A new paper, titled “Block by Block: How Urban Real Estate Can Lead the Electrification Transition at the District Scale,” explores how grid-friendly and low-carbon district energy systems could be viable in New York.
Are district-scale thermal energy networks a solution for decarbonizing the built environment without overburdening the energy grid? These systems, where nearby buildings with complementary load profiles share energy between them, are more energy efficient, grid friendly, and resilient than typical building-by-building electrification.
“Block by Block: How Urban Real Estate Can Lead the Electrification Transition at the District Scale” evaluates the carbon, economic, and infrastructure impacts of district-scale building electrification using a unified technical, financial, and policy analysis framework. Authored by Carbon Signal and published by the Urban Land Institute’s Randall Lewis Center for Sustainability in Real Estate with support from KPF, the report aims to make these energy-efficient systems more accessible to commercial real estate (CRE) developers. The paper offers a framework to determine whether a district scale solution is feasible or advantageous for their own buildings or portfolios. The research translates the complexity of district-scale thermal networks into clear, actionable steps, allowing developers to make early assessments based on limited and publicly available data. The report then applies that framework to three clusters of buildings in New York City: the Penn District, Chelsea-Meatpacking, and Bryant Park.
The report’s authors, Shreshth Nagpal, CEO of Carbon Signal, and James Perakis, Head of Product at Carbon Signal, undertook their research as awardees of the ULI Randall Lewis Center for Sustainability in Real Estate’s A. Eugene Kohn Fellowship. Established in memory of KPF Co-founder Gene Kohn, the fellowship supports groundbreaking research pertaining to sustainability in the built environment. Past Kohn Fellowship reports have explored the tradeoffs between embodied and operational carbon in building façades as well as the business case for adaptive reuse.
