Brookfield Properties Underscores Sustainability for Operational Edge

NEW YORK CITY-  Brookfield Properties is buckling down on its sustainability strategy. The Canadian-headquartered asset management firm has zeroed in on upgrading its Brookfield Place Central Plant to reduce its carbon footprint, increase energy efficiency and lower overhead costs, Daniel Kindbergh, executive vice president of operations at Brookfield Properties, tells GlobeSt.com. 

Brookfield partnered with Con Edison to take inventory and embark on reducing its total energy consumption at Brookfield Place. The firm replaced key components of its central cooling plant to increase and maximize thermal storage. The plant is responsible for powering the 8 million-square-foot, four-building complex and 44,000-square-foot atrium known as the Winter Garden.

For over 30 years, the cooling plant has been operating. Brookfield chose to retrofit the outdated machines instead of discarding them. Upgraded over the past several years, the cooling plant had its tube bundles and compressors replaced and received a more modern optimization system. The cooling plant is located 60 feet below Brookfield Place, constructed in what is a “bathtub within a landfill” built from original construction materials of the World Trade Center after it was excavated, according to Kindbergh.

The footprint of the property is an estimated 160,000 square feet and uses water funneled from the Hudson River to cool the property instead of cooling towers like traditional buildings, which use more energy.  Like how an AC would cool a property, the river cools the energy-generated hot air, maneuvering through 49 river water pumps flowing in and out, GlobeSt.com learned on a tour of the facility.

The pumps suck water from the river into multiple systems, which each includes a plate heat exchanger, two different pipes, one for the cool river water and the other for the condenser water used to remove heat energy from the building complex. When the exchange is made the river water is sent back out into the Hudson River.

The facility also received new sensors to allow the Brookfield team to visually see the capacity of its supplemental water tanks, which allows the cooling plant to store up to 25 percent more water during the cooling hours. “We’re thinking about the future and how to retrofit the machines to set-up them up for the next 30 years,” Kindbergh said. 

With the updated system, Brookfield has reduced its total energy usage in terms of kWh by 20 percent from May 2019 through August 2019 during the year’s hottest months, reducing its carbon footprint by 4100 tons of CO2 and saving an average of 23.8 percent on costs.

“When you drive a car, you don’t drive at 160 miles per hour all of the time,“ Kindbergh said. “We don’t want to go full blast all of the time, we want to get machines into a nice energy curve and save energy, they’re running good to provide what we need to power the buildings, so we are using a lot less energy. ”

In addition, ConEd recently informed Brookfield that on account of the central Plant retrofit, it will receive $4.1 million in energy rebates, which is the largest award of ConEd’s 2019 Demand Management Program. It is far greater than what was expected because performance has exceeded projections, according to Kindbergh. 

He said Brookfield’s main motivation is to make sustainability part of its core operations model but also to comply with the city’s Climate Mobilization Act, also known as Local Law 97, requiring larger buildings to lower carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030. For buildings that are non-compliant, they could face fines.  “We’re trying to avoid those fines, there’s a lot more to do but we have ten years to do it,” Kindbergh said.