 Good evening, everyone. Thanks so much for being here. Welcome to NYU. My name is Cecil Scheib and I am a Chief Sustainability Officer here at NYU. I'm so glad you're all here. I just wanted to say a couple words about NYU and why I think this is so important. As part of my job at NYU and helping us meet our climate goals and helping engage our community, I do a lot of speaking to students. Actually, fall semester I made it a goal to speak to as many students as I could. I went out into classes and I spoke to over 5,000 undergraduate students this fall. NYU is a big place. I ask students the same couple of questions. I say who here knows about global climate change. Basically, every hand goes up. The kids that are coming to us for college, they know what's coming. They've seen the papers. They've been educated. Then I ask, keep your hand up. If you think you can make a difference, that your voice matters. Almost all the hands go down. I say, raise your hand if you're scared and all the hands go back up. People know this change is coming. It scares them and they don't feel that they can do anything about it. What I think is so critical there is that so often fighting climate change, making a difference, is viewed as a technical question. It's a question and you're going to hear about these things tonight. I assume heat pumps, electric vehicles, all this different technology. But I believe that at the end of the day, it's a social question. It's the story we tell ourselves. We have the technology we need to deal with these problems. It's the choice of whether we use it. It's the story we tell ourselves about. We know we can make a difference. We can fix this, but will we? That's why I think it's so important that you all have showed up, taken your time. You could have been doing something else. You came here to talk about what is New York City going to do to take its part in confronting global climate change? And your voice does matter. And doing it with the input of the community is how we will tell our story in a way that sticks. So I just want to say briefly what we're doing at NYU and how we've worked with the mayor's office. We helped the mayor's office set up the first New York City carbon challenge back in the year 2007 that challenged universities and hospitals to cut their greenhouse gas emissions 30% in 10 years. No one knew if it could be done, but the city said let's start with universities and hospitals because these are institutions that own their buildings. We're willing to invest in the long term. NYU cut its emissions 30% in just five years. That's the equivalent of planning all of Manhattan and all of Brooklyn in trees. And I use this example with students to say don't think this has to take decades. It doesn't. Rapid change is possible. We can make that change. We're currently on target for a total of 50% reductions by the year 2025 and to be carbon neutral by the year 2040. How are we going to do it? Our buildings have to go all electric. You can't be net zero. You can't be zero if you're burning fossil fuels. We need to go electric. And then as the grid greens and as you hear much more tonight, the state has its own goals about green grid. When we get there, we will be truly climate neutral. And I try to tell this story to students this change is going to happen in such a short period. The year 2040 seems so far away, but the students that will be sitting in these seats at NYU in the year 2040 are already born. We have one short lifetime between someone being born and they coming to this building to study engineering, to study something else to get this right. So we've always been very pleased to partner with the mayor's office. So happy to host tonight. So happy to see such a great turnout on a cold night. I want to give a particular shout out to the folks in Tandon's Sustainable Engineering Initiative and Andrea Silverman in that initiative who has something called FloodNet, which is warning for the Gowanus neighborhood that has flood sensors that lets people in the neighborhood know and gives them warning when a flood may happen, so that they can be prepared. Because at this point we have to do more than just mitigation, we have to think about adaptation as well because this change is here. I'm going to turn things over to Claudia and I want to say thank you for coming and have a great discussion. Thanks so much, Cecil. And thanks so much to NYU for hosting us. It's really wonderful to be here. It's such a beautiful building. I've never been here before, but it's a great space for this conversation. And thank you so much to all of you for coming out on a Thursday night. I know it's a long event and everyone's cold and tired, so I really appreciate you making the effort to be here with us today. So I'm Claudia Vijard Lehmann. I'm an energy policy advisor with the New York City Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. You may have previously heard of us as the Mayor's Office of Sustainability or the Mayor's Office of Resiliency. Under this administration we've now combined to think more holistically about climate planning from an equity perspective. So I'm excited to talk a little bit about New York City's goals and our initiatives here with the Power Up project. And then I'll hand it over to our excellent CBO partners who we've been working with, our community-based organization partners we've been working with to organize these community town halls and other outreach and engagement events to make sure that you as New Yorkers have the opportunity to participate in the energy transition planning process. So I'll just start with a high level overview. So of course New York City is committed to carbon neutrality by 2050 and that includes 100% clean electricity by 2040. But we really need to be doing that while focusing on equity and inclusion. So that's sort of the new mission of our Climate and Environmental Justice office. We need to be prioritizing air quality improvements, particularly in communities that have the most impacts on health and air quality, poor air quality outcomes. And we need to be thinking about democratizing energy information. It is very difficult for an average New Yorker to participate in energy planning, even if they care about climate change, even if they care about clean energy, just because those planning processes aren't always transparent and they aren't always easy to access because they're so filled with jargon. So that's part of the goal of tonight is to really try to put some of these concepts into plain language and invite you all to comment and give us feedback on what your energy priorities are so that way we can incorporate them into the planning process. Affordability is a huge issue in New York City. So one and a half million New York City residents are energy cost burden, which means they're paying too much of their income on energy bills. And so as we transition and make all of these new investments in clean energy, we need to be thinking about how to direct the benefits and the savings that can be associated with that towards those who need it most. So that way people can afford to pay their energy bills in New York City. And of course we need to be doing this while thinking about resiliency, so reliability, making sure that people don't have to deal with outages even as we're transitioning to clean power and even as the impacts of climate change are intensifying. So we're really in this unified office trying to think about and address all of these problems holistically as we embark on this energy planning process. So environmental justice and climate justice are part of our office's name. So I just wanted to spend a moment talking about what that actually means. We want to make sure that we're ensuring access and inclusion and planning and decision making like we're hoping to try to start tonight. And we need to really be focusing on the disparities in environmental health and quality of life outcomes between different New York City neighborhoods and really prioritize frontline communities. Climate justice of course very similar themes but really focused on communities that are most vulnerable to a rapidly changing climate. Climate change often exacerbates social inequities that already existed and that was really made clear by every disaster that's hit the headlines in the last couple of years. I personally was most impacted in my career trajectory by Hurricane Maria when that hit Puerto Rico in 2017's where a lot of my family is from. Of course many of you know devastated the island with over 3,000 dead and people without power for 11 months or sometimes longer. And that's really one example of systems that are already sort of broken really impacting people who are already marginalized from the planning process. And energy I think is a really exciting space where you can both address reducing emissions and helping to reduce the impacts of climate change in the future while also building resiliency to the impacts that are already baked in. So I just wanted to provide a little context that will sort of frame the rest of the night's discussion which are the general pillars of the energy transition that are pretty widely accepted. The first is to use less energy. So if we want to achieve our clean energy transition we need to move forward quickly on energy efficiency measures so that could be something as simple as what you see green city force doing here delivering high efficiency light bulbs to tenants in the Bronx. It could be more costly and complicated weatherization processes like roof replacements or upgrading the facade the outside of a building. After we've done our energy efficiency we need to be switching to electricity wherever possible. So that could be like switching from a bus that uses diesel to one that uses electricity such as you see here in this in this image we also need to be electrifying our buildings. So right now in New York City most buildings get their heat from burning natural gas or fuel oil in the basement and we need to be switching over to electric systems instead wherever feasible. And then finally if we're electrifying everything we need to make sure that that electricity is actually generated from clean sources. So we're you know part of a broader New York state plan to achieve 70% renewables by 2030 100% clean electricity by 2040 and we're excited to explore opportunities for the city to help make that transition possible. I did want to just take a moment to pause to recognize the enormity of the challenge when it comes to climate risk and incorporating the impact of climate change in our energy planning. So by the 2050s we are expecting a significant increase in storm intensity as well as days with extreme rain that you know have clear impacts on the way that our energy system will be built. We're also expecting nearly two feet of sea level rise and by the 2050s up to quadruple the number of days above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. So that'll basically mean that our summers in New York feel more like Birmingham, Alabama summers than a New York City of the past. So it's a pretty extreme challenge and I think it's just another and another way to emphasize how important it is to be thinking holistically about our energy planning challenges. So what is power up NYC? That's the name on the flyers that hopefully brought you here tonight. Power up is an inclusive energy transition plan led by the New York City Mayor's Office and it's sort of got two main buckets in the process. The first is why we're here today. We want to be championing and prioritizing and understanding New Yorker's priorities when it comes to the energy transition. So we've been doing a lot of community outreach and listening opportunities to better understand what you guys would like to see in the future. And then the second part is research oriented. So we have done a lot of work both at the city and the state to understand what is going to be needed for the energy transition. So we wanted to be very conscious as we were planning power up to not reinvent the wheel. We really wanted to build off of what we already understand and then identify specific gaps where research has not yet been conducted that where answers would really be helpful in understanding what the next steps of city government action should be to help catalyze this transition. So you hear more about those specific research areas in just a few minutes. And then where are we headed? So the end goal is that we're going to publish a plan, an energy plan next April for Earth Day. And that will really identify specific actions that New York City government