waste husks from rice grains as a fuel source. Consuming rice husks rather than diesel fuel, the Surabaya boiler is expected to generate about 6,000,000 kcal per hour to heat water used in mosquito coil production.
Several solar projects are helping provide hot water heating for the company’s facility in Shanghai. One provides hot water for food service and other office needs. Solar- heated waste water from the facility’s steam piping network aids aerosol production.