Greenwire's Nathanial Gronewold has a post today on the New York Times Green Inc. blog (http://nyti.ms/9Q4xu2) that gets to one of the thorniest problems facing America's cities: How to deep-retrofit older buildings for improved energy efficiency.
This is hard, messy work that's going require hundreds of billions of dollars and decades.
Gronewold points out that New York City has already done a pretty good job with new construction. Virtually every new building is LEED certified.
But here's what he writes about existing structures:
"Having successfully moved new construction projects to the eco-friendly side of the equation with relative ease, officials are now grappling with a far more difficult challenge -- upgrading thousands of existing buildings to stop wasting electricity and curb greenhouse gas emissions."
If you're in construction in New York City, deep-retrofits are the proverbial gold mine.