ThoughtLab Featured

New York City has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 and by over 80% by 2050, as part of its Green New Deal plan for a more sustainable future. The New York City Housing Authority—the largest provider of public housing in North America—is fulfilling this pledge by retrofitting its huge portfolio of housing units, which is no easy task. Its approach can serve as a blueprint for other cities.

Achieving these goals will not be simple for The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Its residential footprint covers over 500,000 tenants in some 335 housing developments, and buildings are the largest source of greenhouse emissions. Under Local Law 97, all buildings that exceed 25,000 square feet must meet new energy efficiency and emissions standards. The city also has banned the use of natural gas for heating and cooling in new buildings.

As a result, NYCHA is pushing hard on several fronts to decarbonize its buildings and convert to beneficial electrification where possible, says Gianluca Galletto, former managing director for technology and innovation partnerships at NYCHA.

“The New York City government plans to decarbonize before the end of the decade—that includes all the buildings that belong to the government, which, if you include NYCHA public housing, goes up to 600 million square feet,” says Galletto. “The only difference is that for public housing the reductions apply to the portfolio on average, not for each single building, so it’s a little more flexible.”

Following a sustainability roadmap

NYCHA is following a Sustainability Agenda that it published in October 2021 that sets out a decarbonization and a climate mitigation roadmap comprising a variety of solutions. These include rooftop solar panels, which NYCHA is installing on public housing facilities to achieve 30MW of power production. On others, it is putting in small wind turbines for additional power, and green roofs to reduce heating and cooling needs. The agency is also assessing feasibility of installing solar plus storage on two of its buildings.

Another measure is transitioning from fossil fuels to clean, electric powered systems for heat, hot water, and cooking in housing units. Improvements include electric induction stoves and ovens and highefficiency heat pumps to provide space heat and hot water. Domestic water and space heating—and cooling—account for 85% of energy needs for New York public housing, explains Galletto. However, while this will reduce emissions from buildings, the full decarbonization effect will depend on New York State converting to carbon-free energy sources for its electricity generation.

Heating and cooling adjustments

NYCHA is also digitizing building heating and cooling systems to better manage distribution. “There are huge quality of life problems because of how old buildings were built,” says Galletto. “One apartment is super-hot in the winter, so they open windows or turn on the air conditioner, while another part of the building is too cold. By changing the architecture of the heat production and distribution, you start to affect the way it is distributed by units.”

This includes installing smart meters and sensors in each apartment. As part of this effort, up to 30,000 families will receive broadband service at a greatly reduced rate, which permits remote management of heating and cooling. “That means no one can put the heat up too high or the air conditioning too low,” he says.

Transformative technologies

NYCHA is looking to Scandinavia for ideas for district heating and thermal networks to ensure that heating and cooling can be shared among buildings and that energy is not wasted. Copenhagen and Stockholm have thousands of miles of heat networks, piping that connects underground, Galletto points out. “Buildings can become prosumers of energy because the heat that they don’t use can be used by the building beside you. It’s a little bit like the cloud, or like network storage for different computers, where you can share some of the free hard drive.”

Getting these heat networks and geothermal heating and cooling units built won’t be easy in New York, with its high population density and streets with a huge underground network of pre-existing piping and wiring. But Galletto says NYCHA will draw on new technologies to build on existing piping—and much older district heating using steam that dates from more than 100 years ago.

These technologies include heat exchangers, geothermal capabilities, and heat pumps, which offer a potential for a more than three-fold increase in efficiency and reduction in energy, Galletto says. “With heat pumps, and with the difference in temperature between inside, outside, underground, and above ground, you can also provide cooling,” says Galletto.

In partnership with the New York Power Authority and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, NYCHA issued a request for proposal seeking a heat pump that can be installed through a window. The three agencies are currently evaluating six proposals and hope to award a contract in 2022.

He adds that NYCHA is looking to replace all gas boilers over 15 years old—those that are the least energy efficient—with heat pump technology. In other NYCHA developments—10 at present—the plan is to move to geothermal heating and cooling that will replace use of natural gas completely, with a single plant serving up to 10 buildings.

 

Innovation is challenging for a city when the national government controls many of its urban domains. Dublin, Ireland’s capital, sets an example of how a municipality can make good progress toward becoming a future-ready city geared to meeting citizen needs, even without total authority, by working with higher levels of government and optimizing the power it does have.

