The new 270,000 square foot 16-story office building at 555 Greenwich Street in Manhattan was completed in 2023, and is among the first NYC skyscrapers to be built with 100% clean zero-carbon heating! It has 68 geothermal energy piles stretching 120 feet underground that conduct warmth upwards in winter and downwards in summer, and two giant industrial-scale heat pumps on the roof.
The building’s control boxes monitor sensor data from both the geothermal heat-exchanging caissons below and the heat pumps above to calculate day by day whether it’s more efficient to exchange heat with the earth or the air. Together, they remove any need for burning any fossil fuels at all to heat the massive building: the first commercial NYC building to achieve this!
And furthermore, as there’s no massive loss due to the waste heat of combustion, this zero-carbon building uses 40% less energy than comparable office buildings — it’s not just that the energy it does use is clean, it’s that it’s doing the same work with less power needed. As always, electrification is also efficiency! 555 Greenwich is currently estimated to save $3 million over 15 years in avoided energy bills.
Heat pumps and building-level geothermal are spreading fast through all current New York City construction, incentivized by farsighted state and local laws. NYC’s Local Law 154, passed in 2021, prohibits integrating fossil fuel systems in most new construction and will start applying to high-rise buildings in 2027. And New York State’s NYSERDA agency has been coordinating building electrification and decarbonization efforts for years, providing grants for specific low-carbon retrofit projects plus technical assistance with new building codes.
100% zero-emissions heat for buildings isn’t a utopian dream of the future, it’s a reality that’s already here! State leaders should actively support clean heat and building decarbonization with strong financial, technical, regulatory, and permitting incentivization of industrial-scale heat pumps plus building and neighborhood-scale geothermal, both in new construction and in retrofitting existing buildings.
Your Dose of Climate Hope is written by Sam Matey-Coste for Climate Action Now.
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