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.
Speaking of transitions not going well..
Story tip : https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a45989334/auto-dealers-sign-letter-to-urge-president-biden-to-tap-brakes-on-ev-mandate/
I conclude they had the same engineering consultants as Jerry Brown did for planning high speed rail?
How’s that project going? When will AOC’s spur to Hawaii be completed?
My wife and I visited Chicago last April and stayed at an apartment complex owned by Sonder. It was an old building that had been retrofitted with heat pump technology and there were three head units in the nominally two bedroom apartment. It was advertised as “air conditioned”.
Unfortunately, we arrived on the day that Chicago had a severe cold snap. As all of the units were linked, the complex was set to cool and could not be quickly changed over to heat. The apartment was freezing and getting colder by the minute. Sonder advised that they would supply heaters and blankets (on demand, according to them) but after two hours of waiting we arranged to leave and go to a local hotel. As we were leaving two and a half hours after arriving and first complaining, a young man arrived with a very small oil column heater that would have not even heated one of the three rooms! I suspect the demand for supplementary heating was so great that one heater per apartment was all that they could offer.
A few years ago our gas-fired furnace experienced a terminal failure … in late (cold) fall. We ordered a replacement and the contractor gave us electric space heaters to keep us warm and cozy while waiting for the replacement unit to arrive. A few days. That is how we do things here in the US Midwest.
Apples and Oranges? Sure. But it’s an example of why more people choose to not live in NYC than choose to live in NYC. 🙂
And I’ll bet your electric bill was a choker….
With icicles frozen to their windows.
A public NY agency being bad at something isn’t
exactly proof that it is hard.
Window unit heat pumps (just like window unit air conditioners) would get the job done in cheap ugly old buildings like these.
Nope. Not in NYC winter.
Please do your heat pump engineering due diligence before commenting and evidencing your abject ignorance. Below about 40F, air heat pumps have to switch to resistive heating, which is stupidly thermally inefficient—calculations previously posted in previous comments.
Figure it out yourself this time before proving you really are vboring.
Yep – Reverse cycle air conditioning or heat pumps go into a de-ice mode at near freezing temps. Basically they stop producing warm air for a period of time.
They only de-ice when they’ve ice up. Since there’s not much humidity in the air in the winter in NYC, there won’t be much icing up.
Really!? Just what do you consider dry air?
40% and higher humidity is far from dry air.
You really should take Rud’s advice, yourself!
https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/blog/mythbusters-heat-pumps-for-extreme-cold-climates
Of course that is a sales spiel and does not provide the cost of the system or the comparative cost to a simple gas fired furnace when the area is regularly at those lower temperatures. But it “works”.
I would be willing to bet installed cost would be less than $176,000 per unit. 😉
Not if the decisions are being made by NYC officials, lol.
“Argumentum ad Ignorantiam, argument from ignorance” 🤥
I have a 4400 square foot, 30 year-old home in rural central Missouri, It was built all-electric with a heat pump. The winters in NYC are no worse than the winters here, roughly speaking. My exterior walls have 2 x 6 studs instead of 2 x 4s and the original owners says there is extra insolation. Windows are original wood frame, are not double paned or low-E.
I’m not sure why modern heat pumps won’t work in NYC winter. They work here. I’m not saying they are the best solution and I’m not saying it’s OK to force this unnecessarily on everyone. I just don’t understand how this “won’t work here” meme keeps going.
As a practical solution, there simply isn’t enough electricity supply for everyone to convert to electric heat pumps. Where will they get the power during extreme cold events? Electric heat pumps work worst when it’s coldest. Mine does OK until if gets into the teens (F) or below.
Nobody has thought this through. NYC will have to ration electricity in the winter, when people need it most. Do the plans include central control of the thermostats to keep the heat setting at 64 or below when the blizzards hit?
Yeah. Someone should write a WUWT article on modern heat pump technology to dispel some of the silliness.
Ya shovel much snow in central Mississippi?
Or hail cabs while standing on ice?
Does your ground in Mississippi freeze solid for most of the winter?
Another, “Argumentum ad Ignorantiam, argument from ignorance”
Soylent said Missouri not Mississippi.
Another argument from lack of attention and poor reading comprehension. 😞
That was true in the 1970s, but modern heat pumps can get heat out of the air down to about 0F.
