Not many buildilngs are all electric, but I have highlighted some below. I will continue to populate this map with my research. Electric buildings in NYC can be viewed in Google Earth or in the iframe below. Use the google earth link for a better viewing experience.
Buildings large and small face challenges with decarbonization. The following steps can be taken to help nudge building owners in the correct direction.
I also believe that living in nyc is the most sustainable form of living in this country, with access to public transit, small dwellings, and accessible public space, it is imperative to building more housing in NYC so as many as possible can live here. Learn about building electrification below.
Buildings have only a few ways of using energy.
While electricity use is dominant for running computers, refrigerators, air conditioners, and fan/pump motors, it is not very common for heating your apartment. Most buildings in NYC have natural gas boilers in the basement that send heat to steam radiators. Ever boiled water on a stove top? Well most buildings do that, but trap that boiling steam in a pipe and it floats up to your radiator. And getting the right amount of steam to your radiator is about as easy as getting a toddler to stay still, so your apartment overheats and you need to open your window in the middle of winter. Its no surpise that heating buildings is the largest natural gas user in NYC.
Do you like hot showers? I sure do, and its the 2nd largest co2 emitter for buildings. These don't usually use steam, you just use the gas to heat one of the water pipes in the building and that gets sent to your shower and sinks. We call this "Domestic Hot Water".
After domestic hot water, stovetops and ovens are the next major co2 emitter in buildings, especially from restaurants. There aren't many other uses for direct combustion of gas. Some laundromats use gas for their dryers (don't confuse your dryer gas vent with the lint vent!). Some buildings have backup generators (these are usually on oil so you don't have to rely on the gas company) and on-site electric generation (we'll put that in the electricity section). Hospitals and kitchens might use gas to boil water to sanitize tools and glassware (don't worry, the gas isn't mixing with the tools).
So how do you eliminate this gas use? Well we probably want to tackle the issue in reverse order and start with the easiest. The laundromats and sterilization uses are called "process loads" in the industry. Fortunately they don't account for a lot of energy, so you just want to slap an electric version of this equipment in and call it a day. No heat pumps (more on that later), nothing complicated, just straight up hot-wire heat. If you ever had a hair dryer, electric space heater, or electric stove top, you'll be familiar with "electric resistance heating". You just turn electricity directly to heat by sizing a wire just small enough to get hot but not melt. Its not efficient, but its cheap to install. The downside is it increases your bills and can strain the electric grid more. So tell hospitals to sterilize stuff with electric boilers and laundromats to dry with electric dryers.
Cooking is a bit more fun to decarbonize. You got stovetops and ovens and most of them are gas. I got beef with these devices. You are doing live gas combustion in your living space! Get a CO2 sensor and place it in your kitchen next time you cook, the CO2 concentration will shoot up, and you are breathing nasty carbon monoxide, which permanently binds to your hemoglobin instead oxygen, reducing your oxygen intact and slowly killing you (and sometimes silently too). So all you got to do is forget to turn the oven off and you can kill everyone in your household! Or even worse, you turn the gas on without igniting it, and you fill up your place with explosive gas that can either asphyxiate you or blow up your entire building.
So what do you do? You might have heard of induction stovetops? They work by electromagnetically heating the cookware instead of heating the surface of the stovetop. Its slightly more efficient, but not that much in the grand scale of things, but provides a much better cooking experience. I plan to buy one of these amazon induction hotplates to slap ontop of my landlords gas top. But if you can just get a normal electric stovetop, thats fine too. Ovens pretty much have to be electric as they work by heating up all the air in the oven. I suppose you could have an oven that heats up the cooking sheet directly, but you wouldn't get the right type of cooking. And if we can't get good baked chicken, then the planet won't be worth saving anyway.
Now for the good stuff, I'm getting so excited. ELECTRIC DOMESTIC HOT WATER! This gets overcomplicated all the time, but in short you can heat up water with a heat pump or with an electric resistance heater. The latter is already really common and isn't the worst option if the tank is large enough, but it can be a difficult retrofit as you need more electric capacity, or you dont get as much heat with the existing electric capacity. You see, to make heat pumps work, you need a few things.
So for single family homes, they have heat pump hot water heaters that work like your refrigerator, they just pull heat from the room and put that in your water loop. For large commercial buildings, you'll probably connect the heat pump to your buildings heating system, and then heat the heating system with an air sourced heat pump. You could also just heat the water directly with the heat pump.
The building heating system is hard, most buildings are designed to operate at 180F or 212F for steam. Heat pumps are most confortable at ~120F, some get above 140F, but there aren't many options. Further more, as it gets colder outside, the heating gets less efficient, right when you need it most! For most large buildings, I reccomend they slowly replace their radiators with larger radiators that can operate at a lower temperature, and slowly repipe the building to use hot water instead of steam. If the building or space is sufficient small, you can probably just install a VRF or mini splitheat pump.
Technology is getting better every year, and in the future, we will have air source heat pumps that can heat at any temperature, and can produce steam. But for now, we can do hybrid heating systems. You can keep the gas and oil as a backup for the coldest days, and use the heat pump other times of the year. NYC doesn't have many cold snaps, so most of the emissions are when its between 30-50 degrees outside. Geothermal is generally stupid expensive, so its generally not reccomended. Electric resistance increases bills a lot and will break the grid if implemented at scale and also make the clean energy production problem even worse.
Place Youtube video here