Posted on 11/30/2023 4:38:11 AM PST by MtnClimber
New York thinks it is going to be the “leader” in showing the world how to transition away from fossil fuels to “green” energy. Our politicians and bureaucrats have not bothered with things like feasibility studies or demonstration projects showing that this can be done, because after all they are geniuses and it is up to the little people to figure out the details. So the energy transition has been ordered up via statutes filled with mandates and deadlines and penalties, with no attention paid to feasibility or cost. We now all get to sit back and watch as this crashes and burns.
In New York City, the main statute on this subject, enacted in 2019, has the title of Climate Mobilization Act, also known as Local Law (LL) 97. The most significant impending mandates are for reductions in “emissions” from buildings, with the first deadline for residential buildings coming right up in January 2024. Few building will fail the 2024 cap, but the mandated emissions limits keep ratcheting down over time. The mandate for 2030 for residential buildings over 25,000 square feet is set such that it cannot be met if the building continues to use gas or oil for heat; so effectively this is a mandate to convert to electric heat by that time.
Daughter Jane — a board member of a co-op in Queens which is over the 25,000 square feet and thus subject to the 2030 mandate — has previously covered this subject at Manhattan Contrarian. Here is her piece from October 2022. The gist was that boards in Queens that had looked into how to convert had been advised of very large costs that were not remotely affordable for their middle-class owners. Jane is currently on maternity leave from Manhattan Contrarian, having just delivered her third baby, so I am taking up this subject while we await her return.
So how big a problem will it be for these buildings to convert to electric heat? Nobody really knows. Remarkably — given that the first deadline, applicable to at least some buildings, is barely over a month away — as far as we can find there doesn’t exist a single example of a large building that has successfully completed a conversion that others can look to to benchmark feasibility and cost. New buildings can be built with all-electric infrastructure without great difficulty. But nobody has any solid idea how much will it cost, and how much disruption will be involved, to retrofit heat pumps into large apartment buildings built in the 1970s, or 60s, or 50s, or even the 1920s.
However, that may be about to change. There is at least one conversion project for a large building that is under way, and near completion, and scheduled to begin operation imminently, in December 2023. You won’t find any reporting about that project in the New York Times or other such media operations that constantly hype the dire need to reduce emissions. However, here is a piece, dated October 28, in a local newspaper called the West Side Rag that covers the Upper West Side neighborhood of Manhattan. The headline is “Heat Pump Project in Frederick Douglass Houses Nears Completion; ‘Powered by Electricity’.”
So, how is it going? The answer is that this effort is an unmitigated disaster. Let’s look into the details.
The conversion in question is taking place at one building in an eighteen-building New York City Housing Authority complex called Frederick Douglass Houses, located in Manhattan along Amsterdam Avenue between West 100th and 104th Streets. NYCHA is effectively exempt from LL97, since it is not subject to the penalties for non-compliance that apply to privately-owned buildings. However, the mandated emissions limits do nominally apply to NYCHA, and for this conversion NYCHA partnered with the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to finance the work.
From the West Side Rag:
A two-year project to convert a public housing building to an electrically powered heat pump system is nearing completion on the Upper West Side. The 58-year-old 20-story tower at 830 Amsterdam Avenue (100th Street), part of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Frederick Douglass Houses development, is being retrofitted to provide heating, cooling, and hot water for residents – and to serve as a possible template for converting more of the 2,410 buildings NYCHA maintains citywide. . . . The project is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and give tenants more control over the temperature in their individual units. . . .
The agencies [NYCHA and NYPA] said the new heat pump system would be the first of its kind at a public housing facility in New York state, and the Amsterdam building would be the first to move away from burning fossil fuels. That makes it “a model for the portfolio,” said Vlada Kenniff, the housing authority’s vice president for energy and sustainability. . . .
So with the first deadline for LL97 compliance barely over a month away, they are just approaching the completion of a heat pump conversion on exactly one of their 2,410 buildings.
Here, from the West Side Rag, are pictures first of the building, and then of the array of large heat pumps that have been installed out in what apparently previously was part of the parking lot:
Then the West Side Rag gives figures for the number of units in the building and the cost of the project. The number of units is 159. And the cost? $28 million.
Holy shit! That’s over $176,000 per unit, just for the heat pump conversion. At a current financing rate of about 7%, that would mean an addition to rent of well over $1000 per month per unit just to finance the purchase and installation of the heat pump system. For comparison, NYCHA here gives the average monthly rent of its apartments as $557 in 2023. So if the tenants were expected to pay the cost of buying and installing this heat pump system, that would mean more than tripling each tenant’s monthly rent. Maybe we shouldn’t worry, because undoubtedly NYCHA’s plan would not be to burden the residents, but rather to get the money from the infinite pile of federal loot available from Washington.