can take to move forward this equitable energy transition citywide. That being said, this is the first of a long process. So we are required by law to put out this energy plan every four years, which is a good thing because this is going to be a very iterative process. And what we need in the next four years is going to be very different than what we need in the next eight or 12 years. So after this process, after this plan is published, it's not the end of all planning, but it will be an opportunity to try to implement the strategies that are outlined in the plan, assess our progress and then repeat an analysis in the years going forward. So it's really a long haul commitment. So hope you're in it with us. And with that, I'm really excited to introduce our community-based organization partners. So like I mentioned, we've been working with five different community-based organizations since the beginning of this project, one from each borough. And they've really helped us connect with communities on the ground, given us feedback on all of our outreach materials, and ask really poignant questions about the way that we were shaping our research. So really, really excited. A lot of huge shout out to helping us plan this town hall as well. And I'll be happy to invite the CBO partners to come up briefly to introduce yourselves and share a little bit about your organization and your role in the project. So I guess can you please join me in welcoming the CBO partners? And I can hand it off first to Leslie Vasquez of South Bronx Unite. Hi everybody, my name is Leslie Vasquez and I am the Clean Air Program Coordinator at South Bronx Unite. And South Bronx Unite is an organization that serves the Mott Haven and Port Morris communities of the South Bronx. And in those two communities, there are 60,000 residents and one small park available to them. That means that we do not have accessibility to green space. And we have a lot of injustices that come out because of that. We have three major highways. Our coast is dotted with polluting facilities, four power peak plants. The list goes on. We have the Bronx Waste Management directed all to our area. So we experience a lot of truck traffic, a lot of air pollution, and we struggle with air quality. Our residents suffer with one of the highest asthma rates in the whole country. And so South Bronx Unite wants to transition the South Bronx into a more electrified borough so that our communities can thrive. We have been piled up with continuous injustices that detriment the success of our communities, health-wise, economic-wise, social-wise. And so with Power Up New York City and with this study, we hope to electrify the borough so that we can become more environmentally sustainable and improve the health of our communities. I will pass it over to Chaya from CDC. Hi, everyone. Good evening. My name is Jessica Balgobin. I am from Chaya CDC, which is a Queens-based nonprofit established to address the housing and economic needs for low-income South Asian and Indo-Curbian New Yorkers. So at Chaya, we provide direct services that meet critical needs within our communities, as well as organize and advocate for systematic change that remove barriers to well-being, housing stability, and economic mobility for our communities. Our participation in this initiative is based in our belief in environmental justice for communities of color, like those that we serve. We see the need for environmental justice in communities like Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park, where I'm from, in Queens, where major highways like the Van Wijk Expressway cut through neighborhoods, leaving behind a harmful amount of gas emissions, more so than in any other neighborhood. We see the need for the rising cost of fossil sorry, we see the need with the rising cost of fossil fuels causing the homeowners that we work with to struggle to pay for heat. Our communities also are directly faced with consequences of climate change. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, many of our community members in Queens experienced irreparable damages to their homes and some lost their lives. The health and economic well-being of our communities are directly tied to the environment around us. We do not want important decisions to be made for us, rather we firmly believe in the power of community and we'll continue to fight for our communities voices to be heard. I'll pass it. Thank you. This is a town hall about energy and I'll admit my energy on this Thursday evening at 6 p.m. is waning. We've heard a lot of fantastic introductions and so I'm actually going to ask us all to take a quick stand up and I want you to just stretch, stretch, let's do whatever you want. This is your space. We're going to be sitting here for two hours, stretch, talk to your neighbor, say who you are, what your interest is in being here tonight. Okay, when you're ready you can take your seat. I have the power and I want to point out we have lovely Spanish interpreters with us tonight and so for our Spanish speakers in the room, I want us to be mindful of the speed in which we're speaking tonight so that they can best help others understand everything that we are saying. So thank you everyone and so I will now tell you who I am, who has been directing you right now. So I am our state policy manager with We Act for Environmental Justice and who is We Act? We Act has been fighting environmental racism at the city, state, and federal levels for more than 30 years. We are a community-based organization that's been building healthy communities by ensuring people of color and low-income communities participate meaningfully. Part of this town hall tonight is in the goal of that process and participate in the creation of fair environmental health policies and practices. We Act works toward achieving energy democracy across New York State because we believe energy is a human right and we're fighting to make it one through a number of campaigns. Energy should be a human right because we use it in our daily lives. We use it to cook, use it to work, use it some people have at-home medical devices that they need stable access to energy to use and in our community of Northern Manhattan, We Act has witnessed families spending too much income on the utility bills. We've seen people in debt ranging from $500 to $5,000 and this debt crisis we're seeing severely impacts our community's ability to put food on the table and to pay their rent. Buildings in New York City you'll hear more tonight but they're responsible for 70% of greenhouse gas emissions. 70% that's crazy all and greenhouse gas emissions are terrible for the planet and for you because they contribute to our changing climate which low-income communities and communities of color have the least resources available to adapt to. So this is why it's so important we focus on buildings today and also why we want to see energy efficiency part of the stress transition. First of all thank you so much thank you for that grounding I do think it's important to recognize um yes we are here on a cold leak like winter night it's a Thursday night it's we you know got slow to get started so I appreciate all that everyone who is here and also I think recognizing like our goals and how we can continue to um better ourselves in a malaria and thinking who who isn't here and how we can continue to expand and be extensive and inclusive in these processes which is part of the overarching goal um but thank you for that grounding I appreciate that um my name is Dani Castillo I am the program manager for the Green Light District at El Fuente um and I do have something written because go off um but just introduce um El Fuente uh we are a community human rights institution we promote leadership uh for peace and justice through the engagement of our members both youth and adult members in um an intersectional holistic approach of merging the arts education scientific research wellness and environmental action we're building upon a legacy of fighting environmental injustices in the south side of Williamsburg and have since then expanded um we were founded in 1982 we uh integrate this these diverse activities and community campaigns through the arts through our green light district initiative which is a holistic community development um initiative thinking about um how we think about community development not just in and resiliency and sustainability not just in in regards to the climate crisis and the current um climate crisis that we're within and climate change but how we think about our communities um in thriving ways holistically um and what that means the Green Light District has um five main areas that we're always looking at intersectionally affordable living health and wellness arts and culture um environmental justice and education and um we also have a global justice training institute um within um our youth leadership centers we have a public high school the El Fuente Academy for Peace and Justice building upon a legacy of uh self-determination of reclaiming um you know um education that is culturally resonant and um and radical and also the El Fuente MS50 Community School in North Brooklyn and we also have the Latino Climate Action Network in Puerto Rico um so we continue to attempt to remain at the forefront of community-led movements for self-determination and initiate and impact social policy both locally and nationally so to bring it back to this like intersectional holistic approach whether we're um in the context of North Brooklyn and the south side of Williamsburg or in Bushwick or we're looking at our our comrades in our team in Puerto Rico we're um always looking at um and always sure to prioritize um collective self-determination we're looking at solutions to very big problems um whether it's in the south side where we have the BQE that cuts across um our our neighborhood and we have our public spaces where um community members just both young and old convene and um whether it's being a part of uh citizen science initiatives or um cultural organizing we recognize that we um we're always taking an intersectional approach and any solutions to these big problems must be led and informed by by the community and we recognize that those solutions have always existed and so that's what we always aim to prioritize in our work um and so with that being said um I'll pass it back to the um oh no we have Staten Island it needs to go I'll pass it away so I'm the last TV elder you'll have to hear from my name is Linda Baron I'm with the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce uh we are a business organization we have uh about 14,000 businesses on Staten Island about a half a million people that live there um we got involved we we got involved in this we've had some situations on Staten Island in terms of environment with the our dump the Staten Island dump was open for many years it's been closed we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the closure this year and actually uh we're still dealing with the the dump and then you know kind of reinventing that area we also had our e-show was severely impacted by Hurricane Sandy and we have a lot of pollution because the Staten Island Expressway is considered they call it one of the world's biggest parking lots actually but our organization is a business organization and the reason that I'm here is really so that we can pass along information to businesses businesses deal with all kinds of different energy bills and they also have to prepare the workforces for the future so there's a lot of things that we need to be aware of that we need to make we act as a hub for businesses uh all the businesses that we serve in the borough plus I have a collaborative relationship with all of the five borough chambers so we constantly share information back and forth and we think that it's really important to be at the table to hear firsthand what's going on so that we can relay this information so not only will the businesses be aware of it but our residents will be aware of it and be able to to voice their opinion thank you thank you all so much for being here and for your um support on this project it's really been an honor to work with each of you thank you so much great um I would love to make a few take a few minutes to introduce council member Lincoln wrestler he's here from this council this neighborhood is in your district yes so it's wonderful that you were able to make it and if you'd like to come to say a few words I know you've been a champion for climate action so appreciate your return thank you so much Claudia it's great to be here