New York State offers $36 million for energy efficiency on commercial buildings

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has made $36 million available through two new initiatives aimed at increasing energy efficiency of commercial buildings.

The programs are available to many properties including office towers, universities, hospitals, and retail stores — which are some of the state’s biggest energy users. The two programs are estimated to cut energy bills of participating buildings by more than $200 million over eight years.

About $30 million is available through NYSERDA for Real Time Energy Management to support the use of advanced technologies to help building owners fine-tune their building’s energy systems, identify capital projects to cut energy costs, and reduce operations and management costs by an expected 5% to 25%.

NYSERDA plans to make $6 million available to building owners and their tenants to improve energy efficiency in leased office spaces. These areas typically consume 40% to 60% of a building’s total energy use.

Companies that design and build energy efficient office spaces for their employees can anticipate paying an average of 30% less for energy than they would pay in a typical office space.

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.