Context

<aside> ℹ️ Buildings account for approximately two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions in New York City, and both Mayor Adams as well as prior mayors have pledged to address these emissions as part of their plans to make the city carbon neutral by 2050.

Under LL97 most buildings over 25,000 square feet will be required to meet new energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions limits by 2024, with stricter limits coming into effect in 2030. The goal is to reduce the emissions produced by the city’s largest buildings 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050.

👉 The implementation of LL97 is crucial toward reducing our carbon footprint and combating climate change.

</aside>

Original Goal

<aside> ⛔ The “Why”: Retrofit cost uncertainty is an important impediment for landlords in their adoption of Local Law 97. This uncertainty and lack of data may jeopardize NYC’s 2050 climate goal of 80% emission reductions.

The “What”: Build an open-source online tool that provides (accurate) retrofit cost estimates for building owners based on their buildings’ unique characteristics.

Challenge: we were unable to find enough data points regarding building retrofit costs to empower us to extrapolate to a meaningful number of buildings

</aside>

Pivot!, New Goal 🛋

<aside> 🟢 The “Why”: No publicly available, high-level understanding or “map” of how the effects of LL97 will be distributed through New York City exists. Providing a simple report that helps visualize LL97 and answers key questions would add value to both policymakers and landlords.

WHAT: A dataset containing BBL level metrics regarding: energy consumption, carbon emissions, and LL97 mandated thresholds, over time. Based on this data, we should be able to answer a number of meaningful questions.

</aside>

Summary of used data sets

Key	Original input	URL	Notes
A	Local Law 84	https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Environment/NYC-Building-Energy-and-Water-Data-Disclosure-for-/5zyy-y8am/about_data	This provides energy consumption data per NYC address.
B	Local Law 97 covered buildings	https://www.nyc.gov/site/sustainablebuildings/requirements/covered-buildings.page	• The list of ~ 28K buildings covered under LL97.
• Note: internally, we joined A & B. The resulting data set is:
C	BeEx calculator (v1)		• Helpful pre-existing resource that we reverse engineered for CO2e thresholds across time.

Untitled

Final output (files)

<aside> 1️⃣ Final data set

dataset_estimated_emissions_cost_penalties_for_each_year_v2.csv

</aside>

<aside> 2️⃣ Hex working doc + app

https://app.hex.tech/software-for-climate/hex/67b53aca-b7d2-42ad-82f7-460d354399e3/draft/logic https://app.hex.tech/software-for-climate/app/67b53aca-b7d2-42ad-82f7-460d354399e3/latest

</aside>