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The Manhattan Apartment Building That Went All-In on All-Electric
This article was published as a collaboration between Reasons to be Cheerful, which reports on solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, and Skylight, which tells stories about the New Yorkers leading the clean energy transition in their own homes.
From the outside, 420 Beekman Hill in Midtown East looks like your standard Manhattan co-op: A 110-unit tower of white brick built in the 1960s, topping out at 13 stories. But its familiar façade masks an innovative upgrade that’s brought the building to the cutting edge of energy efficient technology. As one of the first co-ops in Manhattan to fully electrify its heating and cooling systems with heat pumps, it serves as a model for cities looking to make older housing stock more sustainable.
Prior to electrification, the building’s system ran on gas-powered steam – one of the least efficient methods of heating and cooling, explains Carl Thompson, Beekman Hill’s resident manager.
With its new retrofit, the building has met its carbon emissions reduction target 25 years ahead of the city’s carbon neutrality goal, established under Local Law 97 (LL97). The landmark law, passed in 2019, requires buildings of more than 25,000 square feet to reduce their carbon emissions by 40 percent (compared to 2006 levels) by the year 2030, and 80 percent by 2050.
Randy Gerner, a resident and board member of 420 Beekman Hill, had a vision for a heating and cooling system that wasn’t powered by fossil fuels. Credit: Marlowe Starling.
Beekman Hill has become a symbol of what’s possible under LL97, and an example of how state and city grants can make large-scale energy upgrades a reality. But subsidies are just one part of the story. The ambitious project might never have been realized if not for a savvy architect-resident, a forward-thinking co-op board and good timing.
When Beekman Hill (officially 420 E. 51st St.) was originally built in 1962, it was part of a broad network of buildings heated by steam, a cheap byproduct of local power company ConEdison’s fossil fuel-based electricity generation.
But as the city grew and ConEd became more centralized, the utility’s network of pipes needed even more fossil fuels to generate and distribute that steam more widely. This maze of pipes loses heat along the way, making it far less efficient and far more expensive for individual buildings. As it happens, buildings are the top contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in New York City, even above transportation.
420 Beekman Hill’s new heat pumps live on a raised platform, leaving the rest of the roof usable by members of the co-op. Credit: Marlowe Starling.
Beekman Hill’s old, steam-based equipment included a large steam-absorption system to generate cooling, plus a heat transfer mechanism to make domestic hot water. By 2022 this system was on its last leg and the co-op board was deciding what to do next. At first, the board considered a natural gas-based boiler and A/C system. But Randy Gerner, a resident and board member who also happens to work as an architect, had another idea.
“We were at an interesting cusp where there was new equipment coming online for heat pumps, systems similar to the ones I’ve been using in my new buildings,” Gerner says. “We were thinking, ‘Is there a way to adapt this to a 1960s building?’ That was our first challenge.”
Gerner also knew they would soon face fines if they didn’t hit the city’s emissions reduction requirements. So why not electrify their clunky system now? Among the co-op board, the proposal met virtually zero dissent.
Gerner and his wife Joan had already led several other upgrades to the building since they moved in nearly 10 years ago, from renovating the laundry room to redesigning the lobby area. For longer-term residents who had experienced less transparency from previous iterations of the board, Gerner’s leadership was well-earned.
“I had full confidence that it would go well,” says Sara Cohen, a 60-year-old resident who has lived at Beekman Hill for the past 20 years. “He treats [the whole building] like his home.”
Gerner is tall but not imposing. With a soft smile, prominent dimples and cheery eyes, he easily instills a sense of trustworthiness. And residents had a bigger reason to put their confidence in him: His decades as an architect at the New York-based firm Gerner Kronick + Valcarcel Architects, which has extensive experience in multi-family high-rise buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens – many of which incorporate climate-friendly upgrades, Gerner says.
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It was a major reason why residents were so supportive of the proposal, despite the physical construction and significant capital investment.
Among the most challenging parts of the project was financing it – a process that took almost eight months. Overall, the project had a price tag of $3.8 million. While the Beekman Hill board wanted to use a green bank to help finance the project, the terms of their mortgage on the building restricted them to loans from their mortgage holder bank, which came with a higher interest rate.
“We were surprised to learn that,” Gerner says. “It was complicated and frustrating, quite frankly.”