It’s like climate change.
Yes heat, but how much is the question?
It’s like the tankless water heaters, the colder the inlet water the cooler your hot water is unless you restrict most of the flow. I looked into them, did the math and said no thanks. They sort of work if you like long lukewarm showers. If you like very hot water for doing dishes or a hot soak, it’s never going to happen.
So you have give up lifestyle preferences in order to use it.
If the output of the heat pump at 0F outside is enough heat to warm a small closet then it’s garbage.
At what outside temperature does it not produce enough heat to keep the place comfortable?
Real numbers not sales nonsense.
🤥 🤥 🤥 🤥 🤥
Hasn’t been true, ever.
Our latest heat pumps were installed last august and they still have difficulty with sub 0°C temperatures. Which we’ve had many times now this year.
By -6°C to -7°C temperatures they grind on endlessly, causing electric meters to spin wildly, until the condenser ices over. Then the condenser motor moans and the heat/AC repairmen tell us to shut off the system and shovel off any snow, so the sun might melt the ice.
What is alarming is that the thermostat now clearly shows a warning that electrically warmed air is being used, in color.
If window units then they have to rewire the building. Hundreds of 220 lines running up the outside walls? Metering will be interesting.
Moving that much energy is not easy.
Window units put a large stress on the window framing. Are the window frames in these older buildings capable of supporting the load on a long term basis? Or would they need to be retrofitted for additional bracing before installing the window units? Cost, cost, cost, …..
Note all of the window air conditioners shown in the picture.
Remember this? https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/14/german-green-party-headquarters-heat-pump-debacle-5-million-euros-cost-still-no-heat/
The crash is going to be ugly. The real solution is to hold all these committee and council members personally responsible.
If you did that, there would be no committees and no councils. That might be an improvement. 😉
Oh how I wish that was right! You’re always going to find a few jobsworth numpty’s that love committees and are convinced that they are always correct to form them, sadly. They get less and less done as, in addition to loving committees, they also love the interminable paperwoek and red tape – it gives their sad, empty little lives some meaning.
Perfect candidates for B ark passengers.
Let’s hope we don’t run out of lamp posts or rope.
I did a quick Google search on engineers in congress : 11 out of 535 or about 2%.
Probably fair to assume other elected officials have similar percentages.
Any questions now why completely unrealistic legislation , as it relates to anything in the engineering & science realm, gets approved??
Zero understanding of the subject matter
Check out the percentage of Engineers in those who really write the legislation… the LOBBYISTS!
Or in the bureaucrats promulgating the actual regulations!
That’s slightly better than here in the UK. When in 2009 the ‘climate act’ was passed there were 3 against votes out of 650. Those three were the only members with a background in a real science, physics or chemistry. We are being wrecked by ignorants who are so ignorant that they don’t even know that they are ignorant.
Agreed. Elect stupid people, get stupid results.
This is yet another example of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome. People too stupid to evaluate their own competence.
The sad part is that even those with relevant knowledge vote the Leftist party line.
And “Atlas Shrugged”
Money!
And an unbelievable arrogance towards engineers. You can’t believe anything from an engineer. Let’s ask a sociologist.
I gave you an upvote – but you forgot the sarc tag and you got a downvote from someone without a sense of humour.
“New York thinks it is going to be the “leader” in showing the world how to transition away from fossil fuels to “green” energy.”
************
The Democratic governor of Michigan seems to think that Michigan is going to be the leader in clean green energy conversion. The quote below is from a bill signing ceremony. The multiple bills she was signing will require clean energy conversions by certain deadline dates (as usual).
“Once I sign these bills, Michigan becomes a national leader on clean energy, bringing billions of federal tax dollars home and private investment into our communities,” Whitmer remarked before signing the legislation.”
https://tinyurl.com/bdz3wkmt
Then of course, there is California. The Marxist central planners will doom us all.
This is another big announcement the governor made a couple years ago, finally being demonstrated (its already been tried and abandoned in Sweden, Italy, Germany, etc). But at least like a 3 way (?)traffic light, Detroit will be first-est.
I just hope when MDOT builds the induction road between Detroit and A2, EVs can then begin paying road taxes.
