Empire State Building Owner Tells All — How to Save a LOT of Money

The Empire State Building is saving millions per year by using energy controls and Lutron lighting control. Updated with 2 videos!

January 3, 2013 TD Staff Leave a Comment

Empire State Building pre-built tenant spaces offer companies turnkey solutions for building out offices that exactly meet their needs. The goals for the energy retrofit of these spaces include:

1. Enhancing performance while reducing renovation costs
2. Reducing the cost and time required for future tenant improvements
3. Not compromising on tenant service and comfort
4. Adopting solutions that integrate and interoperate with other building systems

During the Q&A session, Anthony Malkin, President of Malkin Properties and owner of the Empire State Building was asked how important is it to his tenants to have energy efficient spaces.

“Hugely, hugely important. We’ve invested over a billion dollars in retrofitting an entire portfolio in New York City of buildings. You go in there and say we have a new lobby and the lobbies in every one of our buildings are beautiful, the new elevators, the hallways are all beautiful. But when the rubber hits the road it’s the fact that we sub-metered every new tenant fit-out, that we do — every new tenant space. We’ve gone into a portfolio of about 8 million square feet of buildings. We’re taking old 250, 550, 750, 1,000 square foot spaces — lots of tiny little spaces that haven’t really been touched aside for paint and carpet and maybe some lighting or ceiling work for 30 or 40 years and we’re demolishing them because they don’t have any utility whatsoever. “They were built in a time when there were computer servers that needed a special room, they don’t even have enough outlets.

Malkin properties are differentiated by being able to say, “We sub-meter everyone of them and these are high performance and energy efficient spaces.” Then they compare that to alternatives where they can lease elsewhere.

Malkin continued to say, “When you get into a lease negotiation, you find that tenants want to be in an Energy Star building. They actually want to be in an energy efficient space. But the mechanical/electrical engineers that designed the air conditioning and the electricity distribution and lighting and the like are actually very behind. They come out and they say they we’re designing the space for 7.5 or 7 watts maximum requirement per square foot.”

Malkin noted one of his larger tenants who would appear to consume a lot of energy is actually only consuming only 1.35 watts per square foot at its peak electric demand including HVAC. When their own mechanical/electrical engineers designed the space they designed it for 7.5 watts, which demonstrates that sub-metering is teaching people their actual usage.

Malkin recounted things he would hear people saying about energy efficient spaces that are amusing and false, “Well it must not have light, or they must be editing books or something. Clearly they don’t have computers, and they’re probably very hot and allowed to wear T-shirts but we have to wear suits. And a very key component to this is lighting control. When you think about it: plug load, air conditioning and lighting control. When you walk into a space and you don’t see it very well occupied and you see all of the lights on and you wonder what that’s all about. Or it’s a super bright day and you have workstations right next to a window but you have the lights are on full.”

Malkin assures everyone that the reality is that the occupancy/vacancy sensors now are much more sophisticated than the ones that many of us have experienced while in the “john” when the lights go off.

Malkin’s team has a product that was developed by Johnson Controls and Jones Lang LaSalle that has been tested with a number of different tenants in the building that is being rolled out. It is an energy consumption dashboard, which allows tenants and even their employees to patch into their office suites performance and learn what their consumption is relative to other spaces in the building.

“So this information that it is more energy efficient is a huge draw. It’s incredibly satisfying to the worker and it actually creates a healthier and better space. Which frankly increases our competitive advantage and if you look at it from both sides, on one hand we save money and on the other hand we attract better tenants for paying higher rent,” says Malkin.

Pictured left to right: Dana Schneider, Senior VP of Sustainability, Jones Lang LaSalle, Anthony Malkin, President of Malkin Properties and owner of the Empire State Building, Michael Pessina, President of Lutron

Malkin credits New York City for being one of the best “practice leaders,” in the country in making it a requirement for all spaces over 10,000 square feet to be sub-metered. Malkin is delivering sub-metering to all new tenant spaces no matter the size. Tenants can choose how much energy they use by how efficiently you design your space.

During the Q&A session, when asked how many square feet that the Lutron products had been installed in the Empire State Building.

Dana Schneider, Senior VP of Sustainability, Jones Lang LaSalle answered, “Our pre-built space standard is Lutron, and we have built about 166,000 square feet and have 99,000 square planned with that standard this year in addition to the lobby. We also installed much more efficient Lutron fixtures which dim based on the time of day.”

Tom Myers, Director of Commercial Real Estate Solutions for Lutron has worked with the Empire State Building team for over three years during the build-out of the spaces.

Myers took the press on a tour of one of the unoccupied retrofitted spaces to demonstrate the simplicity of the lighting technology that has been implemented and outlined the three-step process.

Step One: Determining Design/Light Load

“The first step is to get your lighting load efficient. It’s about the lamps and fixtures and technology there before you think about the controls. Before I stepped in, Dana and team found a balance and eventually evolved from T8 linear lamps to T5 light sources and lamps.” There is an adoption of LED technology in the entranceway that further reduced the lighting load.

