Overview

In alignment with New York City’s ambitious climate legislation under the Climate Mobilization Act, FSG is supporting Phipps Houses in a comprehensive effort to decarbonize its portfolio and achieve full compliance with Local Law 97 (LL97). Phipps Houses, a leading nonprofit provider of affordable housing, owns and operates a diverse portfolio of residential and commercial buildings across the city. Recognizing the scale and urgency of the city’s emissions reduction mandates, Phipps partnered with FSG in 2024 to conduct a full-spectrum energy and sustainability assessment designed to evaluate feasibility and develop actionable pathways to meeting their commitments to sustainability.

The analysis involves eight integral tasks which are as follows: determination of building compliance with LL97, conditions and risk assessments, development of a strategy and roadmap for compliance, synthesis of reports needed for Article 320 and 321 compliance under LL97, incentive and utility program identification, and technical assistance with energy and sustainability related work throughout the development pipeline.

Approach and Methodology

Each property within the Phipps portfolio was evaluated to determine current conditions and systems, utilizing information provided by Phipps, recent audit reports, as well as various site visits to gather equipment information. Care was taken to evaluate the practical viability of implementing major energy upgrades for each property, particularly those related to electrification and emissions reductions. The feasibility analysis considered a wide range of site-specific variables, including:

• The capacity and condition of existing electrical infrastructure and the potential need for service upgrades

• Physical constraints affecting the installation of mechanical and electrical systems

• Structural constraints related to renewable energy systems and battery storage

For each building in the portfolio, the benchmarking analysis included reviewing the energy required to perform services for the buildings which involved reviewing utility bills to establish consumption baselines for space heating, DHW, cooking, air conditioning, and electric base loads. Carbon emissions analysis was also performed to determine the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the existing consumption baselines, and the necessary energy consumption reductions needed for each property to comply with LL97.

To test the impact of various retrofit scenarios, FSG developed representative energy models for representative properties, selected to represent groups of similar buildings, for the portfolio using EnergyPlus. These models were calibrated to reflect current building energy consumption and used to create a range of energy efficiency measures.