Best-Laid Plans

In September Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan aimed at cutting New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2050, a goal echoed by the City Council, which recently held a hearing on a bill that would encode it in law. But what will it actually take to achieve such an ambitious end?

Two things must be taken into account first: To start with, New York City is already more energy-efficient than most communities, due to the fact that it is denser than most communities because of its high density.

“Even though most of the land sits under single-family homes, most of the people live in multi-family dwellings where one person’s floor is another person’s ceiling,” said Steven Cohen, executive director of Columbia’s Earth Institute. “So even though these are old buildings that are not particularly energy-efficient, we still use less energy because of the fact that we’re not heating as many exterior walls in the winter. … We also tend to be outside in communal spaces more than in other parts of the country; even our interior lighting is lower.”

Second, about three-quarters of the city’s energy is generated from its buildings—a far higher percentage than in most places, since walking and public transportation are the preferred modes of transit for many people— which is why the first phase of the de Blasio administration’s plan involves retrofitting public structures with more efficient heating, cooling and power systems, incentivizing the private sector to do the same with its own properties, and installing 100 megawatts worth of solar panels across 300 buildings over the next decade.

The city has already reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 19 percent compared with its 2005 levels, primarily by switching from coal and dirtier heating oils to cleaner-burning oils and natural gas. But “The majority of these reductions are the result of non-replicable ‘low-hanging fruit’ ... which is why we saw the need for the mayor’s new sweeping green buildings plan,” said Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Managment and Budget.

Still, the city’s goal cannot be achieved through retrofitting buildings alone.

“To get to 80 percent reductions, we need to talk about renewable energy,” Cohen said. “By 2050 the assumption is that you would be off the internal combustion engine and on to electric cars. Without that I do not think you could get to those levels of reduction.”

At a recent City Council hearing Environmental Committee Chair Donovan Richards was joined by Councilman Costa Constantinides— who introduced the bill complementing the mayor’s plan—and Councilmen Brad Lander and Rory Lancman. Their first order of business was to question Bill Goldstein, the mayor’s senior advisor on recovery, resiliency and infrastructure, and Dan Zarrilli, head of the city’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency, along with two energy program directors from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. Although enthusiastic about the policy, the Council members did not shy away from the obvious difficulties inherent in executing it.

“It’s great to have the administration here and so aggressively working on this,” Lander said. “At the same time I think it’s important that we flag just how big of a job this is. … The challenge before us might be bigger than we are.”

Lander appeared skeptical that private sector building owners will voluntarily retrofit their properties at a rate conforming with the plan’s targets, even if offered incentives to do so. Zarrilli assured him that there would be greater outreach to small building owners than there has been in the past, and said his office has not ruled out making the retrofits mandatory at some point.

“In the past we’ve seen inadequate enforcement on just about every issue across the board,” Richards said.

Zarrilli, pointing out that the city’s air is cleaner than it has been in 50 years, emphasized the necessity of rigorous interim targets and goals.

The mayor has come under criticism of late from some environmental advocates for failing so far to find a new director for the Office of Long- Term Planning and Sustainability—the office charged with coordinating the city’s sustainability efforts across all departments—and for which Zarrilli is currently the acting head.

In a separate interview with City & State, Zarrilli pointed out that OLTPS and the Office of Recovery and Resiliency were actually one unit until this spring. So while the search continues for a new director of OLTPS, Zarrilli is essentially continuing in a leadership role he has served in since the Bloomberg administration.

“We’re firing on all cylinders,” he said. “We’re doubling the number of staff that we have focused on climate change issues both on the resiliency side and now with the work on the sustainability side. So there really is so much more commitment coming now in terms of staff and resources and implementation coming down the pike.”

Transportation is clearly the next piece of the puzzle, but Zarrilli said his office has been so focused on the buildings plan that it will not be announcing a policy in this area until the spring.

Cohen contends that technology is not yet where it needs to be in the renewable energy sector for the city to reach its emissions reduction goal.

Energy stVorage, for instance, must be improved upon if the city is to wean itself off fossil fuels entirely. Power sources such as wind and solar are effective when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but to make them consistently available, energy needs to be saved for rainy days as well. And solar panels are also far less efficient at gathering power from sunlight than they could be.

“In the end there needs to be some transformative technology that we don’t have yet,” said Cohen, noting that the application of nanotechnology to solar cells should make them progressively smaller. “If the solar receptor was, say, the size of a window rather than the size of your roof, suddenly you start seeing the possibility of people using those technologies to generate more and more of their home energy. When you get to that, then an 80 percent reduction is really quite feasible.” He added, “When I was in graduate school, the computer I used was the size of my living room, and it had less computing power than my iPhone.”