on I actually was just celebrating uh NYU Tandon yesterday because one of the buildings here at Metro Tech uh has just been purchased by NYU and the School of Engineering is expanding which is a you know great thing for our efforts to solve climate challenges of climate change and I really want to thank NYU for hosting us and their leadership uh it's it's critically important and I want to thank all of you for coming out uh as the neighborhood council member we've really centered uh the fight against climate change uh at the top of our agenda here in district 33 uh we've released a climate roadmap for how we want to drive down emissions from our buildings our transportation our waste the resiliency solutions that we need to see in our waterfront district here we we just announced a new uh tree plan where we're going to be planting 3400 trees in every available tree bed across district 33 over the next four years uh I believe very deeply that the solutions to the climate crisis are in our communities and it's at town hall events like these where we bring together local leaders uh community members to share your expertise and your guidance and your input that's how we're gonna make progress together and I want to thank the community-based organizations who have helped convene us and get the word out especially Appuente representing Brooklyn and and the mayor's office uh for for partnering and for engaging uh because we need to do this work together arm in arm and government and community to get everybody involved the solutions to the climate crisis I really do believe that the climate crisis is the single greatest threat facing the people of New York City uh and the time for action is now moderation is unacceptable we need to to implement the boldest most ambitious solutions that we can and I'm really excited to hear from all of you and work with all of you to make these things happen right here in district 33 and across the city of New York so thanks for having me tonight thank you so much really appreciate it um great so we are now going to dive into the research area topics um because we want to make sure that all of these somewhat complicated topics are accessible to everyone we're going to start each section with a 101 delivered by our community-based organization partner so really excited to ask Rihanna to come back up to talk a little bit about uh buildings and the expected changes we're uh gonna be pushing for over the next decades thank you hi everyone thank you I got a couple highs uh so as the slide says people spend 90 percent of their time indoors which is crazy we need to get out more and that's why it's so important that your building is healthy for you to live in meaning it's free of health hazards like mold lead and asbestos is safe for you to live in meaning it's free of natural gas that when burned in your apartment like from your stove oops or from your water boiler that runs usually on natural gas that that releases toxic chemicals into your air in your apartment and so we want to make sure that that doesn't happen anymore um that cannot happen but we switch to electric heat pumps that are going to efficiently warm and cool your building which are that image right there so we also want to make sure your building is comfortable for you to live in mean if you spend so much time on it in it you can you want you to be able to afford the energy you're spending spending in your building so I want to do a quick survey with you all how many of you have ever thought your building was too hot in the summer raise your hands yeah me too me too um what if it's too cold in the winter yep yep and how many of you have ever thought your energy bill was too high when you saw it I think that's the majority of folks there um so that's unfortunate um but three out of four northern Manhattan neighborhoods are at the highest risk for dying during and immediately following an extreme heat event these neighborhoods experience high temperatures due to a lack of green space like parks and have limited access to home and air conditioning research has shown that your indoor temperature can even be hotter than your outside temperatures you're not imagining it uh 2022 was one of our hottest summers on record as a result of climate change and increasing hot weather days leave many low income residents unable to pay energy bills that can go up 30 percent from running your air conditioning that's why affordable energy is so critical given that many Yorkers already cannot afford to own and operate an air conditioner and that can have deadly consequences so if you thought your building was too hot or too cold that's why energy efficiency upgrades are so important some examples of what an energy efficiency upgrade looks like is replacing your water boiler like I said that usually runs on gas with a heat pump that runs on electricity you can insulate your walls to keep you cool in the summer and warm in the winter and you can upgrade your windows to prevent air from coming in right now disadvantaged communities do not equitably receive amounts of funding from the state of new york to complete these beneficial home upgrades they mostly already go to wealthy communities and so that's why we act as pushing the state to fund the removal of lead mold and asbestos that makes you sick so you can also receive the funding to install these energy efficiency upgrades that are healthy and make your home safe so and they also reduce your energy bill if you're using less energy to do the same task that you are now that means you're using less energy overall and that brings your bill down so we act envision an energy future that runs on renewables has electric buildings gets gas out of your homes involves community participation and decision-making is affordable and contributes to the health and well-being of you and your family so there are some challenges to reducing pollution from buildings one new york city electricity is expensive two the labor force isn't yet ready to meet demand and three great updates great updates will be needed and if you have more questions on this there are opportunities for you to discuss more in our breakout session later so thank you everyone good evening i think i can get away with that is that better my name is Zachary satilly i'm with e3 e3 is the consultant that's been hired to help with the research behind the power-up study and before i dive in we're going to go through lots of topics tonight but a little bit of housekeeping quickly so i'd like to first do an appreciation for kinetic communities daphne and angel who put this event together the hardest part is getting started and we're already on our way so uh they will be helping collect questions throughout tonight so if you have questions about the topics we're going to go topic by topic uh they're going to hand out flashcards and collect flashcards so we can have an orderly q&a and make sure we get to everybody's questions throughout the night so let me jump into buildings so for this project we identified several areas where we felt we needed to do more research so that we can put forward actions that the city can take come spring when we release the report and buildings are obviously front and center and that's why we're talking about them first building electrification we're talking about scaling up heat pumps we must install many many many heat pumps there are million buildings in new york city it's going to take a long time to retrofit all of them the city has really made some strides very recently in this regard first off burning fossil fuels and buildings is going to be prohibited at most newly constructed buildings by 2027 that's not that far away local law 154 passed in december of last year and that's jump starting this whole industry but we know the costs are going to be very significant so the research that we formulated is really evaluating how heat pump technologies in different building types compare to the conventional systems than our buildings now we know that there's high upfront costs we also know that sometimes they're more expensive to operate however we also believe that they are going to be significant sources of reduced air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions so we need to go forward with this plan and our research is really focused on assessing the cost gap to understand how we're going to fund this we focused in a few areas on multifamily housing so i'm going to walk through how we've landed on this topic so the research is going to cover lots of different technologies but we're going to zoom in on what we're describing here as unsubsidized rent stabilized affordable housing we chose this for a number of reasons we felt that market rate housing has already been sufficiently studied nica has a tremendous plan on how they're going to electrify and we felt that rent stabilized buildings have very unique challenges one there's going to be a challenge on how this is going to be funded and how this is ultimately going to be who's going to bear the burden of these investments so on the right the graphic looks like it got a little screwed up but the green represents the rent stabilized population as far as units the blue is market rate and those other smaller sectors are rent controlled public housing etc so all we're highlighting here is that rent stabilized is a massive part of our building stock and there's not a great solution on how we're going to electrify it today so we're going to do some this is not supposed to be pedantic in a way we want to show that this is a pretty straightforward calculation that we can do we know there's going to be high costs those costs include the upfront cost of weatherization which is going to be critical the cost of the actual equipment and then many of the costs of things that are going to block electrification like health and safety repairs that need to be taken care of prior to the installation of a heat pump we also know that once a heat pump is installed you're going to see increased electric bills because you're switching from a fuel like gas or oil however there's tremendous benefit and there's tremendous support for this the federal government and the state have fantastic incentives for weatherization those can be layered with new incentives for electrification and then if you saw the passage of the inflation reduction act recently massive tax credits are now coming forward and the federal government is going to put a substantial part of this bill you also will have the benefits of reduced fuel bills when you switch from a fossil fuel to electric we believe there will be a big gap still and what our research is focused on is how large is that gap where is it most prominent in what sorts of buildings and what sorts of technologies are going to create the largest gap and then how can the city move forward with a plan that ultimately closes that gap claudia spoke a bit about energy burden so i won't get deep into this but electricity bills are likely going to increase because gas bills or increase more so than your gas bills will decrease and what we're most concerned about is renters in a situation where their heat is now on their electric bill we need to be very clear about ultimately who's going to pay for that heat whether it be electric or fuel the government may need to help fill this gap and we ultimately want to make sure that those who are most energy cost burdens are not more so because of this transition so this is a wonky chart but what we're trying to show here on the left red is all the costs and don't focus too closely on the numbers right now this is a preliminary analysis but we're using this as a representation of what a retrofit would look like in a pre-war multifamily building that's less than seven stories you have costs right up front for those health and safety improvements taking care of cracks mold lead etc we've tried to estimate on a per unit basis over the life cycle of the equipment what that costs we then look at the incremental cost of the new equipment that you have to pay up front the incremental increased electricity bill and maybe some increased o and m cost and then you start working down the waterfall and when you get to that blue tall chart a bar in the center that's what we envision to be what it costs where the benefits land before there's any incentive and really what that represents is a tremendous amount of cost per unit a massive amount you start layering in all the incentives that exist today and when you get to the far end of that chart you still have that cost gap so what we're working on now is trying to determine exactly how