Many of the tallest buildings in the world
are iconic and symbolic for both the cities and the countries
where they're being built.
The energy of the roaring 20s is manifested in the Empire State Building,
a representation of not just the city of New York but the whole country as a whole.
Buildings are responsible for about a third of the
greenhouse gas emissions in New York State,
and we have millions of old buildings.
Retrofitting existing buildings is probably one of our most formidable climate challenges.
The icons of urban life are at the center of policies to slow climate change.
In 2019 New York City enacted Local Law 97,
which places carbon caps on most large buildings.
Within years, the city will fine buildings for exceeding those caps.
And at the state level,
lawmakers are hoping to make New York a leader in large-scale retrofitting.
The 90-year-old Empire State Building provides a template
for environmentally conscious renovations.
That's the one that people are looking at and what do they do
and how are they measuring themselves against that building.
In 2010, the Empire State Building completed the first phase of an extensive retrofit.
Within a decade, the retrofit slashed
the building's energy usage by more than forty percent.
And it saved the high-rise more than four million dollars each year.
We moved to a program to reposition the building
in a dynamic way as a leader in energy efficiency, building health
and indoor environmental quality as a way to differentiate,
to attract better tenants, better credits, longer lease terms.
There's no silver bullet. It's silver buckshot.
It's lots of different pieces that work together.
We've done a tremendous amount of work with our tenants
to do things like lower the energy usage associated with lighting equipment ,
heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.
One of the things that we did was to retrofit all of the windows in the building.
We have 6,514 windows. We reused over 96 percent of the existing materials.
We added a pane of suspended coated film,
which manages heat gain in the summer and heat loss in the winter.
We added insulation behind all of our radiators.
We upgraded the entire central plant which
is which is a chiller plant that provides all the cooling.
We reused the shells of these giant machines, and we gutted them and rebuilt them on site.
We decided to replace our elevators with the destination dispatch type of system,
which actually uses regenerative braking.
Instead of just friction braking that generates heat, it generates electricity.
There is no shortcut. You have to look at all the systems in a building
and you have to look at the behavior of the human beings that occupy that building.
These are lessons that we've learned that not everyone knows yet,
and these are you know, we intend to inform policy with our successful practice
and also help other building owners
to get to the point where we are and hopefully to get to the point where we will be.
What the empire state building did a decade ago
was pioneering and really led a green building movement
and this needs to continue and we actually need to even go further and deeper.
We think about all the buildings we need to retrofit, the big ones and the small ones,
you know, we need to be retrofitting 200 buildings a day every day for the next 12,000 days.
The magnitude of the transformation that we need in our economy
really does require action at every level of government.
Our goals in the state are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
40 percent by 2030 and 85 percent by mid-century.
The Empire Building Challenge is a first of a kind
public-private partnership to make New York a global hub
for low-carbon and environmentally sustainable building solutions.
We selected 10 partners who we will work through in this public private partnership to demonstrate
low-carbon technologies, low-carbon solutions in high-rise buildings.
Through these early demonstrations we will start
to learn more about how a building owner can decarbonize a high-rise building.
We will only be successful if we actually show that those low carbon solutions,
whether it's low-carbon buildings or a carbon-free power grid,
that that is a a better system for people,
that's better that creates economic opportunity and it's a better system
that other entities want to replicate,
whether it's throughout the country whether it's throughout the globe
but that's the transformation that that we need.