Deep Energy Change at Steinway & Sons in Long Island City

The other day it was my pleasure to get a tour of the Steinway facility in Long Island City, and see their Energy Plant, in particular their solar thermal installation including a 100 ton absorption chiller, and which is smoothly integrated into their overall system with natural gas as a backup, and with an underlying development track of process improvement and rationalization of the energy infrastructure of the plant, which goes directly into improvements in their temperature (68F) and humidity control (50%RH), and increased systems reliability, and a payoff that includes measurable improvement in their operations. The tour was led by Mr. Bill Rigos, who was the project lead for Steinway, and who clearly took hands on responsibility for the project, including overseeing the development of a very customized system of controls that integrates essentially all of the relevant data from various sources, and makes easy control of their system a reality.

Revision/Update: Here is a report on the same installation from Greentech Media from 2013: https://www.greenbiz.com/news/2013/02/22/black-and-gold-go-green-steinway-sons-journey-sustainability

To me, what I saw was a demonstration of the kind of "deep energy change"  the City needs more of. The financial people might tend to see a project with a ca 7.5 year payback, which in investment terms is not overly exciting, but, were the total scope to be modeled, including the greater measure of energy independence, and systems redundancy/reliability, as well as the various aspects of process improvements in the factory, the actual capital improvement to the business is staggering, since it not only saves energy but is directly responsible for process improvements, and reduced production loss ratios which are a direct consequence of a more controllable climate system. In other words, the secret is always in seeing the integral effects on overall operations and these types of intra-marginal investments add tremendous value to the economy.

These types of projects stand in shrill contrast to much of what is going on under the name of energy efficiency, which is often times actually a massive government subsidized form of capital destruction, that can be summed up as: make'm more efficient and switch 'em to gas, or, as a friendly engineer who is in the energy efficiency racket referred to their projects in upgrading multi-family buildings: "screwing in new lightbulbs." Central to the argument which we advance on this site the first generation of energy efficiency projects are always easy, have short paybacks, except they ignore the fact that there is NO follow-on, because they are an investment track with diminishing returns over time.

I could only say that it was a special privilege to see such a shining example of profound systems thinking, and an enduring deep commitment in the person of Bill Rigos himself, in such a venerable New York institution. Literally a shining example for the City, showing an alternative to the natural gas mono-culture that is engulfing us all, which is simply the next energy crisis in the making. At least here and there we are seeing example of looking at energy as we properly should, as a make or buy decision, in which renewable energy becomes the driver and subscription energy the backup. These are the breakthroughs we need to evolve to a sustainable economy and a measure of energy independence which can grow over time. Renewable energy plant is becoming a capital asset of buildings and companies, and valuations of businesses and buildings will undergo radical change in the years to come. Many who are dancing to the pied piper of energy efficiency will come to realize they foolishly invested in becoming more entrenched in fossil fuels and subscription energy, and are likely to find themselves cornere in a dead end street at the next energy crisis, which is presently being created by the current vogue of superficial energy change, which wrongly prioritizes energy efficiency before a proper assessment of the fundamental make or buy decisions about energy plant and the life-cycle consequences of those decisions.

The superficial story of the energy savings at Steinway will be validated over and over again by the immeasurable process improvements to their unique and incredibly valuable industrial process. The evaluation of these kinds of intra-marginal improvements remains notoriously difficult, but it is the difference between business-like investments in energy plant as a strategic asset of a business, compared to the herd-like and thoughtless pursuit of energy efficiency of existing plant, which is more a customer retention program for the utilities and energy companies, and at best an operational savings, that does not deserve the name of an investment.

As an example of the value of Solar Thermal technology in general this application is also valuable, for too often people are charmed by Solar PV because of the incentives, and because electricity is more sexy than heat. What is forgotten is that a lot of the energy you need in buildings is heat anyway, so as long as Solar Thermal produces about five times the amount of energy for the same square area compared to PV, there is little reason to look into PV if you could be using Solar Thermal instead in our densely populated area with high real estate prices.