Dive Brief:

• Site energy use in buildings over 25,000 square feet in New York City dropped for the fifth consecutive year, with over 90% of large buildings estimated to comply with 2024 emission limits set by the city’s building emissions law, according to the Urban Green Council’s analysis of the city’s 2023 energy and water use data.
• The 92% of buildings meeting Local Law 97’s 2024 carbon emission limits, compared with 88% reported last year, include 93% of office buildings and 94% of multifamily buildings, the latest benchmarking data from the Urban Green Council shows. 
• Higher compliance among office buildings can be attributed to “building energy efficiency gains plus cleaning up compliance records, like actual building square footage, which is a key component for LL97 calculations,” Urban Green Council CEO John Mandyck said in an interview. “For most commercial buildings, adopting best practices — upgrading lighting, implementing sub-metering, focusing on operations and maintenance — is likely enough to get them into compliance for 2024.”

Dive Insight:

Urban Green Council said it calculated emissions rates and Local Law 97 compliance estimates using energy and water use benchmarked data from New York City’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory, an annual report produced by the mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. This inventory measures emissions from activities within the city’s five boroughs and tracks progress toward emission reduction goals. 

Site energy use fell 15% since 2010, while carbon emissions dropped 26% among regularly benchmarked properties during the same time, Urban Green’s analysis found. 

City data, released by the NYC Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice in September 2023, showed that 63% of large buildings were already exceeding 2030 targets. 

The Urban Green Council’s latest benchmarking data, meanwhile, shows that 43% of all buildings are on track to meet LL97’s stricter 2030 emission limits, with current emission levels from 50% of office buildings and 49% of multifamily buildings aligning with the 2030 standards. 

The emission limits for the 2030-2034 compliance window impose a significantly lower emissions threshold per square foot than those in the 2024-2029 compliance period. For example, during the 2024-2029 compliance period, the emissions intensity limit for office space is calculated by multiplying the Business Group B buildings emissions intensity limit of 0.00846 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per square foot by the corresponding gross floor area. For the 2030-2034 compliance window, the emissions intensity limit multiplier for Business Group B buildings drops to 0.00453 tCO₂e per square foot. Business Group B includes office, professional and service-type transaction buildings, according to the New York City building code. 

As the city moves toward stricter 2030 limits, “we should expect to see buildings continue to implement energy efficiency, operations and maintenance best practices,” Mandyck said. He noted that other strategies building owners can adopt include taking steps to electrify fossil-fuel-based heat and hot water. “The beneficial electrification credit can help amplify the effect of the work buildings do to comply with 2030 limits,” Mandyck said. 

The beneficial electrification credit incentivizes building owners to replace fossil fuel systems — in whole or in part — with highly efficient electric heating, cooling and hot water equipment, according to an Urban Green Council paper published in April. While building owners can use this credit for the 2024-2029 LL97 limits, the greatest opportunity lies in helping the 65% of covered buildings that must meet stricter 2030-2034 targets, the April paper says.

Urban Green Council’s analysis also throws light on energy end uses in New York City’s large buildings. Its findings suggest that space heating and domestic hot water accounted for 70% of site energy use in multifamily buildings. Electric end uses such as cooling, plug loads, lighting and ventilation, however, are more prominent in office buildings than other building sectors, the data shows. 

Commercial building operators face certain challenges in reducing energy consumption in space heating and domestic hot water, Mandyck noted. “Almost all heating in NYC today is fossil fuel-based, and electrifying heating will require installing heat pumps,” he said. About 20% of commercial buildings operate from district steam heat provided by Consolidated Edison, which has its own plans to decarbonize that application, according to Mandyck. “Space heating is also a bigger challenge and opportunity for commercial buildings since their domestic hot water loads are relatively small,” he said.