Published April 6, 2022
Listen to our fourteenth episode of Urban Green Live! Hosted by Urban Green Council CEO John Mandyck, this interview series features international industry experts to answer your questions about a low carbon future.
On April 6, 2022, we welcomed Anthony Fiore, Deputy Commissioner and Chief Decarbonization Officer at NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services. In this episode, Anthony and John discussed NYC’s plan to reduce emissions in its portfolio of buildings and comply with Local Law 97.
Key Takeaways
DCAS acts as the hub for city government, providing shared services like human capital, fleet management, procurement, and real estate.
-> It is responsible for energy management across a diverse portfolio of over 4,000 city-owned buildings, including offices, courthouses, community centers, police precincts, firehouses, museums, libraries, hospitals, schools, and universities.
DCAS has many future initiatives including:
-> Continue building on existing efforts with more projects and policy changes.
-> Focus on accountability, people initiatives, collaboration, and optimized building operations.
-> Address emission reductions, particularly in disadvantaged communities, with an equity lens.
Speakers
John Mandyck
Chief Executive Officer
Anthony Fiore
Deputy Commissioner and Chief Decarbonization Officer NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services
Q&A
John Mandyck: In 2019, the city tagged nine buildings for deep energy retrofits to comply with Local Law 97. Have these been implemented and are more facilities gonna be added?
Anthony Fiore: Yeah, those projects are underway right now. The purpose of that program is really to get at a 50% or more energy reduction or greenhouse gas emission reduction from those buildings. It’s a whole building approach. And yes, certainly we want to add more of that type of whole building system to the portfolio of interventions that we’re doing.
John Mandyck: What are the biggest lessons industry can learn from the city’s decarbonization efforts?
Anthony Fiore: I think the whole city’s approach is to lead by example. I think we’ve seen that in the past when we look at the emission reductions that have been achieved in the public sector versus the private sector. It’s really showing that the investments that the city is making and the planning that we’re doing so that we can integrate our state of good repair into the capital replacement cycle is really important. I think that’s certainly transferable to the private sector.
John Mandyck: What jobs are needed to accelerate decarbonization or job training?
Anthony Fiore: It’s a great question because a lot of different jobs are necessary. You know, there’s a technical aspect of it, with design engineers, energy management professionals, strategic planners, but it’s also the trades. Over time we’ve been seeing a waning of trades, and that’s something that really needs to be brought back. These folks have been doing green jobs forever. Every time you improve the operation of existing equipment, you get more out of that equipment in terms of energy efficiency. So that’s really important.
One other thing that I found, and this is a commonality with the private sector, is that more and more things are becoming automated. It’s a different skill set than what we’ve seen out there in the past to interface with the human machine interface pieces and the programmable logic controllers. I think that’s a real area that’s ripe for some curriculum development
John Mandyck: What’s been the most challenging city building to work on?
Anthony Fiore: I think they each have their own challenges. An example of this is schools. In schools, you have to work around the children that are there. We’re not going to interrupt education to do this work. There’s access requirements, there’s off hour work that has to be done.
Let’s take another example. Let’s look at cultural institutions and museums and zoos and our aquariums and so forth. They each have unique challenges too, because you can’t take systems down when you have cultural artifacts and animals that are being protected. I think those are some of the different types of challenges that are out there, but each one offers its own unique challenges.
John Mandyck: What technologies do you think we need now that could accelerate decarbonization?
Anthony Fiore: Okay, two come to mind. First is electrification and having that apply to more building typologies and in retrofit applications. We need to change our codes and standards for new buildings, but the majority of the work is in existing buildings. So how do we advance the technology around electrification for retrofit applications across this diverse set of building typologies?
The second is energy storage. As we become more and more reliant on variable production, renewable resources like wind and sun, we have to have technologies other than fossil fuel technologies that fill that gap.
John Mandyck: Given all the city’s resources, is it easier or harder to do retrofits in city buildings?
Anthony Fiore: You know, it’s certainly a challenge, but I have to say that the city has been leading by example for quite some time. Again, with this new administration, the decision making is happening more quickly than I’ve seen it happen in the past. I think from that level we’re starting to approach the public sector where often building owners can make decisions much more quickly than city government. City government has the ability to make investments that may have a longer payback period than the typical building owner is willing to do. There’s pros and cons to both. I don’t think there’s any magic that makes one side better or easier than the other.
John Mandyck: How do you track your emissions?