Forgot the link
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2023/11/29/detroit-road-electreon-charge-ev-14th-street/71728909007/
When the power goes off, what then? Freeze in the dark! 🙂
In my house — built with central heating and air conditioning — where electricity is low cost the air-sourced heat pump works well.
The region often has winter temperature below freezing, down to -15°F {-26°C}.
Supplemental and emergency heat is provided by a modern wood stove. Try that in each of the 159 units (1 building) or all 177,569 apartments in the system.
I know — provide each with a grill and a bag of charcoal. No. Don’t. People will die. It is that time of the year again. Authorities need to warn everyone.
Sad to say John, but people are going to die from this whether they try burning charcoal or not.
Reality is usually a bitch. As here.
I love that photo of the heat pumps in the former parking lot. I have two questions:
1. Where are the EV chargers for the tenants gonna go?
2. How much copper can be “liberated” from those heat pumps?
No big deal on the parking spaces since no one will have cars in the future anyway.
As for tripling the rent, obviously the people who live in those buildings can pay more in taxes so that their rent can be subsidized so it remains the same. What? Increasing their taxes by that much would have the same effect? I have the solution! Raise taxes on everyone by a teeny tiny amount to subsidize those units. And another teeny tiny amount for the next set of units. No one will notice that way, boiled frog and all that. Until the economy implodes but until then its a plan.
That’s what the “carbon tax” is, and why they escalate each year. “Boiling frog” analogy is great–I’m gonna steal it!
We all know that when it blows up, it won’t the bureaucrats fault. They will blame someone else, most likely Big Heatpump (for failing to anticipate demand), Big Union (for not having enough electricians for installation), and of course, Lowly Citizen (for creating such a hostile conversion environment by squawking about cost, reliability, and anything else not in line with the wisdom of the NetZero Party.)
Exxon knew? Why not blame the evil fossil fuel companies for the debacle?
Looks like you neglected to mention the main culprit. Trump!
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just buy a few electric space heaters for $50 each? The cost to just run the ‘heat pump’ electrically would power one of the electric space heaters. You could pay the entire electricity bill (probably less) on the interest saved for the $176K expenditure for the capital cost of the said heat pump and installation.
After the carbon taxes on NG and heating oil, it is going to be super expensive to heat with NG/boilers anyway, but at least the infrastructure is already in place and working well. Why retrofit a 75 year old co-op/condo with all this nonsense when the building will be replaced soon enough anyway? It would be one thing to mandate new construction with onerous regulations, but this will completely gut the used older buildings which I guess, is the plan. Byzantine red tape and bureaucracy will be the end of us.
Electric space heaters work good for me. Pelonis is a very good space heater.
The building would be better off installing space heaters built into the walls of rooms rather than doing the heat pump thing. This kind of retrofit would be easy to do.
The electricity needed to do such a thing was not anticipated when the wires, breakers, load panels, feeder lines and utility service lines were installed. Every one of those would need to be up-sized 200% or more.
Sure, and they’re reliable too as 80% of the electricity needed comes from fossil fuels and Canadian hydro. And they’re 100% efficient – if you don’t count fuel conversion and transmission losses. So what if it costs twice as much as natural gas heat – we have a planet to save or something.
I have often pondered why more thought is not been given to infra red panel heaters (which heat the person, not the room, IIRC)
I know there is still an electric power demand…..but even so…..
I hope that your grandchild is a contrarian too. Alas skepticism in my gene pool seems a recessive gene as my kids read and believe the Guardian And have written me off as a hard-right conspiracy theorist
That must be frustrating.
They will see the light one of these days.
With much lower standards of living, like the rest of us victims of Leftist insanities.
It happened with my kids too. Even the Very Smart Engineer. One day reality will bite them in the rear.
In a city the size of NY, you would think there are more than enough engineers, and among those engineers educated in the laws of physics and the practical application of those laws, at least one or two would have been brave enough to tell the political class they were barking mad.
I may be wrong in my thinking.
Bad career move. Boss of BigHeatPump announces they’ve just won the contract tender to heat pump said building so that’s what you do and big toys are more fun than small toys. It also pays your bills at home.
Having worked in the utility industry for years, and being an engineer of sorts, I can tell you that what lowly engineers think is not nearly as important at what the Board of Directors and the State Utility Commission think. They speak, you listen and do.