large that is so we went through and we're going to go through all the topics very very quickly and I have one minute remaining but I don't need any more minutes because really the purpose of tonight is to flash up what we're doing and where we're at most of the research is in process and then get feedback have you asked questions challenge us help us refine our analysis so that as we go into the into the holiday season and into the spring we're actually making sure that we're landing on on something that we can all stand behind and that's actually going to move the needle so I'm going to stop there and I think we should pause for questions and I'm not sure how we're going to facilitate that if you want to do that pass and finish okay so the first question is can more information be provided on local on 97 as quite a few New York City buildings fall into that code and it's a two-parter what can regular renters do to report building issues besides 311 so I don't feel equipped to answer that second one I'm not sure if there's anybody in the team what can regular renters do to report building issues besides 311 I assume pulp would be the best resource yeah so so for folks that are looking for building support there is pulp as well as heart share which is a non-profit located in Brooklyn New York that can provide you with billing assistance for your utility bills so I encourage you to look at heart share.org and then you can also reach out to the utilities directly they do have a billing assistance program and a billing payment option where they can provide you with billing assistance for income eligible resident renters and regarding local on 97 so there's there's many many resources and local on 97 applies to not just multifamily properties and also commercial properties also the city itself so I would say if you're a commercial or multifamily building and you're a larger customer I would encourage you to reach out to the accelerator the New York City accelerator which has lots of information is a free resource Daphne do you want to give a quick plug for electrify yes so New York City has two initiatives one is the NYC accelerator which is a free technical advisory program for multifamily buildings over five units across the five boroughs and so if you need any support you have any questions about your building systems and how to make them more efficient that is a free resource to you all for folks that are in the one to four family home there is another initiative called electrify NYC which is focused first on health and comfort so ensuring that you have the proper insulation the proper health and safety protocols and then help you look at solar plus heat pumps and making sure that they're doing it in a cost effective way does not increase the financial burden to homeowners and lastly there are a lot of utility programs there's affordable multifamily program and a residential energy program run by the joint utilities of New York so national grid and connet and all the other fun utilities that are also free resource to you all so you can look at their website and we'll share all these what is hope hope is a free resource for people to use their lawyers and they have all languages pretty much available to you so you can email them you can call them they have a hotline their website is utilityproject.org and so if you do have anything that you need help with regarding your utility bill if you have a problem with your energy supplier such as con Edison or national grid you can go to pulp and they are more than happy to help you and you can share that resource anyone else you know struggling with utility debt what they do is they help you enroll in state programs like some of the ones mentioned and there are some state programs available to eliminate utility debt right now until December 31st 2022 and so that is the energy affordability program for anyone wondering so just wanted to provide some extra context thank you and lots of questions came in so i'm going to try to get to all of them oh even more so where's all the electricity going to come from we're going to get to that one later could be oh could be how would we prevent how do we prevent and future ideologies so that renters aren't footing the bill how are you planning to implement ideas if they're still in the research with few projected plans how do you get to enacting and moving forward so i'll take the second one first so this study is intending to be quite different than i think a lot of the plans that many cities produce you'll probably be frustrated with how specific some of this research is as we go through it it's very much because we think it's unlocking some of the blocks that are preventing action from happening so the report that you'll see in the spring is going to be very action oriented with specific initiatives that are measurable and they're all going to be touching on each of the topics we're going to talk about tonight the could be i think is in reference to the unknown about who's going to pay for this and i think that our research is really focused on trying to demystify exactly that question there are a lot of well we'll figure it out type conversations happening and i think when it comes to rent stabilized housing there's even more so so i think we're going to put forward lots of information about what the blocks are so that the city can take action and move forward with a plan to actually unblock some of those those challenges and answer some of those question would the drastic increase in pricing cause a larger disparity absolutely and i think that's why we're doing this research is we feel that that hasn't been identified as large of a problem as it actually is there is going to be a massive disparity if we don't intervene and make sure that buildings actually have the tools they need to to make these improvements and find a way to fund the improvements wouldn't local law 97 help provide a significant stream of revenue to accurately fund the transition very good question i think it's it's something that we'll see as local law 97 rulemaking is completed there'll be lots of more information about how the the fines will be enforced where those fines will go and i think a lot of thought will be put into exactly what can be done with that revenue source i think one question i heard was how do we protect tenants or renters and so from building costs one piece of legislation that we act supports and will likely be fighting for next legislative session which means to pass policy into law is something called good cause eviction and what that is it's a policy that would protect renters from being evicted unfairly if the renter if the landlord raises someone's rent unfairly that they can no longer afford it it would block that tenant from being evicted so that is something that is on our radar and we are interested in passing this in conjunction with advocating for energy efficiency because we know that some landlords may be shady and they may want to pass energy efficiency costs upgrades on to tenants unfairly and so that is why it's important that we are also looking out for renter rights and tenant protections and deaf near angel let me know so we can stay on schedule because we may have to pull some of these questions into the breakouts if we can't get to all of them great crusher wise new york city electricity so expensive and what's being done about it also where does it come from so the second part i think is easier to answer and we're going to talk more about this a lot of the energy that comes into the city comes from outside comes into the city from outside whether that be from from upstate if you're following the headlines the last couple of weeks they just broke ground on bringing some power from canada down into new york city there's some power that comes in from new jersey and then there's a lot of power that's generated in the city for reliability purposes so the energy comes from all over and the energy mix is primarily fossil there's a second question i think i just saw it about was nuclear energy analyzed as a viable alternative there was a nuclear power plant in new york city that served uh or excuse me that was up in bucana new york that served new york city that was closed indian point most of that generation was replaced by fossil so our our from a carbon standpoint our grid actually got dirtier when we closed that nuclear power plant uh there's no new nuclear really being built at large scale anywhere in the united states right now because of cost and i think i only have one more minute and there's a few good questions i'm going to try to take one more and then we're going to save the rest for the for the breakouts how does how do geothermal heat loops fit into the clean injury equation so since i had to go through the research very quickly i didn't touch on the different types of heat pumps but we are looking at geothermal heat pumps as part of this research so there's many types of heat pumps some of them are called ground source heat pumps or geothermal heat pumps those leverage the fact that underground you have a pretty constant temperature that can be used for cooling and heating there's also air source heat pumps that pull heat out of the air uh both technologies are viable both are being considered so daphne should i move on to the next section because of time so i'm going to keep these before we bring up the wonderful leslie i want to inform everyone that we act also has a survey so we act staff raise your hands let everyone know who you are thank you i'm going to come to myself anika kaleb or lani to do a survey with us if you have an energy story you want to tell us if your building or your utility company has been treating you unfairly if you have high energy bills if your building is too hot or too cold let us know that is really helpful information and we want to help take care of you all so please come to us any of us and we can we can do that survey with you thank you great i'm just going to i'm just going to take one more because it's a very great question on what is health and safety entail and don't put that put that down this is a good question so what is health and safety entail i just want to go back to that quickly so this is a critical point so we've included the cost of health and safety and what that means can mean a variety of things but before you put a heat pump in you're going to want to do a lot of things to reduce the overall cost of the system you're going to want to think about energy efficiency first you're going to certainly also want to think about what we're calling health and safety here which is fixing cracks mold spes this all the other things you're going to encounter when you start opening up walls you start trying to run new conduit these are all things that typically are kept out of the equation but they're the reason why these projects don't happen often so i just wanted to touch on that i think that's great and let's let's jump to transportation so i don't get us too far behind and leslie do you want to join us thank you can you guys hear me okay awesome just a quick reminder of we're going to be passing around blue flashcards and you guys can place all of your transportation questions there and they will be collected at the end and we'll answer some of your questions so new yorkers are they live in the most transit oriented city in america because new york is such a densely populated city there needs to be a lot of public transportation a lot of accessible transportation resources for new yorkers to get around now new york city emits 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and are comprised of transportation emissions and we are aiming to have 80 percent of trips taken within the five boroughs so that they could be less so that they could emit less energy i'm so sorry less pollution by walking taking bikes and mass transit by 2050 now electrifying vehicles on our streets are key in reducing greenhouse gas emissions if we have electric vehicles we will no longer be emitting carbon dioxide into the air and that has a lot of correlation that lead to cumulative impacts if they are not addressed for example because we have such high emissions of carbon dioxide in the air that means that we have that it is able to trap more heat meaning that in the summer temperatures our low-income communities that reside in heavily dense transportation areas and our next to highways have buses and trains near them that means that they are the ones who experience the most exacerbated versions of heat vulnerability meaning that transportation is a direct cause to a lot of the health