RMI = Rocky Mountain Institute
April 6, 2009 saw one of the most significant announcements in Rocky Mountain Institute’s history. The Empire State Building, New York’s most iconic skyscraper is set to undergo a groundbreaking energy efficiency retrofit. RMI, serving as a technical advisor, helped design a program that will lead to a 38 percent reduction in the building’s energy use. This will cost $13 million, save approximately $4.4 million per year in energy costs, and thus yield a 3-year payback on investment! If you think this is exciting news, you are not alone. So far, over 500 news publications around the world have featured stories on The Empire State Building's “going green.”
Through The Empire State Building program, RMI and its partners revolutionized the process for analyzing and retrofitting existing buildings to use energy more efficiently. By taking the right steps in the right order and reducing loads before looking at supplying additional energy to the building, they set a great precedent for the retrofit of other aging buildings around the world.
The integrative design approach RMI introduced will yield about double the normal level of savings in such projects, yet at comparable or lower cost, by optimally combining a whole package of improvements. For example, 6,500 windows will be remanufactured onsite—a world first, saving a huge amount of truck traffic—into “superwindows” that nearly triple their insulating value and are almost perfect in letting in light without heat. The better windows and state of the art lighting will cut the cooling load by one-third. This lets the old chillers be reduced and renovated rather than expanded and replaced…saving capital that helps pay for the other improvements.
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