NYC to Require Existing Buildings to Upgrade Their Lighting
New York City has passed significant new legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from existing government, commercial and residential buildings in New York City.
The six-point Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, introduced on Earth Day and enacted as part of PlaNYC, includes four bills that will dramatically reduce the City’s energy usage, saving consumers $700 million annually in energy costs, while creating 17,880 jobs and reducing New York City’s carbon footprint.
In addition to the four pieces of legislation, the six-point plan includes two PlaNYC programs that will train workers for the new construction-related jobs that will be created, and help finance energy-saving improvements using $16 million in federal stimulus funding.
While New York currently has the lowest per capita carbon footprint of any major city in America, about 80% of its carbon footprint comes from energy consumption by its more than 1 million buildings. As 85% of the buildings that exist today will be in use in 2030, increasing efficiency in existing buildings is critical to meeting the PlaNYC goal of a 30% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Once implemented, the legislation will reduce citywide greenhouse gas emissions by 4.75%, the largest reduction achieved by a single program.
The four bills, which passed in December 2009, include:
Int. No. 973-A: Legislation that requires large commercial buildings (over 50,000 square feet) to upgrade their lighting, and also sub-meter tenant spaces over 10,000 square feet;
Int. No. 564-A: Legislation that creates a New York City Energy Code that existing buildings will have to meet whenever they make renovations (closing the loophole that allows buildings to perpetuate non-compliant systems if they perform renovations on less than half of a given building system);
Int. No. 476-A: Legislation that requires large buildings owners to make an annual benchmark analysis of energy consumption so that owners, tenants, and potential tenants can compare buildings’ energy consumption; and
Int. No. 967-A: Legislation that requires large private buildings to conduct energy audits once every decade and implement energy efficient maintenance practices. Also, all city-owned buildings over 10,000 sq ft will be required to conduct audits and complete energy retrofits that pay for themselves within 7-years.
In addition to the legislation, the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan includes two other initiatives: A workforce development working group of real estate, labor, and others that will identify the skills needed and ensure that sufficient training opportunities exist to fill the estimated 17,880 construction and building-related jobs the legislation will create.
Check out this video describing the new legislation here.
This legislation does not represent lighting upgrades. It represents a significant down grade in lighting applications. There are many options to reduce energy consumption without degrading
the visual impact of a well designed lighting plan.
It is clearly an energy reduction plan, NOT a lighting upgrade.
W. J. Detmer
Architectural Lighting L.L.C.
I don’t agree with it. This is way too much goverment intervention into the lives of people
These are all great points and thanks for your comments. I would like to add though that the government is not affecting people’s private lives with this legislation, but influencing the actions of corporations, which are legal fictions. All the law does is say you have to have the same efficiency in an existing building as in a new one, and you have lots of time to do this, which makes complete sense. The benefit to the City will be significant and it will get thousands of tenant buildings, which normally would not upgrade because of who pays/who benefits conflicts, to improve their efficiency. The law itself is, in truth, an “energy reduction plan”–but it is up to the owner and lighting designers to make it a “lighting upgrade.”
This could be a BIG business opportunity, in my opinion, for lighting designers doing business in New York City over the next 15 years.
P.S. My question is, as this seems unclear, is what version of the code do you have to comply with? Right now, NYC has a modified version of the 2007 state code, which in turn is based on 2003 IECC. But what about in 2024–does a building have to upgrade to the 2022 IECC or the 2003 IECC? Anybody know the answer to this?
Good grief! Check out the photo: NYC needs outdoor lighting legislation to reduce the unnecessary skyglow from excessive lighting. These new building codes do not address outdoor lighting.
Hi Craig,
Will the utilities/city offer up any incentitives to the building owners for retrofitting existing lighting systems?
Edward Bray – LC
United Lamp Supply
Two quick responses to these great comments:
First, if you were to upgrade every building in NYC to IECC 2003, the automatic shutoff alone would likely dramatically reduce light pollution.
Second, my understanding is that utilities serving NYC offer rebate programs for energy-efficient lighting. Example here: http://www.coned.com/energyefficiency/businessdirect.asp. There is also the Commercial Buildings Tax Deduction (www.lightingtaxdeduction.org).
Cuba has been successful in dramatic reduction of energy through government action. First, were strict new use codes that included lamp restrictions, then mandates that all commercial and residential building owners retrofit. That legislation then rationalized house-to-house, building-by-building forced compliance inspections and spontaneous retrofits – gangs of students forcibly installing CFLs.