disparities that we see with high temperatures as well electrifying vehicles also lowers the risk of respiratory illnesses as i mentioned the south bronx is one of the highest has one of the highest asthma rates in the whole country um the other boroughs in york city follow that as well and so if we have less carbon dioxide in our air and less um particulate matter emitters um that cause so much harm in our health in the health of our communities electrifying these vehicles also reduces um that impact as well it reduces noise pollution as well as it ends our dependency on fossil fuels now some of the challenges that we face uh for reducing pollution from transportation is that there are limited charging infrastructure that allows for the adoption of electric vehicles so because the charging uh electric vehicles is not as common as fossil fuel emitting vehicles um the charging stations are limited however we plan on transition it on having at least 10 000 charging curbside um chargers by the year 2030 now another issue is that sourcing electric vehicles can be difficult however a lot of electric vehicle sources are planning on making electric vehicles that have a longer range and have a larger capacity to function properly in our new electric economy and the last challenge is that grid upgrades need to be um need to be changed so because electric vehicles have a higher voltage and energy the grid needs to be uh more resilient and more reliable so that we can make sure that our vehicles will uh will be reliable for our use and yeah I think this is the yeah I already got questions before we started uh so will making transportation more sustainable significantly increase riding costs so I think it's to be determined certainly the challenge with EVs is is upfront costs we need to find a way to fund them um the cost of ownership of an EV is likely to be a lot cheaper so it's really if uh in many ways it's finance and supply chain I think is the the short answer there on whether or not it's going to be more or less expensive and I'll get to these let me get to these after because there's a lot so oh thanks okay so we zoomed in here we're talking about just school buses now and I think it's important just to highlight some of the progress that's been made recently so both New York City and New York State require all electric school buses by 2035 and this is going to dramatically reduce the harmful health and climate impacts of the diesel emissions that come from our existing buses and then also in addition to that any new purchase of a school bus needs to be electric by 2027 and those are both very recent announcements this blew my mind when I first heard if there's 10 000 school buses in New York City it's tremendous school buses are also very expensive today three to four times the cost in some cases the good news is that there's a lot of money going into this space the federal government has put tremendous amounts of money in the infrastructure act and has just doubled down really with the inflation reduction act so there's a lot of funding coming to help seed this market and get school buses into our communities what we did with our research is we want to just better understand today what the costs are what the benefits are compare that to conventional vehicles we've already committed to doing it so now we're thinking about how do we defray the cost as much as we can and one of the areas we're looking at I'll talk about more is called vehicle to grid and it's thinking about how these large batteries that are going to be sitting idle for large periods of the day and maybe some seasons in the summer where they're getting less used what can we do with those batteries when they're not driving children around the city so what we're doing right now is analyzing school bus route data to really understand when these buses need to be driving and when they're not we really want to know and it's in the in the field it's called when do they sleep when does a bus pull into a depot when does it pull over to the side of the road where are there opportunities to use that bus when it's not operating for its primary purpose and buses are real the reason why there's so much interest in school buses right now is they have such well-defined travel patterns unlike say an uber that is going to be following customers all day and trying to ride constantly a school bus has very distinct time when it rides and a very distinct distinct time when it sleeps so what we're doing is looking at different ways that you can control the cost of a school bus and when you operate it so there's something called managed charging that essentially is just playing off the fact that electricity doesn't cost the same throughout the day so there's times of day and times of year when electricity is cheaper and you want to take advantage of those and you really want to do that not only as an individual school bus operator somebody that's managing the buses but also societally we want to make sure that we're controlling the amount of electricity that these chargers are using so that we're not increasing the peak of our electric system the other thing we're looking at is what I mentioned earlier which is vehicle to grid and we don't need to get into the the details as far as the economics right now because we're just getting started with this analysis but ultimately the thought process is there's going to be time when you can discharge extra electricity in the battery and potentially get on a tariff with the utility where you can get paid for that so vehicle to grid is not just applicable school bus it's really applicable to all vehicles but we think it's that school buses could be a great candidate and since we've already committed to buying all these these buses all around the country we might as well think about this infrastructure and what we can do with it and then when we get deeper into the analysis and you'll see this in the fall or excuse me in the spring when we release it we're going to be doing lots of sensitivities to think about how to make this cheaper you can charge multiple buses off a single charger that could reduce costs there's going to be some analysis around more expensive chargers or less expensive chargers based on the power capacity of those charges and how quickly they can charge so we're going to be doing lots of iterations of this analysis to try to find the optimal way to actually manage the bus fleet so i'm going to jump to the next topic and we're going to go through a few and then take another break so this is grid readiness this is another topic so we're building up to essentially this topic we've talked about electrifying buildings we've talked about electrifying school buses and other vehicles so now we're thinking about okay this is a lot of new electrical load and right now new york city's peak electricity demand currently happens in the summer really happens during heat waves and it's really happening when we're blasting our air conditioning as we switch to electric heat as we add lots of electric vehicles over time the prediction is that that peak is going to change to the winter the reason the peak so important is because the system is designed to the peak and that's what drives all the cost so if it switches to the winter and then ultimately the peak increases there's lots of cost and vision down the road and how are we going to make sure that we manage that peak the best we can that's what the whole game is going to be about so this is really just trying to predict when and where we think electrification is going to happen it's a tough thing to predict but there's lots of there's lots of tools you can use to try to envision where this is going to happen first some of that's just need so where in the city are we going to need a lot of electric vehicles where do we have communities that have predominantly residential buildings that are going to have heat pumps throughout the city you're going to have an uneven adoption income is certainly going to drive a lot of adoption we need to predict how income is going to drive that adoption and where adoption may not happen because of income and ultimately what we're trying to do is layer on all these different factors so that we can inform the grid upgrading plan so that we're doing this more strategically and it's all to manage cost so this is a very very preliminary map on the right but new york city's grid and now we're talking about essentially con Edison's grid the distribution the local distribution grid it's made up of networks and what networks are essentially groupings that together create the broader grid sometimes physically there's a limit on how much power you can get in the certain communities and and what con Edison's primary role is is to upgrade their networks and maintain that supply of electricity to all of us reliably but over time as we forecast where adoption is going to happen we can look at the existing system today and we can look at what we think is going to happen in the future we can start trying to make some predictions so what this map is starting to show and there's going to be many of these in the report and really what the purpose of these is don't read into anything other than the fact that all those little lines on on new york city represent physical parts of our grid and we've isolated at that level and said we think we know what's in those communities we can try to predict where there's going to be higher peaks because of that and then we compare that to kind of existing plan and say maybe we can help inform where we think we're going to have challenges and this can not only reduce costs we can think about air quality considerations there's lots of other outputs that come out of this this analysis but really we just want to try to get a view of what the future is going to look like and that's what this analysis is about so before a break I shouldn't have teased you with that how electrification impact the grid so very timely are there any improvements being done to maintain the uh its capacity so absolutely so that's like I said that's con Edison's primary role is improving and maintaining the grid and that's what we pay them for and all around the country there's utilities just like con Edison that get paid to maintain the quality of the grid all utilities are now thinking about what electrification is going to do to their grid and in a cold climate like New York you have different challenges than you do in other parts of the country where maybe they're not going to have as big a concern with a winter peak like we will in in New York City we truly imagine that over time and there's all sorts of predictions on it's going to be 2035 or later when do we think the grid is going to switch from a at a system-wide level a summer peaking grid to a winter peaking grid the other wrinkle that's happening here is think about when it's really cold and when you need the most heat it's usually overnight so now we're also switching to a nighttime peaking grid the reason why that map is ultimately going to be very informative when it's finalized is it's going to show us that at a system level you have challenges and then on a network level those little shapes on that map you have even different challenges much of the area we're in right now in Brooklyn is nighttime peaking meaning that in this isolated part of the grid right now con Edison is struggling to to maintain a peak overnight or really actually to about 11 p.m and then power usage goes down in other parts of the city especially commercial districts you have the opposite you have a daytime peak so it's not an easy thing to determine what's going to happen in the future but we certainly can make some predictions and that's what we're going to try to do with this following up on the high cost of electricity in the city how we'll try the transition to EVB affordable I think I tried to answer that one that's a very tough question I think that we're going to have to think about what incentives we can put in the market so that EV ownership is affordable I'm aware that the department of transportation decast fleet TLC lots of divisions of of agencies in New York City are all creating electrification plans on how they're actually going to get more EVs into their into their fleets are you going to use the lamppost as a charging station certainly that's being considered I can't really answer that question that's not my area of expertise but I think there's a real challenge thinking about curbside charging just think about what happens to any infrastructure that's in the street gets damaged gets vandalized there's danger