55 Water Street

Overview
Originally constructed in 1972 as the largest office building in the world, 55 Water Street stands today as one of New York City’s premier Class A commercial office structures.   At 55 Water Street, building modernization efforts have focused on improving safety, security & comfort for the occupants while simultaneously enhancing the resiliency and reliability of the infrastructure.

Details
In 2014, the building completed a chiller plant retrofit that included the installation of a state of the art thermal storage chiller plant along with central plant automation and energy dashboards to reduce the building’s impact on the environment, provide resiliency and reduce costs for their tenants.

The system features:

  • The world’s largest ice-producing chiller
  • Two (2) Trane Model CDHF 3,250 ton “Day” Chillers
  • One (1) Trane Model CDHF 2,950/2,020 ton “Dual Duty” Chiller
  • Thermal ice storage system with 134 CALMAC Icebank® tanks
  • Variable Frequency Drive Pumps
  • Trane Tracer™ SC Building Automation System

Each of the three (3) new chillers is fully backed up by the building’s dedicated emergency generators.

New central plant automation systems were also installed and were used to modify the building’s pumping and air distribution systems from a constant primary flow to a variable primary flow system using Trane’s Earthwise™ low flow/low temp strategy.  The new chillers were designed to accommodate this new building wide operational structure.

Highlights
The results include an annual kWh reduction of over 2,000,000 kWh, peak load reduction of 2.1 MW, and annual electricity savings of over $2.5M.

The combination of reduced summer peak electric demand, reduced annual kWh consumption, and load shifting via thermal storage has the equivalent environmental impact of reducing over 36M lbs of annual carbon dioxide emissions – equivalent to removing 3,280 cars from the road or planting 4,886 acres of trees.

The project was awarded $1.3M in incentives from the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority (NYSERDA) via the Existing facilities Program for its demand reduction and energy consumption reduction capability.