New Jersey's Carlton Tower Condominium Is Being Paid to Perform
Carlton Tower's new energy-efficient equipment
May 22, 2014 — The building systems at Carlton Tower in Passaic, N.J., were on life support. Longtime superintendent Felix Rivera carefully maintained everything, including the condominium’s two boilers, for as long as possible, but it was clear the end was near.
So the Carlton board of managers took a side step. They hired an engineering firm to help them rethink simply replacing or repairing. They were after rewards, and they wanted to invest in building systems that offered these.
Energy Squared, the consulting firm Carlton Tower hired, is a partner in the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities’ Pay for Performance Program. The program, similar to New York’s NYSERDA, offers grants and incentives to defray costs of upgrading with more energy-efficient equipment. The condo is investing $900,000 into system upgrades, and expects to receive $200,000 from the Pay for Performance program. It received a condo loan from Popular Community Bank (formerly Banco Popular) and anticipates recouping its investment in about eight years.
Energy Squared will be present at Carlton Tower for the entire Pay for Performance process. It conducted the initial analysis, oversaw the contractors and vendors who did the actual upgrading, and the company is now in what project manager Will Hillsinger calls “standby mode.”
The Real World: Passaic
“A year after everything is installed, we will collect the utility bills and check how much real-world energy usage they saved,” says Hillsinger. This examination will determine the final adjustment of the state’s incentives, which are broken up into three payments.
The condo has already received the first two payments; the final one will directly reflect the actual energy use and savings, as reported by Energy Squared. After the final analysis of the condo’s energy bills, the state will compare it to the projected energy savings and adjust the final incentive up or down, depending on how well the building actually did.
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Photo by Jennifer Wu. Click to enlarge.