sometimes in having this in the street so there's a lot of thinking that still needs to be done about where the optimal place to charges whether it be in a parking garage at your home in new yet to be conceived you know equivalence to what a gas station is today these these are all things that are being determined right now but I'm not sure exactly if the lamppost would be would be an option where's the funding for improvements come from so I think that's that's going to be a combination of the what we pay for electricity and where we take public funds and invest it into the things we want to invest in and if you're following a lot of the proceeding that the state is going through right now for the climate act so much of that is where are we going to push the funding so that we can make this affordable with the increased public transportation prices how will you convince people to take public transit that honestly is is kind of out of scope for for our study but I think certainly the city has very clear goals about how they want to reduce the amount of rides that are actually taken in the EV or in a vehicle all together if we can promote and continue to public transit will all be better off and we don't have to solve for some of these problems I'm not sure are you going to add more bike lanes again that's that's kind of out of scope for this are you going to penalize non-electric transit again those are questions that I think are very much outside of the scope of what we're doing they're certainly good questions and I think they're questions that should be asked but there's no plan in anything that we're working on about penalizing non-electric transit how can we push the city to install more chargers 30 000 just isn't enough goal for 2030 so I think the prediction is EVs are going to come a lot faster than electric buildings for a variety of reasons one is just what we call stock turnover how long do you keep a vehicle versus how long do you keep a building so the opportunities to replace old buildings with new don't really exist in our lifetime there's so many of the buildings that we're in today are going to continue to exist there is new construction certainly happening but look on your block how many of those buildings are new it's it's certainly not going to happen at the pace that I think vehicles are going to happen so I believe that this topic in particular is so important because we're forecasting based on the policy goals what are the actual if we just look at policy and just think about what we're committing to and those policy goals are set by trying to stay on track to achieve our climate goals those are incredibly ambitious and there's no precedent for them there's not many markets that have really gone through this before so this is a real opportunity for New York in a very very dense environment to really be a real leader and think about how to roll this out how many more questions do we have time for I'm just last one and thank you I'm not trying to ignore anything here this is an overwhelming number of questions for the amount of time that we have tonight so how do you expect to address the drivers in the communities how do you expect to address the drivers in the communities that earn a living from conventional trucks and are not able to purchase electric vehicles great question I certainly don't have an answer to this I will say that there is a lot of truck electrification planning that's going on right now in New York City thinking through those who have fleets you have the challenges of where's where those trucks go which communities go through where they come from these are all big big questions I would say there is no stick that I'm aware of right now that's preventing anybody from driving a conventional vehicle most of the interest is in carrots to help people adopt electric vehicles how is equity prioritized great question so we I didn't really touch on that so one of the outputs of the electrification study for school buses is really it's that last bullet there one of our work products is going to be a prioritization framework of how to think about which communities we would recommend to be the first to get school buses so get these electric school buses we need to think about working backwards from some of these goals 2035 is not a long time but to turn over 10,000 buses it's very expensive like many cities New York City has contractors and vendors that provide school buses to them so ultimately they will be responsible for electrifying their fleets so where we're aiming this research is not only to help maybe find some financial tools to help but then also to direct the city and give them some information about where we think you're going to have the highest air quality benefits where you think there may be opportunities to have a headroom on the existing electrical system which we reduce cost there's there's lots of ways that we can think about prioritization but equity is the primary way we're going to look at it I'm out of time again repeat this question oh sorry the question was how is equity going to be prioritized in the implementation of school bus electrification okay so many more I think there's some buildings one in here I think we're going to have to do another hall Claudia okay are we taking a break yeah all right thank you everyone for coming back so at this point we've reached the halfway mark of our session today and the town hall but before I turn it over to Zach again I would actually like to speak about the current reality that we live in today we're gonna hear in a few moments about transitioning our grid and our grid readiness and how we can shift to clean energy what it means and what is necessary to achieve it just to think about a few things here earlier this year the state released this designation of disadvantaged communities in New York this game is no surprise to most of us because we've been living and seeing and experiencing the historic disinvestment in our communities and of our people if we go back in time we can see that the city that the city has historically cited its fossil fuel plants in our communities that is primarily responsible for almost like a quarter of New York City's greenhouse gas emissions and if we are working on releasing plans and analyzing just ways of energy transition we need to think about how these plants need to be retired in favor of clean energy storage facilities and clean energy projects and that must include meaningful ways and meaningful input and meaningful involvement of our communities so this is why sessions like this are really important this is why this needs to keep on happening within the process to inform how we shift towards clean energy so the sighting of these new facilities that are clean energy that rely on non-polluting I wouldn't say fuels but you know resources should be a pathway to create direct investment into our communities through green jobs through reduced pollution this transition would also allow New York City's building sector and transportation sector to comply with historic laws like local law 97 that we fought so hard to pass a few years back and that we are in the process of rulemaking today we are in a moment where our communities and communities of color and even globally communities that have been disadvantaged by the fossil fuel industries by businesses usual are rejecting kind of how how to say this are rejecting these notions of transition fuels like natural gas are rejecting notions like net zero when we actually want zero emissions um and so in our position here as community-based organizations that are working in tandem with uh with our consultant partners and with MOCEJ we urge everyone in positions of power to exercise their privilege in approaching this shift through an intersectional lens because we are no longer isolated and separated as communities we are part of a global movement we are part of a local and state movement and so uh we listen to each other and we speak and we stand together so with that I'm gonna welcome Zach again and to hear about transitioning our great thank you so there's a number of topics in this section we're gonna start with energy storage so this topic is really focused on opportunities to both deploy battery storage in New York City to help facilitate uh retirement of fossil power plants storage is gonna play an important role in this transition in New York and all around the world really because at as simplest form what storage allows you to do is charge during times when you have high renewable output and then discharge during times of the highest demand we also aim to identify what key considerations should be used when siting storage on both city-owned and on private property so in order to answer these questions we're doing some modeling of the New York City electricity system and we chose the year 2030 lots of major policy goals exist in that year one of the most important is New York City committed to 70% renewable energy by 2030 and what we're doing is we're simulating what we think the electricity mix is going to be in 2030 and assessing the impacts of all the renewable renewable projects and additional transmission that's being built and really what the goal is here is we want to identify opportunities for energy storage as a potential solution to offset some of the run hours of these fossil plants that exist in our communities we also want to identify key considerations where it can be built and we want to develop a prioritization framework again similar to the EV research on where those installations should go in order to accelerate the retirement of these fossil plants many of them in EJ communities so for this research as we discussed in the previous topics we think electricity demand is going to increase we know it's going to increase because we're going to have lots of new electric vehicles and electric heat you're essentially taking things that primarily served right now by fossil fuels and converting to electricity so electricity consumption is going to increase and what we've done here is we've said on the left I'll start with the graphics so 2021 that's almost today it's 2022 I know but we're using data from 2021 to just show a baseline of how New York City got its what the New York City electricity generation was in that year and then to the right is a simulation of what we think is going to happen in 2030 and it's important to do that simulation because there's a lot of commitments already made there's a lot of contracts signed there's a lot of new resources are going to come online and a lot of these resources that colorful mix are a lot of renewables you have hydro you have onshore and offshore wind the yellow is utility scale solar being imported from primarily upstate so you have not lots of new cleaner resources coming online and we think that that's going to displace a lot of the generation that's happening today so on this map the little dots represent power plants in New York City and the colors and it may be hard to see but there's a color scale there and the darker the color the more we assume that plant's going to operate in this simulation so we're trying to predict is when you bring in all these new renewable resources what's the energy going to mix going to look like on an hour by hour basis in the year 2030 assuming what we think the weather is going to be like and ultimately we simulate how often we think those plants are going to run so there's something called capacity factor on that map that's essentially how often it's going to run as a percentage over the course of the year so the light pink dots we think are plants that potentially are going to run a lot less they're less than 1% so that's a pretty dramatic amount of time that they're not operating and they're online to ensure the reliability of the system and there is an economic incentive for many of them to operate we think that may go away and you're going to see lots of these plants potentially not operating at all so the reason we went through that analysis is we ultimately want to think about how storage could displace that so if they're only running a short period of time energy storage is limited it has to charge and discharge and throughout the year energy storage has to do that cycle and we need to match that cycle compared to how a power plant would operate it's going to be some plants that are not going to be able to be replaced with energy storage today with today's technology because the storage won't be it won't be economic to build the storage to replace a long output of a power plant over a long period of time so let me just see it make