After an eye-popping quote for gas, an Inwood building cozied up to an alternative

As New York City pushes large build­ings to cut their carbon emis­sions, some home­owners are learning first­hand that the road away from fuel oil can be paved with formi­dable chal­lenges. Inwood Park Apartments, a 50-unit building perched at the top of Manhattan, discov­ered this the hard way when resi­dents learned that their modest plans for a boiler fuel upgrade could cost them millions of dollars. 

The middle-income coop­er­a­tive, built in 1937, is subject to Local Law 97 (LL97), along with many other aging build­ings, and could have begun facing fines soon if they didn’t take action. Fortunately, co-op board pres­i­dent Hal Fuchsman said the building’s manager put LL97 on their radar early, ​“before it was even some­thing that most people talked about.” 

They wanted to get out ahead, so several years ago they started exploring possible retrofit solu­tions that could help bring down the building’s overall carbon emis­sions. But they kept hitting roadblocks.

The Challenge

Take, for example, the roof. ​“The roof was designed to hold two things: The roof, and snow,” said Fuchsman. Many resi­dents pushed for solar panels, but they were disap­pointed to learn that their roof likely wouldn’t bear the load without rein­forcing the wooden beams that held it up. 

The solu­tion to replace the wooden beams, Fuchsman said, would have been to ​“heli­copter up steel.” After recently spending almost a million dollars to re-do the roof’s surface, starting over felt out of the question. 

Down below, there’s the bedrock. Inwood Park Apartments is located at 585 W. 215th St., and has no base­ment; like many build­ings in the area, it’s built right into the city’s sloping schist. That elim­i­nated another climate friendly option: A geot­hermal heat pump, which uses the near-constant temper­a­ture under­ground to absorb warm or cold air from above.

Instead, the building opted to work with its existing boiler. The No. 4 fuel oil they use is a step up from the coal that orig­i­nally powered the building. But as LL97 fines kick in and ramp up over the coming years, the boiler is becoming a liability. Just upgrading their No. 4 fuel oil to No. 2, which will be required anyway under another local law, would add costs without bringing any mean­ingful efficiencies.

The Roadmap: Plan A

In 2021, wanting to under­stand the options at their disposal, Inwood Park Apartments contracted with Bright Power for an energy audit.

Darren Johnson, the Bright Power account manager who worked on the project, said the consulting group often helps build­ings opti­mize what they have, with a focus on projects that pay for them­selves through added energy efficiency. 

“A lot of times, espe­cially if it’s an inef­fi­cient building on oil, a lot of the upgrades are going to look finan­cially good, because oil is expen­sive,” said Johnson. For Inwood Park Apartments, the recom­men­da­tion was clear: Skip fuel oil No. 2, and switch to natural gas. 

Natural gas could make use of the building’s existing steam radi­ator system, while being more energy effi­cient than fuel oil. Modern controls for the boiler and usage moni­toring would bring costs further down. All told, Bright Power esti­mated a project cost around $200,000 for the boiler upgrades. 

Excited for a solu­tion, the building part­nered with a firm called Metro Group to esti­mate how much gas they would need and how much it would cost. 

Metro Group gave a ball­park esti­mate of $10,000 for a gas line hookup from energy company Con Edison, and submitted a load letter to the utility asking for a quote. In response, ConEd quoted them $3 million.

“When ConEd returns a $3 million bill, that’s ConEd speak for saying you don’t get gas,” Fuchsman said. ​“It’s totally unrealistic.”

With that blow, Fuchsman and his fellow share­holders smacked head­long into another set of chal­lenges: What to do when your building’s needs run counter to larger plans that weren’t designed with you in mind. 

The Roadblock: A City Transitioning Away from Gas

Fuchsman and Johnson say that the expla­na­tion for the sky-high gas quote is that their project was caught up in larger changes happening around them: ConEd had already been in the process of switching other large Inwood build­ings from low to high pres­sure gas lines.