100% green energy —
Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer
Well, can you put your hands in your head? Oh no
I said, “Dreamer, you’re nothing but a dreamer
Well, can you put your hands in your head? Oh no
I said, “Far out, what a day, a year, a life it is
You know, well you know you had it comin’ to you
Now there’s not a lot I can do
Dreamer, you stupid little dreamer
Le’s have a quick look at what happens if ALL of NY city is converted to reverse cycle heating/cooling.
In summer, you could assume that each household would require say 10kW of cooling, (a simple guess). To provide this cooling, a really efficient cooler would use 2kW of electricity and in effect suck the 10kW of heat from indoors and dump it outdoors, with the additional electrical load too.
So, in summer, the environment would be warmed at the rate of 12kW per household.
It takes about 1.2kJ to heat one cubic metre of air by one degree, (relative humidity will change this number). So in one hour, each unit will heat (12/1.2) x 3600 m3 by one degree. This is a rise of 1C, for 36,000m3 of external air, each hour.
If you assume that 50C will do you harm, then on an otherwise ambient 30C day, each household will raise about 1,800m3 to 50C, (each hour). This is about 3x the volume of a typical household and it will heat this every hour.
Clearly, if you are heating this much air, then you are affecting the local weather. Who would have though that cities get hotter when the A/C goes on? /sarc.
Thankfully heat rises and can get away. BUT in winter, things are reversed. That cold air drops to the street level and just sits there. It’s not going to be pretty when everyone is using heat pumps to warm their houses in winter. Just reverse the numbers above for an idea of how cold it could get, of course the heaters fail before this happens and go to direct, resistive heating. Can anyone afford that? Can the grid?
Whoa! We don’t need no stinking number/metrics to show that instead of solving the warming ?problem? it will exacerbate/compound the problem by increasing UHI warming. Nah!? that’s not possible. The net Zero goals’ cost benefits far outweigh their costs. Umh, erh, or does it? /sarc
On that project, how do they get the hot air to the units? If it has gas fired hot air there is at least ductwork, but if the heat pump hot air is cooler it will not work. If hot water then they are starting from scratch. The outside walls would be covered with ducts. Keeping the air hot 20 stories up would be fun.
Are the HVAC technical details for this project available for public examination by anyone who asks to see them? Are all the other project planning documents in the public record and are these also available to anyone who asks to see them?
As a refresher, wind and solar do different things than crude oil.
Renewables only provide occasional electricity but cannot manufacture anything.
Crude oil is virtually never used to generate electricity but when manufactured into petrochemicals, is the basis for virtually all the products in our materialistic society that did not exist before the 1800’s.
We should be careful with what we wish for. From the proverb “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” tells us that:
Lack of due diligence was the hallmark of the Solyndra scam and a number of other politically connected deals that surged starting in the Obama junta.
The laws of physics and the rules of economics are not adequate. They must be rewritten so that progressives can live in the magical world they envision where unicorn farts and fairy dust make everything virtuous and free.
Isn’t that where Peter Pan and Tinkerbell live? Follow the second star to the right until morning? If only our liberal politicians would try to follow Peter Pan to Neverland.
So how much CO2 will be diminished by converting to all electric heating? They don’t know, they haven’t attempted to figure it out, and they don’t care. It’s all about the narrative and demonizing fossil fuels.
My wife and I spent 4 years in China and were fortunate to have visited Angkor Wat during one of our vacations. We have been discussing all the inane things that are going on now. The WSJ today had lots of things for us to discuss. I told her about this article and the reported $55B income bleed to Florida. She quipped, soon, we will be talking about what happened in New York like they talk about what happened to Angkor Wat.
The Verge has a similar take of spending other people’s money and the overall lack of reality: https://www.theverge.com/23951214/heat-pump-nycha-public-housing-electric-sustainable
No plan survives first contact with the enemy. And in the case of the Green Leap Forward, reality is the enemy.
Well, that’s a good thing.
Because if some of the apartments have troubles getting warm water through their radiant heat plumbing or into their radiators, just wait till you find out about heat pump air temperatures at the duct exhaust.
A hint. Don’t step out of the shower and try to warm up over a vent. You will find out just how chilled your bones can get.
Anything warmer requires high electricity usage to warm the air.