Step Two: Optimizing Operating Hours

“Let’s get the annual operating hours as efficient and optimized as possible. Quite simply it’s all about making sure the lights are only on when they need to be on and certainly off when they don’t need to be on.”

The motion sensors are set up a couple of different ways depending on space. The entrance space and the hallway is set up as “occupancy sensors,” for automatic “on,” when you enter the space and then to automatically go “off,” when the space is vacant for a period of time. The other way to use motion sensors is as “vacancy sensors,” a person would actively need to turn on a light. This makes more sense in office spaces because in many cases a light might not need to be turned on in some instances. This saves a lot of energy.

“The beauty of this technology is that we can set it up exactly the way the tenant wants it. And if they ever want to change it because it is a digital, wireless and addressable system it is very easy. It would only take us about 15 seconds to change these sensors say from occupancy to vacancy,” said Myers.

Step Three: Daylighting

“Most importantly, the third step is that when the lights need to be on, lets only use the light energy that we really need. In our industry we refer to that as ‘daylighting controls,’” said Myers.

There are a number of photo sensors that constantly monitors the amount of daylight coming in from the windows and then transparently and automatically reduces or optimizes the electric light levels to complement the amount of daylight in the space at any given time.

Since the standard code requirement is that the electric light available has to assume you are working without any daylight available. Having the ability to automatically adjust the light according to a target light level significantly reduces energy costs.

This and the following two slides show actual daylighting effects in a pre-built, corner office space in the Empire State Building. This is a morning daylighting image. (Photo copyright Whitney Cox)

This slide shows actual daylighting effects in the afternoon in a pre-built, corner office space in the Empire State Building. (Photo copyright Whitney Cox)

This slide shows actual daylighting effects in the evening in a pre-built, corner office space in the Empire State Building. (Photo copyright Whitney Cox)

Along the way, Myers pointed out a few key stats:

The occupancy/vacancy sensors versus a code compliant time clock, we were able to save over 30 percent of the annual energy lighting usage with motion sensors.

Depending on the space the use of daylighting controls reduces the energy consumption between 50 and 75 percent.

In 2013 it will be a requirement to use daylight control in commercial spaces.

All of the light fixtures in the space have a Lutron dimming light ballast that is turned on or off either by manual control or in response to daylight.

Myers demonstrated that when the shades were raised that the daylighting control went into action and the lights automatically dimmed gradually over 35 to 40 seconds to adjust the light level in response to a maintain a target luminance level in the space.

One of the invisible systems is a device that sits in the ceiling and integrates with the HVAC system. It is one of the ways that Lutron integrates with other systems such as HVAC. Prior to this technology a room would have needed two different motion sensors, one for HVAC and one for lighting.

This photo shows all of the products used in the Empire State Building project.

Tenants have the ability to make adjustments to each office space to maximize the optimal light output for each task. A worker that reads paper plans versus someone on the computer requires different lighting to prevent fatigue.

The power of the system integration is that a tenant can shave the lighting load to an overall space by any percentage needed during peak load times. This is particularly important during times when the power grid is stressed and building owners are being asked to shave some load. A demonstration was doing of dimming the lights 30 percent while Myers was talking and nobody in the room perceived the change.

Although imperceptible, this would only be used for short periods of time during an energy crisis because productivity would be affected.

Lutron has developed a “plug and load” extension cord that detects plug loads that is digitally addressed to a sensor so that when the motion sensor detects that space is empty, they will turn off. This is particularly important for all of the components workers bring in such as fans, computer monitor and other devices that are often left on when a person goes home.

During the Q&A session, Malkin pointed out, “This is very low hanging fruit. To be fair, we are using the Lutron system specs and equipment in all of our pre-builts across our entire portfolio in New York and the suburbs, but if we invited you to 1333 Broadway, you probably wouldn’t come. So that’s why we’re doing it here.”

Speaking for this editor, I would have been happy to go to 1333 Broadway, but I did really enjoy the view from the observation floor of the Empire State Building!

One might think that a $4.4 million per year savings and a full return on investment in just over 3 years, representing a 38.5 percent total energy savings, a lighting energy reduction of 65 percent using Lutron lighting controls, an Energy Star 90 and LEED EBOM Gold rating would make a highly competitive building owner tempted to keep his magic formula a secret. Not so.

The secrets were unveiled at a press conference on, July 17th held on the renovated observation floor of the Empire State Building. This event might have just as easily been a seminar for building owners hosted by one of New York’s most esteemed building owners, Anthony Malkin, President of Malkin Properties and owner of the iconic structure.

Malkin has a personal commitment to help every building, no matter the owner — to be green and sustainable. He hosted this press event to tout the virtues of wireless energy and lighting controls, and on this particular day, to highlight the Lutron lighting controls that have begun to roll out in, as Malkin likes to say, “the world’s most famous office building.”

“My commitment is whenever somebody is doing work with us that has good impact on us, I want to share that with the rest of the world. The fact of the matter is that if we only succeed at the Empire State Building, we have failed, “says Malkin. “There are hundreds of equivalents of ‘Empire State Buildings’ in New York City and thousands around the world.”