At that same NYCHA link, they give their total number of apartments as 177,569. To provide each of them with heat from one of these heat pumps at $176,000 each would cost a total of over $31 billion.
In other words, converting this building has shown that retrofitting a central heat pump system like this for such buildings is infeasible to the point of being ludicrous. But of course, this is New York, and nobody is allowed to say that. The West Side Rag seeks out a comment from one Paul DiMichele, identified as a spokesman for NYPA:
NYPA spokesman Paul DeMichele explained via email that “the complexities of the project motivated NYPA and NYCHA to think about other scalable solutions to bring heat pump technology to NYCHA residents.”
Ah, the “complexities.” Well, how about another possible approach, such as a heat pump on the roof?:
An earlier effort to install a different kind of heat pump mechanism on the roof of the Fort Independence Houses in the Bronx experienced similar challenges, with program manager Jordan Bonomo quoted in a story about that project on the Grist media platform explaining, “Each apartment had a story. We quickly realized that while we like the technology, we couldn’t possibly scale that across our portfolio.”
And thus, with a month to go to the first (theoretical) deadline under this LL97, we are exactly nowhere in coming up with a way to convert older buildings built with gas or oil heat to electric heat pumps at any remotely affordable cost. Energy reality is rising up once again.
If these apartment dwellers just move out of New York City then the buildings won’t need heat.
Manhattan Contrarian Ping
Good luck with a cold snap if all, or most, of the buildings are converted to all-electric. The grid won’t stand a chance.
The politicians are geniuses. They will figure it out... :)
Heat pump below 40 degrees cant get it done
“NYCHA is effectively exempt from LL97, since it is not subject to the penalties for non-compliance that apply to privately-owned buildings. However, the mandated emissions limits do nominally apply to NYCHA, and for this conversion NYCHA partnered with the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to finance the work.”
Sure, do a project which will definitely fail in low-income housing units. The cost overruns, risks and potential damage to the systems can be mitigated by just leaving the poor tenants in the dark, without hot water or heating. Plus, after the mob takes their cut, the pols get their 10% kickbacks and the race hustlers take their cut, the costs will triple.
Here is a better solution. Every brownstone in NYC needs to be converted to electric by 2028(election season). Forget 18 story buildings occupied by low income families. Convert wealthy folks brownstones, measure the results over a period of five years and if it proves successful, then consider doing other domiciles. For their compliance, they get a mandatory tax break.
“Heat pump below 40 degrees cant get it done”
True, and NY City AVERAGES something like 33 degrees in winter. So backup systems kick-in, which are essentially giant toasters in each unit that use 3 times the power of heat pumps for the same heat.
Same happens here in Texas in cold snaps which driver power usage above even our hot summers. Lots of electric heating, most of it toaster-only, with nearly EVERY modern apartment using toaster-only heating (and water heating). We paid the price for that 2 years ago, and will likely be paying that price again and again, sooner than later.
Even being in Florida we don’t like the heat cost. Florida designs with cooling from ceiling, cold air falls, doesn’t work with heat from same ducts. So we use a few ‘hvac controlled’ space heaters that will heat from the floor for the few weeks a year we need it. hvac controls prevent cool and heat from every both running at the same time.
Air-couple heat pumps have a terrible “Coefficient of Performance” when the air temps drop to near freezing and put out lukewarm air. Nobody likes lukewarm air, so you need backup resistance electric heat. The existing electrical distribution system would need to be replaced, another minor detail on the road to green nirvana.
And that is presuming the unicorn fart power generation technology works, too. They haven’t even started those demonstration projects yet.
The idiots that thought LL 97 is such a great thing are the same ones who bitch and complain that there’s a housing crisis in New York City.
Just raise taxes and import more illegal aliens on welfare.
They will succeed.
All they need to do this is for YOU to allow them to re-define words.
For example, the green plan is that all of you peasants simply die. Tah, dah! We (the elites who now own all of your stuff) have led (what is left of) the world to utopia.
Temperatures recently in the Peoples Republic of Minnesota have dipped into the single digits and below zero is soon to come. My place is a toasty 71 degrees and my aged gas furnace thanks to good insulation runs sparingly. An electric heat pump in these temperatures would be running almost constantly using inefficient resistance heat and struggling to maintain any comfortable temperatures. It is ironic that the government has banned incandescent light bulbs because they use too much electricity since they use inefficient electric resistance to make light, but will mandate the same type of inefficient electric resistance to heat homes.
When using space heaters run your ceiling fans in reverse bring the hot air down to your living area.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.