Geothermal Energy to Power Two Massive Brooklyn Buildings

Even as the Trump administration tries to gut the clean-energy grants and tax breaks of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, New Yorkers are embracing cutting-edge green technology.

Two massive new buildings, both in Brooklyn, will be powered by geothermal energy, also known as ground-source heat pumps.

One is 1515 Surf Ave., a 463-unit building just off the boardwalk in Coney Island; the other is the Riverie, a two-tower, 834-until residential development scheduled to open next year in Greenpoint. Both will be heated and cooled not by fossil fuels but by the warm air beneath the Earth's surface.

“What it allowed us to do is eliminate all the gas-fired equipment from the building,” Anthony Tortora, senior vice president and principal of LCOR, which developed 1515 Surf, tells The City.

In their efforts to cut their buildings' carbon emissions enough to comply with the city's stringent new climate law, Local Law 97, many co-op and condo boards have begun to embrace air-source heat pumps, which are powered by electricity and use the outside air to cool or warm a building — without the need to generate hot or cold air onsite through fossil fuel-powered boilers or chillers.

Ground-source heat pumps, on the other hand, tap into the warm air underground (about 50 to 60 degrees) via hundreds of wells drilled hundreds of feet into the ground. In the winter, the system extracts heat from the earth to warm the building, and in the summer the system sends indoor heat back into the ground to keep the building cool. The heat is conveyed through liquid carried by pipes.

Installing geothermal heat pumps can be more expensive up front and challenging to drill into the ground — especially in dense New York City, with its small lots. But there are abundant financial incentives and technical support provided by state programs, utility companies and the Inflation Reduction Act — as long as backers successfully resist Trump's efforts to gut the law.

“It’s an inflection point, it’s becoming much more common,” says Kevin McDonald, principal building systems engineer at Steven Winter Associates, who advises affordable housing developments. “If you’re looking for simple, resilient, long-term solutions for electrification, this is it.”

More and more New Yorkers seem to agree. Noteworthy geothermal buildings in the city include St. Patrick's Cathedral, the West End Building at Brooklyn College, the Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island, the Queens Botanical Garden Visitor Center, and P.S. 62 in Staten Island. Efforts are ongoing to install geothermal systems at the NYC Housing Authority's Eastchester Gardens and Jackson Houses in the Bronx to provide hot water for more than 1,700 apartments across 17 buildings.

Katherine Thompson, a climate activist and president of Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park, tells The New York Post: “With the climate emergency, we want to get off of fossil fuels, we want to be all electric. However, the grid is going to be overloaded. What’s amazing about this kind of (geothermal) technology … is that it reduces the load on the electrical grid, so we won’t have as many outages. And it will reduce the cost of electricity. Right now, people are facing incredible rate hikes in gas and in electricity. It’s horrible.”