By Jared Ebersole in Video — 29 May 2026

The Letter Grades Making New York Buildings Show Their Energy Use

New York's building energy grades turn invisible utility use into a public sign, while Local Law 97 turns excess emissions into real financial pressure.

New York learned something from restaurant grades: public embarrassment works.

That is why large buildings now have to post energy grades near their entrances. The signs look simple, almost bureaucratic: a letter, a score, a year. But they turn one of the city's biggest climate problems into something visible from the sidewalk.

Buildings are New York's main source of greenhouse gas emissions. Not cars. Not taxis. Not delivery trucks. Buildings. Heating, cooling, lighting, elevators, hot water, offices, apartments, retail, servers, trading floors, restaurants, and ventilation systems all add up. In a vertical city, the skyline is also an energy system.

For decades, most people could not see that system. You could walk into a tower and judge the lobby, the stone, the elevators, the security desk, the art, and the rent. You could not tell whether the building used energy efficiently. Local Law 33 changed that by requiring many buildings over 25,000 square feet to display annual Building Energy Efficiency Rating labels at public entrances.

The grades are based on ENERGY STAR scores from benchmarking data. An A means a score of 85 or higher. B runs from 70 to 84. C runs from 55 to 69. D is below 55. F is for buildings that failed to submit required benchmarking. N is for buildings exempted or not covered by the scoring system.

The brilliance of the grade is not that it explains everything.

It is that it refuses to let energy performance stay invisible.

That matters because building efficiency is not intuitive. A beloved old landmark can outperform a newer glass tower. A building with green branding can still consume huge amounts of energy if its tenants run intensive operations around the clock. A luxury office with efficient equipment can still be a high emitter if it is used hard enough.

The Empire State Building is the example every owner knows.

Built in 1931, it could have become a warning label for the difficulty of decarbonizing historic skyscrapers. Instead, its ownership undertook a major retrofit years before Local Law 97 penalties began. The project included controls, tenant improvements, mechanical upgrades, and one of the most famous window retrofits in the city.

The building has 6,514 windows. Rather than simply throw them out and install new units, the retrofit team reused most of the existing glass and frames, rebuilding the windows on site to improve insulation. The Empire State Building says the process quadrupled window energy performance while reusing more than 96 percent of existing materials. Rocky Mountain Institute projected the overall retrofit would cut energy use by 38 percent and save about $4.4 million a year once tenant spaces were upgraded.

That is the optimistic version of the law's logic: measure the problem, make it public, invest in the building, save energy, and reduce emissions.

Then there is the harder version.

Local Law 33 creates the public grade. Local Law 97 creates emissions limits and penalties for many large buildings. Starting with the first compliance period in 2024, covered buildings that exceed their annual emissions caps can face penalties calculated at $268 per metric ton over the limit, unless they qualify for specific adjustments or alternative compliance pathways. The limits become more demanding in 2030.

That is when the stakes get much higher. A Real Estate Board of New York analysis projected that by 2030 more than 13,500 properties could face combined penalties as high as $900 million per year if they did not reduce emissions or otherwise comply. Climate advocates, building owners, consultants, and city officials have been fighting over how strict enforcement should be, how renewable energy credits should count, and how much flexibility is appropriate for difficult buildings.

The controversy exists because buildings are not all the same.

A small apartment building, a luxury condo tower, a hospital, a university lab, a data-heavy office, a hotel, and a trading-floor-heavy skyscraper can have radically different energy profiles. Some buildings have obvious retrofit paths: LEDs, better controls, insulation, electrified heating, improved ventilation, heat pumps, better windows, smarter schedules. Others have deep physical constraints, landmark restrictions, unusual tenants, or equipment that cannot be easily replaced without massive cost.

One Bryant Park shows the contradiction.

The Bank of America Tower was celebrated as a green skyscraper when it opened, and sources describe it as the first commercial high-rise in the United States to achieve LEED Platinum certification. It has high-performance systems, water-saving features, cogeneration, and other sustainability measures. But it also houses energy-intensive office uses. Bloomberg reported in 2022 that the tower was on track to exceed city emissions limits, illustrating the gap between a design certification and actual operating emissions.

That is the uncomfortable lesson behind the grades.

A building is not green because its brochure says it is. It is green only if its real operations, fuel sources, tenants, maintenance, systems, and schedules produce lower emissions. The city's grading and emissions laws force that conversation out of the engineering room and into the lobby.

There are ways for owners to soften the impact. They can hire consultants, tune systems, document good-faith efforts, pursue adjustments, and in some cases use renewable energy credits. Some of those pathways are practical and necessary. A city cannot decarbonize thousands of complex buildings overnight. But critics argue that overly broad credit use can let buildings paper over emissions rather than cutting them at the source.

That tension is the whole policy fight in miniature.

New York needs owners to spend money on boring things: boilers, chillers, controls, meters, insulation, windows, electrification, tenant systems, and maintenance. The city also needs rules flexible enough not to punish impossible cases blindly. Public grades create shame. Carbon caps create cost. Retrofits create the actual emissions cuts.

The sign in the lobby is only the beginning.

It is a public label attached to a private machine, telling everyone who walks in that the building is no longer being judged only by marble, height, views, or rent. It is being judged by what it consumes.

For a city built upward, that is a quiet revolution.