<
https://www.fastcompany.com/91013535/nycs-first-all-electric-skyscraper-doesnt-use-a-drop-of-fossil-fuel>
"When it opens to residents this spring, the 44-story tower at 505 State Street
in Brooklyn will be a vision of future buildings to come. The skyscraper will
be powered fully by electricity and burn no fossil fuels on site, making it the
first tower in New York City to do so. In a world where gas burning stoves
remain commonplace and gas furnaces still heat most homes, it’s a
climate-conscious approach to building design that feels years, if not decades,
ahead of its time.
But according to its designer and developer, this anomaly of a building wasn’t
actually difficult to pull off. It was just a matter of reducing the amount of
electricity the building needed to function and then finding the right
equipment to consistently provide that energy without relying on anything but
the grid.
The building is a project of New York-based Alloy Development, a rare real
estate development firm that consists mostly of architects. In addition to
taking on the financial risk to develop their projects, they also design them.
With a set of principles centered around sustainable development, the company
focuses on achieving carbon neutrality in its projects. The tower at 505 State
Street is part of a larger block-sized development project that Alloy has been
working on for eight years. The decision was made early on to make the 440-unit
tower all electric, even if the path to getting there was not quite clear at
the time.
All-electric single family homes are not uncommon, especially at the higher end
of the housing market. But replicating that at the scale of 440 apartments
required that Alloy’s designers and engineers think about the building’s
systems more holistically. They realized that on-site renewable energy
production, building-wide energy efficiency, and in-unit appliances were all
interconnected sustainability efforts. Reducing the overall energy load though
those interconnected paths would allow electrification to scale up. Once that
was established as the solution, they just had to figure out how to do it."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-we-are-reading-skyscrapers-electric-uncropping-farmland/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
