Transcriber: Nelia Losada Reviewer: Capa Girl
Hi! I'm Kevin Surace and I am glad to be here at TEDxPresidio,
virtually anyway on this video.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the Empire State building.
The Empire State building is an iconic building, built in 1931
and it is a terrific building.
If you've been there you know what I'm talking about.
Just beautiful, right in the middle of Manhattan.
And we were honored to be part of a huge project
at the Empire State building to retrofit the entire building for energy efficiency,
saving nearly 40% of the overall energy in the building,
across the 5 or 6, or 8 different changes that were made in the building.
One of those changes was advanced window technology,
and that's what we were involved in, here, at Serious Materials.
We actually designed windows that were 4 times better,
a 400% improvement over the dual pane windows that were already installed.
Now, those dual pane windows have been put in in the mid-nineties
and Tony Malkin, the building's owner,
did not want to throw away all the glass.
So, not only did we replace the windows,
we, for the first time ever in the history, ever that we know,
actually reused all of the original glass.
We took the glass out of those windows,
cleaned all of that glass in our own processing facility
on the 5th floor of the building itself.
We then reused that glass to make new windows that had multiple chambers,
gas, warm edge spacers, and some other technology
and put them back in the frames.
We did this every night, over night, for about 6 months,
finished the project 3 months earlier.
The building has some 6,514 windows, 26,000 panes of glass,
all of which had to be replaced
and which were replaced in that 6 month period.
The interesting thing about windows is
dual pane windows were actually invented in about 1865 and, in fact, they were patented.
That, with a high volume process for dual pane windows,
was patented in 1931, the same year that the Empire State building was built.
Let's hear it from Tony Malkin, the building's owner,
what he wanted to accomplish and did accomplish in the Empire State building.
I am Anthony Malkin, and I'd like to welcome you to the Empire State building,
the world's most famous office building.
Today we're here to celebrate an important milestone.
In May of 2007, at a meeting of the C40 Cities at the top of the Hearst building in New York city,
I was chatting with Jamie Russell of the Clinton Climate Initiative,
speaking about the effort that was, in their minds, critical,
of dealing with existing buildings.
Through this program at the Empire State building,
which was used as a very large test bench,
we've been able to figure that we'll save approximately 40% of our annual energy bill,
about 4.4 million dollars a year of current costs
against these retrofit measures.
This issue of retrofitting the existing building stock,
which would represent 60 to 80% of the carbon footprint
of cities around the world, that's what's critical.
And if we're going to reduce energy consumption,
we really have to address existing buildings.
Kevin Surace: The kind of technologies that we used at the Empire State building
we, in fact, have in many of our products
for residential as well as commercial use across the country.
And we can save really substantial amounts of energy
and have quite rapid paybacks depending on your property and your location.
And it's certainly worth looking into these kinds
of advanced technologies in windows, and glass, and other things.
The message here is that if you can do this in a 1931 building,
you can do it in any building in America,
in fact, any building worldwide.
And we can save 30, 40, 50% of the energy in all of these buildings.
Thank you for your time today, have a great TEDxPresidio,
learn a lot and take a lot home with you.