Brooklyn Museum’s $48 Million Energy Retrofit Aims to Cut Emissions by 57 Percent

New York City is replacing the Brooklyn Museum's ageing steam plant, adding a solar carport and electrifying humidity control in a $48 million package that should cut more than 3,300 metric tons of carbon a year.

illustrarch Editoral Team9 November 20262 Mins read1

Brooklyn Museum’s Million Energy Retrofit Aims to Cut Emissions by 57 Percent

The Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway. · Image: courtesy New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services

The Brooklyn Museum is partway through a $48 million overhaul of the systems that heat, cool and power its century-old building at 200 Eastern Parkway, The Art Newspaper reports. The Brooklyn Museum energy retrofit was announced in June by the museum, the New York Power Authority (NYPA) and the city’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), and is due to be finished in mid-2027.

What the Brooklyn Museum energy retrofit includes

According to the DCAS announcement, the ageing steam plant that heats the building will give way to a high efficiency hot water plant with an electrified heat recovery chiller and condensing gas boilers, so heat pulled out during cooling can be reused where it is needed. A solar array will be built over the parking area between the museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, also shading the cars beneath. The package adds a new building management system, upgrades to heating, ventilation and air conditioning, and electric humidification to keep gallery conditions steady for the collection.

Curved glass and steel entrance canopy at the base of a pale stone classical facade with tall columns — The museum’s glazed entrance pavilion. · Image: Suicasmo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Savings measured in carbon

Hardat Raywat, the museum’s deputy director for operations, engineering and facilities, told the paper that the museum expects its carbon to fall by roughly 57 percent, or more than 3,300 metric tons a year, which he compared to taking 725 cars off the road. The project is fully funded by DCAS and delivered through NYPA’s energy services programme. Brian Chang, deputy commissioner for energy management at DCAS, said the price covers 17 separate upgrades, and that tackling many systems at once avoids opening up the same walls again and again.

The work feeds into Local Law 97, the city’s 2019 climate law, which requires city government operations to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 against a 2006 baseline on the way to net zero by 2050. The museum belongs to the Cultural Institutions Group, 39 organisations on city-owned property, and DCAS has run similar projects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.

A model for older museum buildings

Chang said the Brooklyn work could hold lessons for other cultural venues, though the paper points out that budgets on this scale are beyond many smaller institutions. Funders such as Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, which awards grants of up to $100,000, help some of them carry out smaller retrofits.