I can’t wait to see the day when a building owner sends his “engineers” into retail, commercial, and residential spaces and demand that tenants retrofit their lighting, HVAC, water heating, cooking, and refrigeration equipment – ala the Cuban model. Yeah, that’s going to happen. I can also see a ground swell of support from building owners faced with re-wiring antique structures to comply with separate metering, and millions of leases renegotiated to cover the costs and separate energy from existing inclusive agreements – uh, not.
If we insist on making energy conservation all about complying with codes and legislation, we hand the future of design over to the lowest common denominator of committees, legislative lobbyists, and silly extremists who are louder than they are smart. In the end, we all end up in little dimly lit gray boxes stripped of anything that cannot be understood by legislative bodies. It’s all too Orwellian for my tastes.
Hopefully the day will never come when governments realize that legislation has no teeth without direct intervention and enforcement. Unfortunately this is a sign we’ve started down this road.
Conservation that comes from informed consent and a desire to contribute can result in improved quality, a role for design expertise, and dramatic improvements in total performance. Yet, for those who feel a need to control – this is not an option. They don’t get the concept, nor is to something they can use to campaign on, or control the actions of others with.
Thanks for your comments Kevin which, as always, are interesting and thought provoking. The problem is “informed consent and a desire to contribute” has been proven not to work without a law or regulation requiring consent and contribution, particularly when a business has to spend a buck it doesn’t want to spend.
For example, looking at all pre-1980 buildings in the United States, including buildings that have been renovated since 1980 and those that have not, lighting upgrades have only occurred in about one out of five of them (18%). This data suggests that 25 billion sq.ft. of commercial floorspace is still overlighted to pre-1980 lighting standards using T12 lamps and magnetic ballasts! Why are we squeezing the life out of lighting power and design in new buildings when older buildings are this out of date? If the DOE is right that 2% of the building stock is replaced each year, buildings built to today’s strictest energy code will be around for 50 years. Within 3-6 years, the efficiency of a new building becomes obsolete.
So the U.S. ends up with what you describe as the Cuban model but is actually simple government intervention regardless of nationality–a mixed bag of energy codes and regulations. I doubt we’ll ever end up with gangs of thugs entering private property and forcing businesses to retrofit. Rather, for tough enforcement, one could instead require a building, thinking off the top of my head, to reapply for an occupancy permit every 10 years, and undergo an inspection to ensure the building is meeting the latest energy code. Or at least make compliance a condition of sale of the building.
Even without that, without the thugs, and without any real teeth in terms of inspection and enforcements, the lesson of energy codes is there will be an expected measure of compliance simply because it’s the law and people have a “desire to contribute.” I did a survey of architects a few years back; they reported an average energy code compliance rate of 80%, even though enforcement is lax or even non-existent in many states. If 18,000 of New York City’s largest buildings retrofit their lighting and 4,000 don’t, that works for me.
If the free market has an even better solution, I’m all ears.
Craig, your post was a source for blog posts and debate over at Build2Sustain as well. Thanks for being such a great resource.
Interesting. Free market architects comply with codes 80% of the time, even when their is little or no enforcement. This is my experience as well, where our engineering firm, as far back as the 1980′s, complied with Title 24 regardless of what state we were designing for, just because it was a good benchmark. Today its ASHRAE. I also know many who use LEED standards on all design work, just because its a good guideline, not because they do that much LEED compliance work. I know dozens of designers who pursue energy efficient design, no matter what codes exist. I even participated in a group re-lamping of an apartment complex to cut energy use, that the landlord refused participate in – causing a few residents to do it despite him. All we need is to tap into what causes this behavior and grow it.
Legislation displaces motivation with blind compliance. Yet, T12 lamps and incandescent A-lamps still exist, even in California – an example of the failure of legislation since DOE and EPA have been trying to rid the universe of those lamps since 1993, when the first lamp black list was issued.
We too often treat energy conservation and environmental stewardship as tree-hugger liberal fantasy. Ed Begley and Bill Nye are the nut jobs, right? Meanwhile we look toward governmental controls and the stripping of civil liberties as viable solutions to the problems caused by treating environmentalism as a liberal tree-hugger fantasy.
One day, we will look around us and wonder just how the government became so powerful and intrusive, oblivious to the fact that we are driving the bus toward that future by demanding it control our collective behavior. Best we not act as individuals, unless we know all other individuals are required to act in a similar fashion, right?
Sadly, we deserve what we get as a collective population.
Thanks again, Kevin. I agree with a lot of what you say here, but would like to make two final points.
