Submetering for savings at Queensview

Before 2025, thinking about elec­tricity costs at the 726-unit Queensview co-op was a burden that board pres­i­dent Victor Roggia bore prac­ti­cally alone. When elec­tricity was billed to the complex as a whole and divided equally among resi­dents as a building expense, indi­vidual share­holders weren’t conscious of how much they were using. 

“We couldn’t afford to pay the elec­tric bills anymore because every­body was walking around here saying, ​‘What do we care about elec­tric? It’s free!’” said Roggia.

But as part of an effi­ciency-first strategy to reduce emis­sions and avoid Local Law 97 (LL97) fines, Queensview under­went subme­tering — the instal­la­tion of addi­tional meters that measure elec­tricity consump­tion by indi­vidual households. 

The subme­ters output hyper-specific usage data for energy consump­tion, heating, and elec­tricity usage across all the apart­ments in the complex. To track all of this data, Queensview installed meters produced by InTech21 in every apart­ment, in addi­tion to the boiler room and common spaces. Each meter connects back to a compre­hen­sive distrib­uted energy resource manage­ment systems plat­form. This allows prop­erty managers to view real-time util­i­ties usage for each indi­vidual unit, pulled from sensors located in each apart­ment and stored in cloud storage. While the core features of this building manage­ment system are similar to others on the market, it offers an addi­tional feature of measuring in-unit temper­a­tures, which provides building managers with live updates from tenant apart­ments without having to submeter the boiler.

Once installed, the largest ​“building system” the subme­tering impacted wasn’t a system at all, but rather resi­dents’ behavior around energy usage. Households expe­ri­ence more fair billing for monthly main­te­nance costs as a result of subme­tering, and Roggia esti­mates that 65 percent of house­holds at Queensview expe­ri­enced reduc­tion in main­te­nance costs, while a smaller propor­tion of resi­dents expe­ri­enced a hike in monthly main­te­nance fees due to consuming more elec­tricity than their neighbors. 

Still, even those resi­dents who are high consumers became more consci­en­tious of their energy consump­tion, said Roggia. ​“There’s 25 people that use the majority of elec­tricity [here]. Once they figured out their bill — like, mine is $60, $70, $80, it depends; theirs were like $700 [or] $800 — then, all of a sudden, their aware­ness changed, and they started using less.”

The subme­tering project only began in March 2025, so there is no compre­hen­sive data avail­able yet on how it has reduced energy consump­tion since. But Roggia empha­sized that the overall reac­tion from resi­dents has trended in the right direction.

At the same time that subme­tering aimed to reduce overall elec­tricity usage and carbon emis­sions, the Queensview board also tried to improve overall afford­ability in an envi­ron­ment of rising elec­tricity costs. They did this through buying energy in bulk from Constellation Energy Group, a third-party energy supplier that delivers energy to build­ings in New York City using Con Edison’s infra­struc­ture. Victor noted that Queensview house­holds save 30 percent more than if they’d had indi­vidual ConEd accounts.

“Costs can still go up, because the rates some­times are offset­ting,” said Thomas Morrison, Director of Energy Management at EN-POWER GROUP. ​“But the ROI [return on invest­ment] is still there because we’re seeing the consump­tion savings.”