Ireland’s central government retains authority over important domains that municipalities in other countries normally control, including education, health, policing, and many aspects of transportation. Irish cities have chief executives, but not directly elected mayors.

“That makes it much harder to set a big, audacious vision, but there’s a lot within our remit that we can do,” says Jamie Cudden, manager of the smart city program for the Dublin City Council. Areas Dublin does control include infrastructure such as roads and sidewalks, parking, fire and rescue, streetlights, libraries, social housing, waste and wastewater management, the environment, and hundreds of typical city services.

“There can be a disconnect between national bodies and what citizens think,” says Cudden. “We serve as the interface, with a closer ear to the ground, particularly when it comes to areas of social inclusion.” The city has its own plan for “future-proofing” itself. “We look to become a dynamic, sustainable, future-ready city built on inclusive neighborhoods and communities, a strong economy, a vibrant cultural life, and connected growth,” says Cudden.

A greener future

Sustainability is a major theme for Dublin, which seeks to meet national and EU goals for a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 while it works to improve the city council’s energy efficiency by 33%. One initiative is the retrofitting of social housing to make it more energy efficient. That includes using national funding to offer incentives for installing solar panels and insulation.

Sustainable mobility is another goal. “The pandemic spurred a massive change in mindset regarding making the city more attractive for cycling and led to a huge investment in cycling infrastructure. Many quicker and more temporary deployments stayed sticky, including a significant pedestrianization in the city center,” says Cudden. “There’s an acknowledgement that the city is a different place post-COVID.”

Dublin is starting to see a pickup in shared mobility, such as car clubs and bike-sharing programs, including Dublinbikes, Moby, and Bleeper, says Cudden. The city supports these organizations by allowing licenses to operate on its streets. In addition, it is encouraging development of mobility-as-a-service apps that allow users to make account-based payments for all legs of a multi-modal journey.

The city is also working to expand the number of EV charging stations, in cooperation with other regional authorities. However, Dublin’s Georgian architecture and narrow streets makes this challenging. “There’s a lot of competition for curbside space, so we are likely to see EV charging in car parks and at petrol stations play a significant transition role,” says Cudden.

Harnessing digital technologies

Dublin is embracing the latest technologies and innovative working practices to improve the quality of life for its citizens in the region. With three other councils in the region, Dublin City Council established the Smart Dublin initiative in 2016 that set up four “smart districts” in the city to act as testbeds for new technologies to solve urban problems in partnership with a range of global technology firms, SME’s, academia, public bodies and local communities.

One area where its work has paid off is telecommunications. The sudden upsurge in remote working, online shopping, and digital communication during the pandemic put tremendous pressure on telecom networks. “It showed us the need for much more consolidation and leadership from the city council to support rather than block telecoms investment,” says Cudden.

As a result, the city council set up a new telecoms unit earlier this year as a “one-stop shop” to help speed the rollout of 5G and high-speed connectivity. “We did a lot of experimentation in our Smart Docklands District from 2017 to build a 5g test-bed and deploy a network of small cells, and realized quickly that it’s hard to find poles, power, and fiber that can be easily accessed,” he says.

The telecoms unit provides a single point of contact for the council to get permits and navigate the planning process to put equipment in ducting, on buildings, and on street furniture.

“This is critical for the future of the city and will help us deliver 5G more quickly than other cities in Europe,” Cudden says. The council is working with companies to ensure that disruption is kept to a minimum and that all parts of the community have connectivity.

Cudden notes that the pandemic’s lasting effects are still unclear. One unknown is how hybrid working will affect office space in business districts. Another is the effect of ecommerce on retail shops in the city, whose business has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Data partnerships

Data is vital for monitoring these trends. The council keeps its finger on the pulse of Dublin’s economic performance— and on its environment—through data partnerships with the private sector. Partners include MasterCard, which provides consumer spending data insights; Standard & Poor’s, which supplies purchasing manager index data; and Google and DPD, which use electric cars and delivery vehicles to collect street-by-street air quality information. Also, the city has developed Dublinked, an innovative non-personal data repository and network freely available to anyone, that includes more than 500 datasets on a wide range of economic, environmental, health, and cultural areas.

Dublin is using this data to support policy decisions and feed into new digital twin technology. It has six different projects in development with multiple industry partners, including piloting the use of digital twins to better manage high-risk sites across the city, for use in emergency response.