Empire State Building Gets Makeover, Window by Window

NEW YORK (March 29) -- On the fifth floor of the Empire State Building last week, a muffled din was escaping from an unassuming office door at the end of a hallway. Inside, men in safety goggles were bent over large glass panes, scraping, washing and filling them with gas. The office space had been transformed into a processing center for the building's 6,514 windows, and the men were in the midst of meticulously removing, cleaning and reconstructing them to be more energy efficient.

"No one in the world has done anything like what we're doing," Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, which is outfitting the windows, told AOL News. "This is a groundbreaking energy retrofit."

The window project is one of eight upgrades under way that, when complete, will cut the building's energy use an estimated 38 percent and save $4.4 million a year. The improvements will push the Empire State Building into the top 10 percent of energy-efficient buildings in the country, according to Anthony E. Malkin, president of Wien and Malkin, which manages the building.

"If we don't impact energy consumption in the existing building environment, we're never going to be able to impact energy consumption in general," he said.

Malkin worked with the Clinton Climate Initiative, the Rocky Mountain Institute and other companies to create a plan that would not only reduce energy consumption but also reduce costs, in the hopes of attracting other building owners. The plan, he says, is "open-source" to encourage others to take the same path. Buildings alone account for 50 to 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in cities, according to the Clinton Climate Initiative.

"If you effect change in the biggest energy consumers, you can categorically turn down the energy consumption in a city like New York," Malkin said. "My mandate was we have to come up with replicable processes."

The windows in the 102-story building are only about 10 years old and already have a dual-pane design. To re-insulate them with a coated film and krypton gas, workers remove them at night so as not to bother the current tenants. The panes are separated and cleaned three times before the film is placed between them and resealed around the edges. They are then baked in an oven to smooth the film and filled with krypton gas, which provides one last layer of insulation.

Only the panes that are damaged or can't be thoroughly cleaned are thrown out.

"It probably doesn't benefit someone who builds glass, but it benefits everyone else," Surace said of the process.

Progress is slow but steady. On the operation's first day last week, they produced zero windows. On the second day, they did 10. By the fourth day, they were up to 42. Their goal is 30 to 50 windows a day to get the project done by December.

The entire retrofit is slated to be finished in 2013. Malkin hopes people will take notice.

"If you were to achieve something in a lesser building, it wouldn't be taken seriously," he said. "But if you were to do it in a building like the Empire State Building, it could change the world."