sure I so ultimately what our modeling suggests is that as this declines in 2030 we're potentially going to see a larger decline statewide than we would in the city and that's based on our simulation so the reason why that's happening is because New York City is a load pocket very congested it's difficult to get electricity here so even with some of the new resources that are coming online we still envision that there will be a decline in fossil in the city but not as much as it is statewide we do envision that some of these plants many of them are going to retire they're going to have to retire because of regulations that were passed on their air on air pollution so many of these plants in the coming years are going to close because of policy but there's going to be additional plants that may just not operate because it's not economic in the face of these renewable and other resources that come online and new transmission that's being built so on this slide there's additional dots and what those additional dots represent the power plants are still there but those additional dots are we're doing a pretty detailed assessment of the tax lots both public and private that potentially could be good candidates for storage and right now the analysis is looking at the size of the lots we're looking at zoning we're looking at permitting and safety restrictions we're looking at their proximity to to higher voltage grid infrastructure and substations as a proxy for maybe reduced costs to connect into those and then we're also obviously in New York City where land is very valuable there's lots of competing resources and there's also lots of very important reasons why storage may not be the best candidate so there's lots of competing uses for this land but we've tried to pick land that is either vacant or doesn't have other uses identified and just use this as an opportunity to start a dialogue around whether or not there's enough room on that land to put large batteries that can ultimately help with the potential closure of fossil plants in the city so lots of questions and I'll try to take them in the order I got them what effort is being done for a smart grid locally built so con Edison has been installing smart meters for for several years now I can't off the top of my head say exactly when they're going to be completely done but I know they've been going borough by borough and putting smart meters in smart meters are seen as kind of the underpinning of a smart grid starting to be able to get more granular information about when people using electricity and what opportunities there may be to shift I'm out of time already wow all right I'm going to try to answer a few more does energy need to be stored near the city or can it be from far away so I think the answer is both so since we're a load pocket for liability reasons we need to generate a lot of power or have storage options to provide a lot of power in times of high need but New York City has always survived off of electricity that comes from elsewhere maybe if you go all the sure maybe we will three minutes now okay maybe we will be if you go all the way back to the first power plant that was built in New York City we were pretty self-sufficient then but it's been a long time since we've been able to survive without importing power and that is likely to remain the case for a long period of time what percent of New York City emissions are associated with peakers I don't know the answer to that we certainly can calculate it and others in the room may but I don't know that answer off the top of my head I will tell you that 70% is associated with buildings but within that 70% is is the electrical consumption there's no way I'm going to get to all these and through this when the materials used for sustainability how will they be disposed of chemicals okay I think I understand so this is this is a common question that many ask sure there's there's certain there's definitely truth to the fact that it takes raw materials it takes lots of energy to generate renewable energy to generate salt to make and manufacture solar panels there's chemicals and batteries this is all certainly something that is understood and being looked at also with heat pumps there's lots of discussion about refrigerants and whether or not those refrigerants are also contributing to global war and these are all truths that we shouldn't deny happen and it's also something that is very much in the in the dialogue as we think about this transition I think the one thing that I can say with absolute certainty because most of what I've said tonight is well we're trying to figure it out we are definitely going to install technology and then replace it if you look at how often you replace your phone these days we are moving at such a fast pace the first EV charger that you put in your garage is probably going to only last a little bit of time before a better technology comes out those are all things that we need to consider in this transition they're very much things that remain at the top of the pile as we think about this and they shouldn't be ignored by any means but there's no easy answers to that I think we need to weigh the needs of communities versus the needs of the city versus the needs of our economy and start thinking about these and having a dialogue about these simultaneously and making some clear-headed decisions about exactly which there's no panacea to any of these these questions what are transmission lines so and two does more transmission need to be built to meet our electrification goals where why and how so in its simplest form transmission lines are just larger larger electrical lines that transmit higher amounts of electricity over a longer longer distances so when we think about the wires that serve your home those are much smaller they carry less voltage than the ones that are much larger that you see maybe in your communities you may see them when you're driving along the highway those are transmission lines they carry a higher more dangerous voltage of electricity over longer periods and we do that because there's less losses we certainly need more transmission so the state has committed to building lots of new transmission transmission hasn't been built in my lifetime in this area and for the first time it is actually being built it's very very expensive there's lots of challenges with land use and New York State has committed to build two major transmission lines that are going to help New York City bring more clean power into the city one is a Champlain Hudson power expressway which I alluded to earlier which just broke ground and the other is Clean Path those are both awarded contracts recently and more transmission will definitely be necessary because we're talking about lots of more electricity needed to to fuel this this transition to a cleaner grid okay I'm out of time on that topic so I'm gonna move as quickly as I can through I think there's two more so urban wind this is a fun one and it's fun for a few reasons one is we're not going to talk about what I think most folks would want to talk about tonight which is offshore wind offshore wind is a major part of New York City's commitments excuse me New York State's commitments and then really every state on the Atlantic Seaboard is thinking about offshore wind in a major way here we're talking about urban wind and we're doing this study this is a requirement that came from a local law can't remember off the top exactly which one it's several years old but we're looking at whether or not there's a big opportunity for smaller wind turbines so you see on the right that's the only commercially commercial scale wind turbine that's in New York City it's in Sunset Park at the Sims municipal recycling facility I think it's a roughly about a hundred megawatts and that's the only one that's been built there are several other on the right you'll see smaller different types of technology these are attached to rooftops and then sims again is in the bottom corner these are the best examples of wind that's been done in New York City and I won't say they're great examples for a number of reasons one is small scale wind is very expensive compared to larger resources they're no there's no economies of scale and then in the built environment there's lots of physical reasons why urban wind is difficult one is because if you think about wind coming into the city it's not to say it's not windy in New York City but when you think about how these wind turns operate they they like strong wind that's consistent in New York City you have gusts of winds and turbulent winds and that's all cities have this where as the the wind comes in it gets it gets moved through the buildings and and it's just it's not in a in a format really that can allow these turbines to to operate well so there have been a few successful installations but most of them are not economic and most of the trials that have been done in New York City have not proven out to be viable so what we did is we did some modeling on the right you'll see we are looking specifically at taller buildings thinking that there'd be good opportunities on maybe the taller rooftop so what we have are dots for buildings that are over a hundred feet or waterfront areas that would be good candidates and really what we determined is that less than one percent of the the lots we looked at were really good candidates and most of our model suggested that that there be poor there'd be a poor wind resource meaning that it wouldn't generate enough electricity for the cost especially when you compare what what else you could use that land for that rooftop for in almost all the lots we looked at there's more opportunity to generate electricity with solar than there would be wind so our key takeaways are the study and this is probably of all the research that we've done this is the one that we're the furthest along on kind of what our final takeaways are and that's that urban wind really has limited potential with today's technology in New York City and we're not recommending to the city that they should prioritize this transition using these smaller scale wind turbines and this is my last topic so do I have time to do this last one okay okay so public land and I save this one the last I think this is one of the most exciting ones and it's really thinking about how New York City can make more progress on its ambitious targets for both solar and storage so there's a citywide goal of 1,000 megawatts or one gigawatt of solar power by 2030 there's also a goal for storage of 500 megawatts by 2025 we need to accelerate our progress on both of these goals and one of the ideas is thinking about how can the city as the largest property owner think about making public land available for clean energy to meet these goals so on the right there is a kind of a humorous representation of what community solar is you'll see the castros and david and it's just a simplified way to describe what what is really happening here but we're trying to identify opportunities for the city to scale up community solar and what community solar would allow is residents to purchase solar power without installing solar panels of of their own and there's a lot of reasons why you could be a renter many of us are you could not have an opportunity to or the capital to put it on your roof there's lots of reasons why this may be a better option it also provides access to significant access to lower income communities and the opportunity to really capture some pretty nice incentives that exist for bill savings so what we'd like to do is evaluate what financial opportunities may exist and look at really the city land and rooftops and figure out if there's opportunities for community solar so the reason why we're so excited about this is the feds have committed to ponying up a lot of money for at least another 10 years and that's represented by those bar charts itc stands for the investment tax credit that's a primary funding mechanism for all solar today essentially is a is a moneyback coupon if you have tax appetite and this is how much most solar is funded today but with the passage of the inflation reduction act that just happens they're adding these lighter blue bars so I'm just going to focus on the far right for smaller community solar systems you can now not only get that standard tax credit 30% back but you can also get additional funding up to close to 60% if you ensure that there's domestic content in the products if you're enrolling LMI customers and if you're located in an LMI location and tonight we won't get into the definitions of all those but