522 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, Mar 3, 2009
Turnkey Thermal Storage Project for Morgan Stanley
Built in 1896, this building has been a fixture of the Grand Central Station area of Manhattan for over 100 years. 522 Fifth Avenue is a 23 story, Class A office building with a long history of being occupied by financial institutions as evidenced by the massive safes located in the basement and subbasement. Morgan Stanley executed a long-term lease of the 595,430 square foot facility in 2006 to house its growing asset management business. Morgan Stanley is one of the world’s largest diversified financial services company, with a reputation for excellence in advice and execution on a global scale. The firm has leading franchises in three businesses: Global Securities, Global Asset
Management and Global Credit Card Services.
Challenge
Morgan Stanley faced the challenge of an aging
cooling infrastructure as well as increased cooling capacity requirements of the planned building usage for 522 that exceeded the existing system capacity. The company decided to pursue a high performance cooling infrastructure solution with the goals of energy
efficiency, increased site resiliency and environmental responsibility, similar to the successful retrofit of their Purchase NY facility. One major difference between the projects was the increased complexity of the logistics in midtown Manhattan.
Solution
Morgan Stanley engaged the Trane New York – New Jersey Energy Services team to evaluate the building’s existing systems and develop innovative, high performance infrastructure solutions to satisfy the new requirements for
the building. Using Trace 700 energy modeling software, the Trane team developed multiple solutions that would meet Morgan Stanley’s needs. Ultimately the team proposed a hybrid chiller plant with a refurbished steam turbine
chiller and a new electric centrifugal chiller with a connected thermal storage system. The new electric chiller would be a dual-mode machine that would produce ice for a thermal storage solution and that would shift the building’s
electric cooling load from daytime to night. Electric produced during night (off-peak) hours is more plentiful, less expensive and generated more efficiently. The solution included the replacement of a 50 year old steam chiller with a new, more efficient and inherently more reliable non-CFC electric chiller. [
Read More]
