Assessing Energy Efficiency in New York City Buildings

Energy efficiency in buildings plays an outsized role in the fight against climate change. In New York City, buildings account for 66% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. In 2009, New York City introduced a benchmarking law that requires owners of large buildings to measure and report their annual energy consumptions. This dataset allows us to formulate and test our research question: What are the trends in energy efficiency in buildings in NYC.

This urban data analysis project, in coordination with Priska Marianne, assessed trends in energy efficiency of New York City buildings in three perspectives:

Building-Scale: What physical characteristics of buildings affect energy efficiency?

Neighborhood-Scale: What are the relationships between energy efficiency and sociodemographic characteristics of neighborhoods?

Temporal-Scale: Have large buildings in NYC become more energy efficient since the adaptation of the NYC Benchmarking Law?

This research has shown that the size of the building correlates with electricity consumption and GHG emissions. Yet, energy use intensity (EUI) is irrelevant to size, age, and density of a building. Thus, old and large buildings can be highly energy efficient contrary to common misconception. Also, identifying spatial patterns of energy consumption at different scales can have enormous potential to develop targeted energy strategies per neighborhood.