Measuring Up
April 02, 2012
By Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.

The Data-Driven Built Environment, a May conference put on by the New York Academy of Sciences, is organized around the premise that "the real estate industry is turning to metrics to validate and evaluate buildings" and this interest is propelled by "new regulations, the desire to improve building performance through modeling, measurement, and benchmarking, and the aspiration to revolutionize building design and engineering to take into account user behavior ... (and) positively affect the financial bottom-line."

Today, benchmarking building energy performance is the law in New York City, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Today, too, benchmarking tools for gathering, measuring and making sense of building energy consumption data are works-in-progress. They are not yet universally applicable to all building types and occupancy conditions, and there is a healthy competition among different scoring systems to become best in class. Given these conditions in the context of rising policy and market demands for reliable and comparable building energy use information, there is an drive to make these performance metrics ready for prime-time while establishing a mature discipline of building science that real estate operators, owners, regulators, bankers, underwriters and tenants can rely on.

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Show Us The Application
February 06, 2012
By Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.

What if someone was sitting on $37.5 million earmarked for improving the energy efficiency of buildings in New York City? If you were interested in project funding, where could you learn more about the program and how to go about applying? And, if this $37.5 million came from the federal stimulus program, what if Congressional Republicans launched hearings, issued subpoenas and hurled media thunderbolts to attack the President during an election year? Would there be another Solyndra-scale circus?

The New York City Energy Efficiency Corporation (NYCEEC), a non-profit organization housed at the City Economic Development Corporation, just so happens to have $37.5 million in federal stimulus funds that it's eager to get out the door. In fact, it must commit the funds no later than spring 2013, or run the risk of having to return these taxpayer dollars to the federal government. As such, a visit to the NYCEEC website would seem to be a logical first step for a prospective program applicant — but wait, there is no website. Even a search on the City' government economic development site produces no results.

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A Whole Lotta Learning Going On
December 07, 2011
By Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.

Scrolling through a list of New York City public buildings that are being propelled into the 21st century with energy audits and efficiency makeovers, I found the monumental art deco Brooklyn Central Library on Grand Army Plaza. As a high school student, I spent many Saturdays there combing through the stacks looking for materials on historical subjects and I vividly recall finding Civil War era documents that crumbled to dust as I turned the pages. Even as a teenager, I felt queasy about having the historical record simply vanish in my hands. Surely, there must be a better way to make this material available, even to the youngest researcher, without losing it by using it!

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X Marks The Spot
June 29, 2011
By Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.

The sun will not set on Article X, part of the recently signed "Power New York Act of 2011" governing the siting of new or the modification of large-scale power plants. An earlier version of Article X included a self-limiting sunset provision that phased out the law on January 1, 2003. Since that time, power project applicants have faced a gauntlet of state and local requirements in addition to the daunting financial challenges that appeared with the Great Recession of 2008 and from 2003 to the present only two permitted repowering projects raised the necessary capital. The new law has no sunset provision.

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Reimagining The Middle Distance
May 16, 2011
By Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.

Starting from the truism that an era's portrait of the future reflects its own image, Laurie Kerr modestly proposed at the final panel in the series Reimagining the Metropolis that we aspire to a clear picture in the 'middle distance'. Twenty years is a workable time frame for making plans and public policies according to Ms Kerr because it allows us to imagine a future we can get to with the tools we already have. She's on to something. As a staff member of the Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability and contributor to PlaNYC 2030, her observation serves as a frame for reflecting on where we are and where we could go with the campaign to make high performance building New York City's new normal.

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Dear Sustainability Officer
March 22, 2011
By Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.

I write to comment on the draft rules that the Department of Buildings proposes to add as a new section 5000–02 to Chapter 5000 of Title 1 of the Official Compilation of the Rules of the City of New York concerning benchmarking... with the data submitted in the 2011 cycle, the City will be in possession of a unique real world research opportunity.

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Moral Hazard
January 25, 2011
By Nancy Anderson, Ph.D.

It might be a new morning for nuclear power in America. A decades-long moratorium on construction of new facilities is ending, although the number of new plants likely to be built is anyone's guess, as is their location. True, the furious debate over questions of the safety and sanity of domestic nuclear power is not over, but concerns over climate change, opposition to new coal-fired power plants, and a nuclear power industry able to finance projects with the backing of multi-level loan guarantees may have shifted the ground out from under the moratorium for now.

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