Gerner says NYC Accelerator, a program of the Office of Climate and Environmental Justice that offers free assistance for energy efficiency upgrades, made them aware of grants for which they were eligible and was a huge help in navigating the application process. In the end, the co-op secured $154,000 from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and $1.1 million from ConEdison to help pay for the project.
“We were the first ones knocking on the door for these incentive programs, and I think it was the right time and the right place for us,” Gerner says.
Cranes installing the new heat pumps on the roof of 420 Beekman Hill. Photo: courtesy of Randy Gerner.
After assessing the cost of the project once the grants were taken into account, the building was responsible for the majority of the total cost and residents were given one of two options for how they wanted to pay: $15,000 up front, or a higher amount over a longer period of time.
But once the project was greenlit, contractors including Ventrop Engineering Consulting Group made the job straightforward, Gerner says.
During construction, a huge crane placed 10 heat pumps on the roof. Then they installed pipes to carry the heat (or cooling, depending on the season) to the mechanical equipment rooms where heat exchangers now distribute the heating and cooling to apartments. But the most challenging part was installing refrigerant pipes through the core of the building from the mechanical room to the roof, says Rahil Shah, a Ventrop engineer. It took several months to complete.
And yet, the project caused minimal disruption to residents’ daily lives. All construction happened behind the scenes in stairwells and using cranes on the street, and the individual heating and cooling units in people’s apartments remained unchanged. Residents never lost heating or cooling service during peak months.
“We were dismantling our heating system while we were doing our cooling, and we dismantled our cooling system while our heating system was still operating,” Gerner says. “The logistics are challenging and that’s why it takes a year, because of the changing seasons.”
Heat pumps are a complex technology but simple in principle, Gerner explains. In the summer, when it’s hot outside, the devices pump hot air out of units. But in the winter they do the opposite, extracting cold air from outside, magnifying the heat it contains and releasing that heat into people’s units. In essence, it’s like reversing a window A/C unit in the wintertime to release hot air into apartments.
There’s an added layer of efficiency at Beekman Hill: In the summertime, instead of expelling hot air into the atmosphere, the system recaptures this heat to generate the building’s hot water sustainably.
Resident manager Carl Thompson. Credit: Marlowe Starling.
For resident manager Thompson, the best part is that all the heat pumps are managed through a sensor-based computer system that he and the engineers can monitor at all times. When one unit goes down, the others automatically step up. The computer also rotates units so that the same few aren’t being overworked, distributing the burden equally among the building’s ten rooftop units.
It’s not required to install heat pumps under LL97 – a common misconception, says Simon Mugo, program manager at NYC Accelerator. But Beekman Hill serves as an example of what’s possible, which could encourage other co-ops to pursue similar upgrades.
“It’s useful to know what the final destination looks like if you’re going into this journey,” Mugo says.
Randy Gerner stands with building manager Carl Thompson in front of the computer system that controls their building’s new heat pumps. Credit: Marlowe Starling.
The building’s energy consumption meter is now proof of what electrification can accomplish. During peak summer months, the building was previously using up to $20,000 worth of ConEdison steam and electrical energy each month, Gerner says. Now, it’s using roughly $12,000 worth of electrical energy during the hottest summer months.
Gerner went into the project assuming an improvement but even he was surprised at the energy savings. “I never expected this,” he says.
Most future upgrades, such as thermostats and induction stoves, are at the mercy of what residents want to invest in. The building’s units still use gas cookstoves – a sore spot that Gerner and Thompson hope they can work on next. But induction stoves require more electricity, and replacing them would mean disruptions to residents. A company called VoltServer might help them achieve their goal by using thin ethernet cables to digitally deliver power with minimal disruptions, explains Thompson and Shah.
For now, residents can enjoy greater comfort and temperature control in their homes, as well as the reassurance of avoiding fines and nearly eliminating their overall greenhouse gas emissions.
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Cohen, a self-described environmentalist, is thrilled that her home now has a lower carbon footprint. But she also sees the upgrades as a potential boost to the value of their apartments, which are relatively affordable for Midtown Manhattan, selling, on average, for less than half a million dollars. At a pre-war co-op on the neighboring block, some units have sold for up to $5.2 million.
Plus, it’s cool to be part of a historic moment. On the day of Beekman Hill’s heat pump installations, Cohen was on the street watching giant cranes lift their new, low-carbon energy sources onto the roof.
“It was a really, really exciting day,” she says.
The post The Manhattan Apartment Building That Went All-In on All-Electric appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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