Anthony Fiore: The city publishes annual greenhouse gas inventory, it comes out in the fall of each year. That inventory tracks both private sector and public sector emissions. We work with every city agency, we do benchmarking for the majority of our buildings, and we take all of that data, purchasing data, and we use that to build up the emissions that are coming from our buildings and from our non-building stationary assets.
John Mandyck: Are you relying on third parties to collect that data or do you have systems built within each agency for the city to collect that data directly?
Anthony Fiore: We do not rely on third parties. We are doing that internally. DCAS collects all of the utility energy data, we do all of the account management for every city agency. So all of the electric, steam, and natural gas bills come into DCAS. Then we collect heating oil use data from the agencies. We also get that through our procurement office because we have citywide contracts to procure that.
John Mandyck: Is there a particular project that has stood out for you as like an aha moment for a lesson learned on the journey for Local Law 97?
Anthony Fiore: We just completed a project, this was the Charles Charleston branch of New York Public Library. That’s a net zero building that was just completed. It was done in cooperation with the New York Public Library and the Economic Development Corporation, among other partners.
I think that really showed how you combine different intervention types to really get the deep carbonization. There’s solar on the roof there, but there’s really robust demand side interventions that were done throughout that building, not only the mechanical systems and the lighting systems, but the building envelope work and all of that coming together to ensure that we were getting out of the system what was designed. Commissioning and testing work was really an important aspect of this.
John Mandyck: You said $800 million has been spent so far. How does that work going forward? Are you funded already to do the project work you need to do through 2025, or do you have to rely every year on the city budget for those capital funds to do the work you need to do?
Anthony Fiore: The good news is the city has dedicated about $3.8 billion over the next 10 years for this effort. So that money is allocated to this. Each year we come up with a spend plan that’s done in close collaboration with our agency partners.
John Mandyck: What opportunities exist for retired technical professionals to return to the workforce for Local Law 97 implementation?
Anthony Fiore: Hey, listen, institutional knowledge is a great thing. We really want to pull on that depth of knowledge. It’s funny because the Department for Aging actually runs a program called the Reserve Program which brings professionals across all disciplines that have retired but still want to contribute and they come back part-time. They’re paid and we can leverage the knowledge that these folks have obtained over decades worth of work experience.
John Mandyck: Is the labor shortage more of a lack of funds for training or a lack of eligible candidates?
Anthony Fiore: I think one, we said this a little bit earlier, but we’ve seen a waning in trade skills. I think that’s a cultural thing that actually has to be addressed. I think we’ve got to get back to really saying these are good options for our kids today. The Department of Education is doing a lot of great work on this, and we’ve even partnered with them to fund training so that students coming right out of high school are prepared for this type of workforce.
But I think there’s a cultural change there that has to happen. I think the other thing is a curriculum that combines disciplines. To be really good at this work, it’s really multidisciplinary. You have to have a certain financial acumen to build business cases, you also have to be able to think strategically and plan, and then you need that technical applied knowledge of how this equipment works and how do you make it better?
I don’t know that there’s any curriculum out there today that brings those three things together in a comprehensive way to train our next generation of green job employees with the skills that are required for success. I would love to see something around that happen.
John Mandyck: How fluid is the city’s building portfolio in the sense that you mentioned you have 4,000 properties, but has it always been that way? Do properties come in and out of ownership?
Anthony Fiore: It is fluid to a degree. Again, I go back to saying 90% of the buildings that are here today will be here in 2050. That’s the same for the overall stock of the city’s buildings, but yes, we have buildings that we get out of and some of the agencies go into leased spaces. We have an absolute emission reduction that we have to obtain, so our emission inventory has to account for that growth. We do that, we go out to our agencies every year and we survey with them for new buildings coming online, buildings that may be going offline, and even new treatment processes.
John Mandyck: How can the general public support what the city’s doing and stay informed about the current work?
Anthony Fiore: I think the general public support here is critical to success. I think there’s a number of ways to stay informed, one way is through the inventory that we report each year, that’s a great way to track the progress. The mayor’s management report that’s published each year is another way. There are additional local laws that require us to report on things, so you can go to DCAS’s website and see the energy management page there. It has a link to all of these reports.
John Mandyck: Do you have a sense for what other cities are doing to decarbonize?
Anthony Fiore: They’re doing much the same as we are. Some cities concentrate more on different aspects. Boston’s been looking at first distributed technologies and energy storage, focusing more on that. Chicago is looking to see what it can do in its buildings.
Local Law 97
NYC’s groundbreaking climate legislation sets carbon emissions caps for large buildings that began in 2024.
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