First, note that the architects could only comply with the code an average of 80% of the time because there was a code to begin with.
Second, architects are people and when they are personally liable for breaking the law, they are likely to comply with it. Corporations, on the other hand, are blind, amoral machines designed to generate profit. If corporations are not compelled by the law to avoid shoving its externalities onto you, a typical corporation would dump waste in your drinking water if it saved them a single dollar; one could argue the corporation would have a moral obligation to do so, on behalf of its shareholders, since if it didn’t, its competitors would do it, save the dollar, and be more competitive in the market. Looking at that logic, which has been common since capitalism’s ancient beginnings, I’m all for government intervention (which sadly may be RIP, along with our democracy, thanks to today’s Supreme Court decision, which reaffirms corporations are “people” and that in under their right of free speech they can pour as much money they want into the political process with no restraint, effectively legalizing bribery).
I guess my bottom line is I don’t consider being forced to wear a seat belt a violation of civil liberties. Instead, I consider government wiretapping and the elimination of Habeas Corpus to be violations of my civil liberties, which much of the public strangely accepts even while they scream about having to pay 2% more for a car that complies with higher CAFE standards. It’s strange to me what some people will give away without a murmur, and what they will take a bullet to protect.
There is a basic issue of fairness that must be considered and one would hope the government would show restraint, and I’m not just talking about thugs coming into your home forcing you to retrofit. I’m talking about new energy codes becoming so restrictive that they rob designers of creative freedom to solve problems. But that’s one reason why I’m supportive of this new law. I’m supportive because this year 2% of the building stock will conform to the latest energy efficiency standards, while 98% of it will not–in fact, 50% of it will be built to standards 25-50 years out of date. So if existing buildings are forced to retrofit, 1) the societal benefit will be multiplied from 2% to nominally 100% and 2) perhaps policymakers won’t need to squeeze so many watts out of new buildings as a result.
Meanwhile, the lighting industry will benefit. In today’s economy, you take what you can get. In New York City, for the next 15 years, the lighting community has an opportunity to make 22,000 phone calls and potentially get 22,000 upgrade projects, as there are 22,000 buildings in the City that are larger than 50,000 sq.ft. The people of New York will save money and, counting on the expertise of the NYC lighting community, get better lighting. The worst that will happen for the shareholders of the corporations that own all these buildings is they will be forced to make a profitable investment.
I, and millions of others wore seat belts long before the laws were put in place to ticket those who were allowed to believe they were going to be trapped in a burning car with them. We also wear helmets on motorcycles, regardless of living in a no-helmet law state. I have never seen any real evidence, other than the wimping by the auto industry itself, that customers complained about paying a few dollars more for improved fuel economy – of that indeed even has happened.
I don’t find codes themselves a violation of liberties. I find the constant movement toward government intervention in every aspect of our lives, from the projects we design, to how we are treated at the airport, a serious issue. In the last ten years the intrusion of legislation has become overwhelming. I do not support the notion that more is better, as all it accomplishes is shifting the power of change and decision making from creative and imaginative people to those who seek to control. This is dangerous ground, and fails to recognize that when compliance is placed above education, inspiration, and peer pressure, we all loose.
IMHO, published design standards, which building owners can access, designers can refer to, and schools can teach to, accomplish far more than legislative action. Building owners should be encouraged by the network of financial institution, lease/rent customers, and utilities to conserve. This can be done through education and expansion of awareness, resulting in a more effective and more sustainable future and progression.
Codes hand a man a fish and tell him when he may eat it. Education and support of inspiration teach a man to fish, and encourage him to care for the sea, and to share what he catches with those unable to fish for themselves – the result is growth in and for all of us.
Codes and legislation also teach us that what is not addressed, must be okay. So, anywhere the code fails to restrict action, there is likelihood that that action will be seen as acceptable. This leads to more restrictions and tighter definitions, and even more intrusion.
I am not against basic codes, nor do I oppose efforts to encourage conservation. I just refuse to celebrate them, as I believe their are far more effective approaches to conservation efforts, that are lost and set aside any time a legislative action is put in play.
Susan is right:) Look at any photo of NYC at night (or for that matter any major city) and you see all kinds of light coming from major high rise buildings..someone is paying for the wasted electricity here and it’s …ha-ha YOU and me and everyone else.
And please, knock it off about government control…I guess you don’t realize how silly you sound?
Want less government control in you lives? Aren’t we in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression? Brought to you by those who thought there was too much government control…