NEW YORK — The Building Energy Exchange (BE-Ex), which connects New York City’s real estate and design professionals to energy-efficiency solutions, in partnership with RMI (formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI), have launched the Retrofit Playbook for Large Buildings, a knowledge-sharing platform with resources to support building owners, operators, and their design and engineering teams in creating cost-effective, long-term decarbonization strategies for large buildings.

The Playbook includes including case studies, technical guides, best practices, and educational materials, a press release from BE-Ex said. It is supported by the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency (NYSERDA).

“NYSERDA was honored to work with Building Energy Exchange, Rocky Mountain Institute, Urban Land Institute, Empire State Realty Trust, and some of the state’s leading real estate owners to develop and launch the Retrofit Playbook for Large Buildings, our prime decarbonization resource for building owners. By providing clear guidance on how to build a team, evaluate solutions from a real estate and technical viewpoint, and deploy resource-efficient strategies in both commercial and multifamily buildings, building owners can support a scalable approach to building decarbonization,” said Susanne DesRoches, vice president of NYSERDA’s Clean and Resilient Buildings department.

“Its resources and case studies provide exemplary guidance on effective and rational approaches to large building decarbonization," said Elijah Hutchinson, executive director of New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice.

Rooted in the Empire Building Challenge (EBC), a joint initiative between NYSERDA and commercial real estate companies to demonstrate replicable approaches to low-carbon retrofits in large commercial and multifamily buildings, the Playbook offers building professionals guidance and insights from EBC project teams to inform the development of effective decarbonization roadmaps for their own properties.

The platform reinvents and expands the Empire Building Playbook, a resource published in April of 2022 that presented case studies detailing the process by which Empire State Realty Trust, Hines, the Durst Organization, and Vornado Realty Trust developed long-term carbon-reduction roadmaps. The continued sharing of partner lessons-learned through the platform will create pathways for others to replicate successes and develop the high-quality, low-carbon buildings of the future, BE-Ex said.

The Retrofit Playbook for Large Buildings is maintained by BE-Ex, RMI, and ULI. Educating building professionals on the Strategic Decarbonization approach — a framework emerging from EBC that merges integrative engineering into asset management — to deliver more effective decarbonization, the platform currently hosts more than 50 unique how-to, assessment, financial, engineering, tenant, and federal incentive resources and 10 real-world case studies from EBC partners. The platform will also encourage industry professionals to connect, collaborate, and contribute to decarbonizing large buildings over time through its call for new resources and case studies, BE-Ex said.

The Retrofit Playbook for Large Buildings follows the release of the related High Rise/Low Carbon Series, produced by BE-Ex and NYSERDA, which advances the decarbonization of New York’s existing buildings by sharing the low-carbon retrofit success stories of the EBC partners through videos, events, and other informative resources.