Malkin has dedicated a lot of his time and is committed to the cause of green buildings and sustainability. He and his wife Shelly started a center, “about sustainable, profitable change, scalable for industry in America,” at The Natural Resources Defense Council, where she has been on the board of trustees for over 15 years.

In October of 2006 the Empire State Rebuilding Project was launched with Malkin’s team made up of people from the Clinton Climate Initiative, Johnson Controls, Jones Lang LaSalle (a real estate firm) and the Rocky Mountain Institute. “The reality is that what we really focused on initially, is how do we draw attention to the building and differentiate it? What we came to in the end was that it was very important for us to be very green. That was our starting point” said Malkin.

“The big issue for us at the Empire State Building has been to take the building from this international icon — this well-known image on the New York skyline — and actually make the inside of the building relevant,” says Malkin.

Malkin cites that 80 percent of the energy in New York City is consumed by buildings and that most commonly traded commodity in the world as the kilowatt.

“The bottom line is if you approach energy savings, you approach virtually everything: You approach the energy tax, you approach national security, you approach reducing costs, you approach increasing profits, you approach increasing competitiveness and you start to do some really interesting things in the workspace. You start making a more productive and healthier workspace,” says Malkin.

While Malkin feels that Energy Star ratings for measuring energy consumption on a relative basis are one of the best, they are based on an entire building. One thing he learned, he said, is that 50 to 65 percent, depending on the building construction and systems, of energy consumption in buildings actually occurs in tenant spaces. “You’ve got plug-load, you’ve got heating and cooling and you have lighting,” says Malkin.

The team started looking at energy and lighting controls as part of their overall metrics.

“When we start working at the Empire State Building, we are continually trying to dig further and deeper in what we can accomplish a profitable investment toward [sustainable] energy efficiency, Malkin says. “Lighting controls became a huge issue. For us it is very clear that one of the biggest wastes — literally wastes — is lighting. People leave lights on when they’re not present, people get headaches because there’s too much light, on a dark day you turn on the lights and on a bright day you don’t turn off the lights.”

The Empire State Building has a 600,000 square-foot tenant but also has many 3,500 to 15,000 square-foot tenants. “We started confronting this issue of how do we wire all of this stuff and how do we tie all of these systems together,” said Malkin. Because of the challenges of wiring an existing building and the expense of installation, wireless thermostats were chosen.

“We were very fortunate to attract the attention of Lutron and to begin to work with Lutron towards our needs for lighting solutions. We found Lutron, really to be the person, the party, the company that understood what we were trying to accomplish,” said Malkin. Lutron put together a series with wireless solutions that made good economic sense for the Empire State Building.

“We are looking for integrated solutions. We want to touch things as little as possible because every time you touch them there’s a huge labor cost involved.” Integrated controls, is another area that Lutron worked closely with the team.

While the Lutron products being used in the Empire State Building are not new, it was abundantly clear that Malkin is taking a great deal of pride in deploying the solutions that are making a huge difference. So much so, that he hosted this press conference to announce the success of the relationship and continued to say, “What I am really here to talk about today is one of our first launches of products developed here at the Empire State Building, very similar to everything else we’ve done, we don’t own anything of it. We use it, our tenants benefit from it, I get no economic benefit from it whatsoever, it’s commercially available, it works, and it’s a terrific tool and a terrific asset. It’s this whole concept of the wireless lighting controls, which are integrated and make terrific results,” says Malkin.

“I am thrilled to be able to host Lutron here today and to welcome Mike Pessina [Lutron’s President] up here to talk about [this success] and more importantly about products that they have developed, which they will be able to launch out for others to use around the world and the United States.” In closing, Malkin emphasized, “It’s a huge opportunity. This is very inexpensive, high-return stuff.”

Pessina took the podium to discuss the solutions that his team worked on in collaboration with the Empire State Building and the Jones Lang LaSalle teams that yielded an astounding 65 percent of lighting energy savings and yielded a 2.75 year payback in the pre-build tenant spaces.

The solutions included Lutron’s retrofitable, Clear Connect Wireless lighting control technologies: wireless occupancy/vacancy sensors, wireless daylight harvesting sensors and personal local manual dimming controls.

Pessina was quick to point out that the individual worker is important. “Each and every light fixture’s light level can be individually adjusted for each person’s needs. This is very important, since there are people in this space and while energy savings is an important part of things, we still have to improve productivity and comfort while saving energy. We achieve this through personal control,” said Pessina.

Lutron is certainly not new to energy savings through lighting control and the company claims that Lutron systems and products save over 10 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually, worldwide, which is equivalent to about $1 billion of utility costs.

When Pessina was asked if any building could expect a similar 65 percent energy savings through lighting control if deploying the same technology, the answer was an emphatic, “yes.”

Check out the slide show above for more details, stats, specs and pictures of the “pre-built” tenant spaces at the Empire State Building.