Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions Attributed to the Building Sector in New York City

Building energy flow data generated from city benchmarking laws can be used to identify energy efficiency and carbon reduction strategies tailored for specific building types, ages, and sizes. By matching technical analysis with building industry knowledge, strategies can be developed for retrofitting existing buildings with relatively low-cost energy conservation measures in the short term and deeper retrofits over the long term timed with building upgrade cycles, and for adopting energy conservation code for new building construction. Using these methods, New York City was able to develop a plan for reducing its carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.