More than 3.5 million visitors pay $21 to stand on its observation deck every year, but the Empire State Building’s biggest financial endeavor is well below the 102nd story.

In October 2010, the Empire State Building (ESB) completed its historical, avant-garde energy retrofit – a $20 million investment that is expected to reduce the building’s energy usage by up to 38 percent, resulting in $4.4 million in energy savings annually.

I have often made the case on Planet Green and TreeHugger that the greenest brick is the one already in the wall, and that our heritage districts are energy conservation districts. In fact, I became such an ardent preservationist that I have ended up as President of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario. One of the constant problems that groups like ours or the National Trust For Historic Preservation is to become relevant to younger people; the membership skews old.

On the other hand, the environmental movement skews young. How does one get the message across that saving buildings can help save the planet? At a conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland last week I saw how one group does it.

Hospitals are receiving much needed energy-efficiency upgrades thanks in part to special funding and grants designed to defray some of the costs. These upgrades can also lead to lower emissions, which is a significant related benefit considering that the U.S. healthcare sector accounts for 8 percent of the country’s carbon-dioxide emissions, according to a recent report.

To help states develop strategies to improve the energy efficiency of existing buildings and reduce costs and emissions, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) has selected six states – Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin – to participate in the Policy Academy on State Building Efficiency Retrofit Programs.

Current efforts at cost-effective energy upgrades touch a very small portion of buildings every year. The Policy Academy will help participating states develop and refine a number of policy options including:

• innovative funding and financing mechanisms;
• building energy use benchmarking tools;
• targeted education and outreach measures; and
• workforce training programs.

These measures will be used to help states design larger-scale building retrofit programs that lead to lower energy use and greenhouse gas emissions and new jobs.

The U.S. Labor Department’s release Wednesday of $100 million in Recovery Act funds for green job training includes a nearly $3 million grant to New York City’s innovative energy efficiency education program for building superintendents.

Seventy-four percent of corporate real estate executives now say they would be willing to pay a premium to retrofit the office space they own to achieve sustainability goals, a new survey has found.

Making existing buildings more sustainable is critical to achieving large-scale environmental benefits. Sustainability initiatives in existing buildings also promote significant business benefits, ranging from enhanced productivity to operational savings. But how can an institution effectively evaluate its sustainability options and focus its “green” dollars where they will have the greatest effect?

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has made more than $1.6 million available through the Multifamily Performance Program to the Schenectady Municipal Housing Authority (SMHA) as part of a comprehensive statewide energy reduction plan. Following an efficiency upgrade, SMHA will reduce energy use by more than 20 percent in six of its apartment complexes, which is expected to save SMHA nearly $480,000 annually. The NYSERDA initiative is part of Governor David A. Paterson’s ‘45 by 15’ plan to meet 45 percent of the State’s electricity needs through efficiency and renewable resources by 2015.

• Full Report [PDF]
• Summary Presentation & Supplementary Information[PPT - 22mb] [PDF - 5mb]
• Data Call
• Data collection instrument
• Engineering and economic assumptions

This report provides the world’s largest database of commissioning case studies for new and existing buildings. It represents a major update and expansion of a study initially published in 2004, with roughly three-times as many projects. We gathered and analyzed data on 643 buildings, representing 99 million square feet of floor space from 26 states. The database incorporates the work of 37 commissioning providers.

Commissioning maximizes the quality and persistence of energy, cost, and emissions reductions. The process ensures that building owners get what they pay for when constructing or retrofitting buildings, provides risk-management and “insurance” for policymakers and program managers enabling their initiatives to actually meet targets, and detects and corrects problems that would eventually surface as far more costly maintenance or safety issues.

This report responds to a widely held concern that end-users do not have confidence in the nature and level of energy savings that can be achieved through the commissioning process. It addresses this issue by assembling diverse case studies and previously unpublished data, and developing performance benchmarks using standardized assumptions. The results demonstrate that commissioning is arguably the single-most cost-effective strategy for reducing energy, costs, and greenhouse-gas emissions in buildings today.

Key findings:

• Median commissioning costs: $0.30 and $1.16 per square foot for existing buildings and new construction, respectively (and 0.4% of total construction costs for new buildings)
• Median whole-building energy savings: 16% and 13%
• Median payback times: 1.1 and 4.2 years
• Median benefit-cost ratios: 4.5 and 1.1
• Cash-on-cash returns: 91% and 23%
• Very considerable reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions were achieved, at a negative cost of -$110 and -$25/tonne CO2-equivalent.
• High-tech buildings are particularly cost-effective, and saved large amounts of energy and emissions due to their energy-intensiveness.
• Projects employing a comprehensive approach to commissioning attained nearly twice the overall median level of savings, and five-times the savings of projects with a constrained approach.
• Non-energy benefits are extensive and often offset part or all of the commissioning cost.
• Limited multi-year post-commissioning data indicate that savings often persistent for a period of at least five years.
• Uniformly applying our median whole-building energy-savings value to the stock of U.S. non-residential buildings yields an energy-savings potential of $30 billion by the year 2030, and annual greenhouse gas emissions reductions of about 340 megatons of CO2 each year. An industry equipped to deliver these benefits would have a sales volume of $4 billion per year and support approximately 24,000 jobs.

“Commissioning America” in a decade is an ambitious goal, but achievable and consistent with this country’s aspirations to simultaneously address energy and environmental issues while creating jobs and stimulating sustainable economic activity.

With fall just around the corner, many homeowners are eyeing their turf and looking for ways to make improvements.

This is one of the biggest planting and lawn maintenance times of the year. But a new way to do things is creeping into the landscape, says Scott McAdam, owner of McAdam Landscape in Forest Park, who recently opened a second location at 18039 Gougar Road, New Lenox.