A 1999 graduate in sustainable design from the University of Virginia, Dana Robbins Schneider led sustainability efforts for many years at the commercial-real-estate giant J.L.L. As the director of sustainability at the Empire State Realty Trust, she oversaw an energy-efficiency retrofit of the iconic Manhattan skyscraper on 34th Street, which demonstrated how landlords could save both carbon and money, and which helped pave the way for Local Law 97, the city's effort to force large buildings to improve their energy performance. (Our interview has been edited.)
How did the Empire State Building retrofit come about? What are the bottom-line before-and-after numbers?
The Empire State Building's 10-year energy-efficiency retrofit started as an exercise to prove -- or disprove -- that there could be an investment-and-return business case for deep energy retrofits. Once it was proven, it was implemented to save energy and reduce costs for both the tenants and Empire State Realty Trust. We partnered with the Clinton Climate Initiative, Rocky Mountain Institute, Johnson Controls, and J.L.L. to manage the project. Through the rebuild, we were able to cut emissions from the building by 54 percent and counting, which has saved us upward of four million dollars each year, with a 3.1-year payback. We have attempted to inform policy with local, state, and federal governments to share what we've learned to reduce emissionsand to meet E.S.R.T.'s target for the building to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
As a result of the retrofit, the building is in the top 20 percent in energy efficiency among all measured buildings in the United States. E.S.R.T. is the nation's largest user of 100-percent green power in real estate and was named Energy Star Partner of the Year in 2021.
What were the key interventions? And do people working in the building even realize that much has changed?
The biggest lesson we learned was that there is no silver bullet -- there is silver buckshot. A combination of measures that interact effectively delivers optimal savings. More than 50 percent of the energy consumed in an office building is consumed by tenants, so the actions of tenants are critical. Landlord-tenant partnerships are the only way to drive deep energy-and-emissions reductions in the built environment.
The best practice for the lowest-cost implementation of energy-efficiency strategies is to make the right steps in the right order. Start with the envelope, or the exterior, of the building. Each project contributes to the success of other projects, so, when we measure effectiveness and R.O.I., it's important to look at how each project interacts with another.
We were able to decrease energy use through strategic tactics throughout the building, with an emphasis on the reuse of existing resources. We executed eight major projects, which included:
- Renovation of the central chiller plant.
- Regenerative braking technology added to each elevator, to store energy instead of heat.
- On-site refurbishment of all 6,514 of the building's double-glass windows, for which we reused more than 96 percent of existing materials, to quadruple their performance.
- Reflective insulation placed behind each radiator, to reduce energy
Do you hear from other building owners wondering how to do this? What do you think are the keys to getting it done?
From the earliest announcement, we have shared all our work for free with the public, and we have rolled out best practices from the Empire State Building's deep energy retrofit to our entire portfolio. E.S.R.T. has a target to achieve carbon neutrality as a commercial portfolio by 2035. With Local Law 97 emissions limits effective in 2024, many building owners are unsure of how to make their buildings compliant. Our chairman, president, and C.E.O. serves on the LL97 Advisory Board and on the LL97 Technical Pathways for Commercial Buildings Working Group to develop and improve policy based on practice, and we are the only commercial landlord to serve on the Implementation Advisory Board.
The Empire State Building has long been a modern marvel, and we intend to keep that reputation as we transparently share our research and best practices in our annual sustainability report. As we prove that it works in the "World's Most Famous Building," which this year celebrates its 90th anniversary, we prove that it can work anywhere.
Climate SchoolThe searing heat in Arizona and Utah has translated into early-season wildfires. The Pack Creek Fire, in the La Sal Mountains, scorched, among many other things, Ken and Jane Sleight's Pack Creek Ranch, a literary landmark, where for decades many of the region's writers have gathered. Some of them have put together a chapbook, "La Sal Mountain Elegies," which includes Terry Tempest Williams's account of being at the ranch, in 1989, on the day that Edward Abbey died.
There's another controversy emerging at the Nature Conservancy.this time about the use of forests. Last summer, a coalition of environmental groups around the country sent T.N.C. a letter asking it to reà «valuate support for promoting forestry as a "natural climate solution" and, in particular, to come out against burning trees to produce electricitythe so-called biomass energy that scientists now understand to be a major climate threat and that sociologists know to be a prime example of environmental racism. T.N.C. executives replied in a letter, saying that "reasonable people can disagree on approaches." (I should note that I served for a decade as a board member of the Adirondack chapter of the Conservancy, and last winter I participated in a fund-raiser for it.) T.N.C. gets things done, but one of its strengths -- access to lots of high-powered financial players who can bankroll their conservation effort -- scan sometimes pose a problem, at least of optics.
A board member and investor from Enviva sits on the group's advisory board for its NatureVest "in-house impact investing program," and Enviva is building plants across the Southeast to produce wood pellets for burning in European power plants. Danna Smith, of the Dogwood Alliance, which led the coalition that sent the letter last summer, told me, "Unfortunately, T.N.C. seems to be centering the financial interests of large landowners, investors, and corporations in ways that are seriously undermining efforts to protect biodiversity, solve the climate crisis, and advance environmental justice."(In a statement, T.N.C. noted that it "only supports qualified use of biomass for energy generation produced as a by-product of native forest restoration," and added that all of its decisions, "including on biomass, are informed by science, and are not influenced by the business relationships of any of our independent advisors. TNC is not engaged with Enviva, and we have no partnerships or plans for partnering with them.")
Here's a revealing examination of the weaknesses of carbon offsets: some University of California professors studying the system's efforts to go carbon-neutral scrutinized the offsets that it was spending millions to purchaseand discovered that it was paying landfills in low-regulation states to burn methane as it was emitted by rotting garbage. This has, at best, a modest effect on greenhouse gases, and seems a very long way from the visionary leadership one would expect from one of the world's greatest public university systems.
Writing in The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer lays out a useful case for the proposition that renewable-energy costs have become so low that they're now driving rapid change even in politics and economics. What he calls the "green vortex" demonstrates "how policy, technology, business, and politics can all work together, lowering the cost of zero-carbon energy, building pro-climate coalitions, and speeding up humanity's ability to decarbonize. It has also already gotten results. The green vortex is what drove down the cost of wind and solar, what overturned Exxon's board, and what the Biden administration is banking on in its infrastructure plan."
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