Either line type could have powered the Inwood Park Apartments, but the utility said a brand-new high pres­sure line would be needed for the project. Fuchsman and Johnson assume that other projects maxed out the existing low-pres­sure lines.

“When you have a lot of build­ings that all start to convert — and that’s what happened in their neigh­bor­hood — then they [can take] up that extra capacity,” Johnson said. The high price tag was for extending a high-pres­sure line from further away, and Johnson said ConEd passes those costs for the major infra­struc­ture construc­tion on to build­ings when needs do not align with existing plans.

While the cost wasn’t typical, Johnson said, ​“it’s not the only one we’ve seen.” He remem­bers another Bright Power client on the East side who saw a $2.7 million gas hookup charge.

In a state­ment to Skylight, a spokesperson from ConEd confirmed, ​“The cost esti­mate provided would have covered the work needed to bring in natural gas from a different main, the closest of which is nearly half a mile away.”

The spokesperson said that the company would have covered the first 100 feet of main for the building, but that any work beyond that would have to be paid for by the Inwood Park Apartments resi­dents, and not ​“passed along to other customers.”

Or, as Johnson put it, ​“You’re gonna have to pay for it — or you can wait until we get to you.” But it’s hard to tell how long that wait might be, since the utility’s time­lines for specific projects are not public. 

Back to the Roadmap: Building Plan B

So, unable to pay for a new line, the building went back to the drawing board. 

Initially, Bright Power had recom­mended pairing gas with other smaller tweaks to improve the perfor­mance of their boiler: A timer to shut off the boiler when not needed, and a ​“radi­ator Cozy” system to control supply and monitor usage.

The radi­ator Cozys, from a company called Kelvin, save energy by keeping over-enthu­si­astic radi­a­tors in check. They provide insu­la­tion, trap­ping warm air around the radi­ator, moni­toring the room temper­a­ture, and releasing hot air only as needed. This prevents apart­ments from becoming swel­tering saunas, saving energy in the process. The ther­mome­ters included in the Cozys also connect to the central boiler down­stairs, making it turn on and off with more precision. 

In the initial plan, a ConEd incen­tive program, MFEEP, would have offered around $40,000 towards the devices. But that program was only avail­able to build­ings that had already switched to gas, Fuchsman said. 

Still, the building decided to go ahead and add the Cozys and timer, paying a bit less than $150,000 for them out of pocket. 

As it turns out, many resi­dents preferred their saunas. The radi­ator Cozy solu­tion essen­tially forced the whole building to turn down the heat. To meet fuel reduc­tion goals, share­holders found them­selves reaching for sweaters.

“Half the building’s pissed cause they’re too cold,” said Fuchsman. ​“And I’m pissed because this is all I talk about now.”

Still, from an energy effi­ciency perspec­tive, Plan B is working. Between the Cozy system, the boiler timer, and a couple of milder winters, Fuchsman said, ​“We’ve saved about 20 percent on fuel oil.”

Those savings are in the same ball­park as Bright Power’s esti­mates for a natural gas conver­sion, although Plan A might have yielded warmer apart­ments. Using less fuel oil saved money, but it also reduced green­house gas emis­sions by 27 percent, elim­i­nating roughly 70 tons of CO₂ emis­sions per year. As a result, the building has hit its LL97 compli­ance target for 2025. 

“We would have spent the amount of money we spent on Cozys in penal­ties pretty quickly, so I’m glad we did some­thing. I’m glad we’re putting the right food forward,” Fuchsman said. 

Still, the process with all of its disap­point­ments, has not been good for morale, he said. From resi­dents’ perspec­tive, reducing emis­sions for now still means turning down the heat. ​“It’s all stick and no carrots,” Fuchsman said. ​“This is what it looks like. You can’t have it both ways.”

And for LL97 compli­ance, reducing fuel oil use is still only an inter­me­diate step. Because energy effi­ciency expec­ta­tions tighten over time, without further changes, the building will likely have to start paying yearly fines begin­ning in 2031.

