There is energy leaving New York’s buildings as steam

A lot of large New York buildings run on steam. It heats them, and much of Manhattan buys it from a district system that pipes it under the streets. Steam carries pressure, and pressure is energy. In many buildings that pressure gets thrown away at a valve, knocked down to a usable level and vented. The building already paid for it. Then it lets it go.

There is a machine for that. A small turbine sits where the pressure gets knocked down, and instead of wasting the drop it turns it into electricity. We ran an analysis with nLine to find where this actually pays in New York, using data the city already publishes.

The data was already public

New York makes large buildings report their energy use every year. That benchmarking record is open. It tells you which buildings use a lot of steam, which is the first thing you need to know to find a recovery opportunity. Nobody had to knock on a door to start. The signal was sitting in a public spreadsheet, waiting for someone to compute it.

What we found

Screening the record, 167 public buildings looked viable for steam energy recovery. Together they point to tens of millions of dollars a year in savings potential and a meaningful cut in carbon, on the order of tens of thousands of metric tons avoided per year, from roughly 187 turbine installs. Brooklyn and the outer boroughs turned out to matter more than the Manhattan-first intuition would suggest. Public housing was the biggest single prize. Hospitals were the easiest early wins, because they run steam hard and cannot afford to waste it.

The buildings that broke physics

A nice side effect of reading a public record closely is that you catch its errors. Six buildings reported energy numbers that are not physically possible, the kind of thing that only happens when a value was typed into the wrong box. Each one is a real data-entry mistake in the city’s official benchmarking file. That is useful two ways. It cleans the analysis, and it is a friendly, factual reason to reach a building owner. Point out the error, and you have opened a conversation without selling anything.

This is the studio pattern again. Find the public record a field has not fully computed, get the signal out of it, and let the finding open the door. The full New York analysis is on the nLine page.