there's lots of opportunity in New York City to capture these larger benefits you layer on the state's benefits and you're starting to see a pretty significant deal 80% off the price of solar with that community solar comes actual bill savings for those who subscribe so I don't have a slide about it but I think that was for brevity's sake but let me just quickly describe I think we're out of time but let me quickly describe what we're doing with this analysis so we're working very closely with other city agency partners including DCAS who right now develops lots of solar on especially schools they're putting lots of rooftop solar on their buildings but we'd like to broach a conversation about whether or not the city could be in a position where it could build community solar and maybe take some minority portion of that actual solar energy for itself and then provide access to low-income customers to participate and purchase a share of that community solar project and ultimately what that comes with is all sorts of guarantees of bill savings and opportunities to be a part of this transition without necessarily having to have the capital to deploy and the reason why the city could be a great partner in this is not only they have access to these higher incentives but they're the landowner they have lots of space so I'm going to stop there and answer some questions are the 1 gigawatt solar and 500 megawatt storage goals city owns or any projects located in New York City those are any projects located in New York City so I'll repeat that sorry if I mumbled it are the 1 gigawatt goal and 500 megawatt storage goals of the city city owned or any projects located so the ones that I referenced are are city wide goals not just city owned the city does have a goal of 100 megawatts of solar on its own properties on its own rooftops and then we're contemplating as part of a lot of the research we're doing thinking about whether it's appropriate for the city to look at a goal for storage am I at time okay let me just I hate to cut any of these off how can New York City residents benefit from community solar I think I touched on that a little bit but really you can participate community solar today there are developers who build community solar projects and they'll subscribe you and you have access to all those incentives today what we want to see is a lot more community solar and we think one way of doing that is having the city really get into this game and actually go out and use its real estate to either attract developers to build or build itself matter of time pick me up all right sorry for cutting you short sack but we are going to give you a little break and we're going to go into breakout session so we'll be splitting into different groups when when you came in you should have received a little star that star has a color you either have red blue yellow or green and so if you're in the red group you are in the back left and then if you're in the blue group you're in the back right if you're in the yellow group you're in the left up here and then if you're in the green group you're on the right over here and so what we really do want to do during this time is to let you speak with one another share your energy concerns with us and based on what you heard today what you know what actions you would like to see us take hi everyone welcome back from the breakout groups I know we're still in the same room but I'd like to welcome a volunteer from the yellow group to share what was discussed in the group are you right yes everyone my name is lj I'm a work at we act for environmental justice I was part of the yellow group and some things that we talked about for the first question and some of the concerns that people had one of them was talk about smaller buildings and complying with things like local law 97 how do we how do we incentivize that where do we get the money to do that how do we get landlords to actually comply to do that to make these uh our buildings cleaner um also one thing another thing that was brought up was getting this information to lower uh lmi communities right you know kind of having these kind of sessions but how do we get that to the communities who need to hear this the most who don't get a chance to ever participate in this they they know that so many things are happening in a city and just things happen but they don't feel like they can actively be participating in that process um someone brought up the issues with nitra that go on in the boilers um and kind of just nitra is kind of playing all together and um also the focus on the electrical electric vehicles being more so personal vehicles in riding as opposed to the heavy uh the medium and heavy duty trucks and like some of our buses and things like that should be more of a focus on kind of talking about those uh aspects as opposed to personal vehicles and like things like where do we charge our EVs in person when we live in a city like New York where most people actually don't uh use a car and then the second aspect was what was the I can't remember the question uh what kind of things do we want to see uh action taken on so cost obviously is the big one making sure that the costs are not passed on to individuals that there's some type of protection to make sure that these things don't get too expensive for anyone also prioritization of like certain communities need certain things more than others do and that making sure that we uh the government does that in a way that's equitable um there's also a concern about indoor air quality and some of these older buildings and ventilation that doesn't you know they don't necessarily have what does that look like when it comes to electrification and then one of the final things were how do we get involved how do we prove how do we move these proposals forward how do we move these plans and these uh reports and things that we want to see done how do we actually get involved with individuals to kind of push those forward all right thank you so much um and that was a great recap of what was discussed and just in the interest of time if the following groups could you know mention something that maybe wasn't discussed or wasn't just shared up here and so um does anyone from does anyone want to volunteer or can you hear me all right yes my name is Calvin I'm a student at New York City College of Technology I study engineering I was part of the gold group I was a gold group and it's just the top of my head some things that we discussed where we focused mainly on builders in the grid one thing about the grid is and I agree because I actually did research into it and found out that a lot of infrastructure in the United States and New York in particular that hasn't been upgraded it's actually been neglected I think that is very important as well that um it's up to you know us the people to put you know uh kind Edison these other different companies that you know make sure that they know and understand that they have to upgrade it and that they shouldn't just do it for profit another thing we discussed was um buildings and how I know one thing topic I brought up was that with buildings I think um the push should be to have everything decentralized because I know we're from the the power structure in New York City I don't want to say it's outdated but it's very susceptible to failure and I think decentralizing it will actually be beneficial to everybody of all and not only that it will actually force people to get um have more understanding for themselves instead of relying on someone else that how like the power system works and that they'll be more um responsible for like um their particular sector and something else that we discussed was can't remember the last one but those are the two things that we mainly talked about it was an honor to be in that group and thank you for having us awesome thank you for sharing and do we have anyone from the blue or green groups want to come up really quickly can anyone hear me I know I have the mask on um I'm part of the green group and for the sake of time really and truly we're just concerned more about the people at the center of these conversations and that's everyday New Yorkers so the things that come up is information shared public knowledge events like these are important but it's also important to have them on the ground running in these communities that we're saying will be most impacted by some of these changes timeline and rollout land use and when we're constantly talking about equitable uses of land how will that translate to those communities accessibility impact on all levels micro and macro level and most importantly who are key stakeholders in this conversation not only having pages of information and research but also visual aids if I could see a snapshot and see how all the puzzles fit together that's something that can be translated to a lot of different communities I write for a local publication in Brooklyn and that's probably one of my biggest takeaways from tonight is how can I create a snapshot of this in the story that not only informs them but lets them know that they are part of the conversations moving forward that was something that was echoed across our group and it seems like it fits in with everyone else's thank you great thank you for sharing and can we have someone from our last group good evening everyone my name is Joseph representing the blue stars I work for well done energy solutions we implement coneds multifamily energy efficiency program so the solutions can start now so please talk to me after for the first question based off what we've learned from this event what we'd like to prioritize workforce development low to moderate income buildings with a focus in tenant financial support and protection once these projects come into effect as well as an understanding as to when these peak hours will be happening so we can adequately prepare for those times as well as education and awareness I think that's very clear there's a lot of opportunities out there but no one knows how to find out or move on them for the second question how would you like to see these priorities take place in your community and how would the city government play a role we start out with true enforcement as well as accountability because it's the higher ups that are making these decisions so we do have to really use the stick rather than the carrot regularly I'm just reading off of a picture right now but this one I just want to highlight more conversations like this as well as yeah more workforce development we need people who actually do this work so I can read it over there too but anyways thank you all right well thank you everyone for participating and sharing your feedback it's definitely very valuable and we do hear you one thing is that you know if there was something that we didn't get to or a question that just maybe came up right now feel free to fill out the survey there is a paper survey or you can scan one of the QR codes around the room and fill out the survey there or if you still have no cards you can pass one of those to us and we'll and leave your contact information on there and we can get back to you that way too but now I'll pass it back to our CBOs for a closing remark just want to thank you all for taking your time tonight I know this was a long session and I'm surprised that a lot of people didn't skip out at the breakout session so but you know there was a lot of thoughtful feedback that we heard here it is a very you know not difficult but it's a lot of information to digest there are some upcoming sessions that are going to be done online so if you want to participate they kind of drill down in some of these areas and there will be more conversations but you know it's really important to have everybody's feedback so that you know this group can kind of inform its study and there will be a lot a lot more conversations so thank you all once again for coming tonight yes so I will just say thank you all so much for participating in our town hall this evening as we've seen from everybody who has presented and spoken so thoughtfully tonight our communities here in New York City are intrinsically connected to the environment around us and we need to continue creating pathways for our community members to seek about how things like climate change affects them so participation and feedback from communities absolutely essential and making any impactful strides toward environmental justice like the energy transition we spent time talking about tonight thanks so much to the organizers for NYU for hosting us and I hope you all get home safely thank you