February brought upbeat climate news from New York City: The Empire State Building and 13 other buildings owned by the Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT) are now powered solely by wind.
ESRT has a portfolio of more than 10 million square feet and now ranks as the nation’s biggest real estate user of entirely renewable energy.
To be precise, this does not mean that the 14 properties will be hooked up to wind turbines that will directly feed them electricity. Instead, as IFLScience explained, ESRT will effectively be paying for energy to be sourced from renewable sources in order to cover the electricity its properties use. The new deal will ensure that a kilowatt-hour of green energy will be added to the grid for every kilowatt-hour of electricity used in ESRT buildings. The company is buying the power from Green Mountain Energy and Direct Energy.
The energy needed to operate buildings is among the nation’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. In New York, buildings generate more than two-thirds of the city’s carbon emissions, Sarah Kaplan reported in The Washington Post.
Bottom line: ESRT will prevent the production of 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of removing all New York City taxis from the road for a year.
This is not the first time ESRT took a bold leadership step on climate, Kaplan noted. A decade-long “deep carbon” retrofit enabled the Empire State Building to cut its planet-warming emissions by about 40 percent. The skyscraper itself has run on renewable energy since 2011.
The move to renewable power was as much a business decision as an environmental one, said Anthony Malkin, the trust’s chief executive. Many of ESRT’s existing tenants had been asking about switching to greener energy sources. And a growing number of companies — including some that rent space in ESRT buildings — have adopted corporate sustainability initiatives that include commitments to reduce their carbon footprints. “We want to differentiate ourselves so we get better tenants at higher rents so we can outperform our competition,” Malkin told The Post. “It’s all market driven.”
This move is an important symbolic victory for renewables, said Cyndy Reynolds, commercial sales director for Green Mountain Energy. “When you have someone like ESRT who you know is going to look at every facet, whether it’s cost or reliability, and they decide to move forward … it’s not just a PR play at that point,” Reynolds told Kaplan. “It’s so important to have examples like ESRT to show the nation that renewable power options are affordable and, dare I say, competitive,” she said.
Wind is the most-used renewable energy source in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration, generating about 9 percent of the nation’s electricity last year.
Data from the financial advisory company Lazard shows that new wind power facilities are cheaper to build and operate than almost all kinds of fossil fuel infrastructure, even without government subsidies. If you factor in tax credits and other incentives, generating wind can cost as little as $9 per 1,000 kilowatt-hours, compared to at least $23 at natural gas power plants.
Meantime, New York State is moving quickly to develop wind power off its coastline. There are five projects in active development--the largest offshore wind pipeline in the nation, totaling more than 4,300 megawatts and representing nearly 50 percent of the capacity needed to meet New York’s offshore wind goal of 9,000 megawatts by 2035.
And there was important news about wind energy production February 3 from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. It will resume the permitting process for Vineyard Wind's proposed wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, with electricity likely to be produced by late 2023. "Offshore wind has the potential to help our nation combat climate change, improve resilience through reliable power, and spur economic development to create good-paying jobs," said BOEM Director Amanda Lefton, who was named head of the agency February 1.
While there is progress being made, the transition to clean energy would move even more quickly if the nation were to put a price on carbon. We are urging Congress to take that step and encourage you to deliver that message to those who represent you on Capitol Hill.