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.