AXA Equitable

Overview
The 1.8 million square foot AXA Equitable building at 787 Seventh Avenues is located between 51^st and 52^nd streets in Midtown Manhattan. Featuring a stone façade constructed from red granite and Indiana limestone, the 54-floor building is home to multiple restaurants and banks, an athletic club, a 499-seat auditorium and a host of legal firms and financial services companies.

AXA wanted to reduce operating costs while maintaining tenant comfort and safety. To accomplish this they partnered with the Trane Energy Services team to design and build a high performance system that would replace the building’s original, outdated heating, ventilation and air conditioning plant.

Details
Using Trane TRACE™ 700 software, a complete financial and energy analysis was performed. Based on the results, Trane recommended replacement of the original 4,000-ton central plan system with two 1,400-ton high efficiency electric Trane chillers, a 1,540-ton Dual Duty electric chiller and a 45-tank thermal storage system, which provides 9,000 ton-hours of thermal storage capacity.

Combined these solutions bring the plant’s total mechanical capacity to 4,340 tons, an increase of 340 tons, in addition to the cooling impact of the new thermal storage unit.

Trane also worked with AXA’s building management team to design the replacement of several chilled water and condenser pumps, coupled with the installation of Variable Flow Drives (VFDs) and state-of-the-art building automation systems.

Highlights
The new plant increases overall capacity by 340 ton while maintaining the same electrical and machinery footprint. The energy conservation provided is estimated to help reduce the building’s carbon emissions by 2.4 million pounds per year, which is the equivalent of removing 220 cars from the road annually or plant 325 acres of trees.