Preparing For the Future

Inwood Park Apartments’ expen­sive natural gas quote is an early example of a larger trend that other build­ings are likely to expe­ri­ence as lawmakers plan to incen­tivize conver­sions to elec­tric rather than gas.

This summer, New York state legis­la­tors passed a bill that, if signed by the governor, could make higher gas hookup charges more common. For build­ings near existing lines, gas hookup costs have tradi­tion­ally been social­ized across gas customers. The proposed law would put connec­tion costs on the build­ings requesting them.

The Natural Resource Defense Council called the bill ​“a mean­ingful step toward fair­ness and afford­ability, ending the prac­tice of forcing all ratepayers to subsi­dize fossil fuel infra­struc­ture for new customers.”

The NRDC advo­cates for tran­si­tioning to renew­able fuels for the building sector in order to reduce climate-warming fossil fuel emis­sions. So does the Mayor’s Office. 

“By leapfrog­ging oil-to-gas conver­sions, building owners can future-proof their assets, comply with LL97, and insu­late them­selves from fluc­tu­ating fossil fuel prices,” a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice told Skylight. ​“This ends subsi­dies to build­ings for gas hookups and incen­tivizes build­ings to switch to effi­cient elec­tric heating and hot water systems.”

But this can be a big jump for older build­ings to make all at once — and some­times, not a finan­cially feasible one. 

Johnson said he believes that currently, there is not enough money in the financing ecosystem to help low- and moderate-income building owners decar­bonize. Many build­ings still need more finan­cial support, Johnson said, to make the switch — even though city, state, and utility level programs all offer addi­tional finan­cial incen­tives. (For example, based on the latest data avail­able, Inwood Park Apartments is not eligible for the city­wide J‑51 tax abate­ment for energy effi­ciency retro­fits and elec­tri­fi­ca­tion projects.)

In this co-op’s case, making gas unwork­able was not enough to incen­tivize elec­tri­fi­ca­tion. Using Fuchsman’s current back-of-enve­lope math, elec­tri­fying is not obvi­ously cheaper than paying a $3 million hookup charge because of all of the costs it would entail, including removing the boiler, decom­mis­sioning the fuel-oil tank, and updating the building enve­lope and elec­trical panels — all before the cost of heat pump equipment.

And there are other costs to consider in addi­tion to the finan­cial. Installing in-unit heat pumps, for instance, would require the co-op to pass new bylaws; right now, in-unit upgrades are the indi­vidual respon­si­bility of each owner, and can’t be mandated.

“That’s the co-op equiv­a­lent of a consti­tu­tional amend­ment,” Fuchsman said. Because in-unit work is currently indi­vid­u­al­ized, it makes collec­tive action diffi­cult, espe­cially since not all share­holders can afford the same solutions.

The Mayor’s office agreed that ​“in some cases, full elec­tri­fi­ca­tion is not a viable strategy unless imple­mented over time, in align­ment with capital cycles, equip­ment end-of-life, tenant turnover, and other key mile­stones,” though the city ​“continues to advo­cate for finan­cial resources at the state and federal level.” 

In the mean­time, the office’s spokesperson recom­mended that build­ings work with the NYC Accelerator on long-term decar­boniza­tion plans. 

Johnson agreed that it pays to keep thinking ahead. Strategies will differ from building to building, he said, but ​“sitting on their hands is never going to be the right answer.”

Both Johnson and Fuchsman hope that changes to tech­nology, financing, and the regu­la­tory path­ways to become more inclu­sive could even­tu­ally smooth the process.

For Inwood Park Apartments, delaying action means contin­uing to rely on a boiler already past the end of its useful life. But for now, Fuchsman is reframing. He is modeling the future costs they may face come 2031, and imag­ining LL97 fines not as a penalty, but as yet another tax to share among shareholders.

“We just have to think about it as a line item, right now, absent any major advance­ments,” Fuchsman said. ​“We have to be real­istic about what we can do without making it unaf­ford­able to live here.”