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The first passenger terminal for air travel in the U.S. was an Art Deco celebration of aviation. In 1935, the fearless Amelia Earhart dedicated the building at the busy airport now known as Newark Liberty International, and within a few years, hundreds of thousands of passengers were hurrying through its marble-and-terrazzo lobby to catch commercial flights.
Now an administrative center called Building One, the former terminal has made history for a new reason: It’s the first edifice owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a bistate transportation agency, to undergo an all-electric retrofit.
“It’s so exciting to see [this kind of] reinvestment and making things new again,” said James Lindberg, senior policy director at the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, who wasn’t involved in the project. “Energy efficiency and decarbonization is part of that. … We know how to do it — we just need more of it.”
Buildings account for a whopping one-third of the nation’s carbon pollution. Every building — even the 80,000 structures that, like Building One, are listed in the National Register of Historic Places — must break up with fossil fuels to align with a cooler climate future.
Retrofitting any existing structure is going to be tougher than going with all-electric systems from the start. But engineers looking to upgrade historic buildings are doubly constrained by the need to maintain their charges’ distinctive architectural features; you can’t just tear down the walls of a landmark.
The Port Authority’s Building One is an early example demonstrating that storied buildings can be electrified — all while keeping their vaunted status intact.
It “was the perfect project to show the art of what’s possible,” said Dennis Pietrocola, director of operations services at the Port Authority. “If we were able to undergo an electrification transformation to Building One” — among the most challenging of the Port Authority’s structures — “then it sets the stage for [decarbonizing] the rest.”
That’s coming. The Port Authority aims to be carbon neutral by 2050, a goal that includes its entire portfolio of more than 1,000 buildings — from storage and parking structures to terminals to offices — at its airports, bridges, tunnels, railways, bus stops, and shipping ports.
Building One is the bustling home base of 190 Port Authority employees, including operations and maintenance workers, police, and firefighters. In 2023, the building’s gas-fueled equipment was ready to conk out, making it a prime candidate for a decarbonization retrofit. Pietrocola and his colleagues carefully planned a series of cost-effective electrifying updates and hired an experienced general contractor, Constellation NewEnergy, to carry them out.
The team installed five large heat pumps on the roof to provide zero-emissions heating and cooling. They put in an energy-recovery system to recycle waste heat from the locker and IT rooms. The crew added a system that can dial down power use when the grid is strained by high demand. And in the parking lot, workers installed 29 new charging ports for electric vehicles.
The team also swapped the building’s gas boilers with electric-resistance ones. Operating with the same physics as big electric tea kettles, these provide an extra boost as needed to the building’s water-based heating system. Pietrocola had considered using heat-pump boilers instead, which can be twice as efficient because they move heat instead of making it, but he nixed the idea because it would’ve meant replacing the hydronic system’s distribution pipes with bigger ones.
Workers also made some more staid updates to lower energy costs: weatherizing the building, applying heat-blocking films on the windows, and replacing more than 1,500 light fixtures with ultra-efficient LEDs.
In total, the project took 18 months and cost about $15 million — $3 million more than it would’ve had the Port Authority stuck with gas-fired equipment, according to Pietrocola.
The Port Authority didn’t use any incentives to cover the expenses, in part because the team needed to act quickly to replace the building’s worn-out systems. But federal and state tax credits are available to private entities and public-private partnerships to electrify operations as part of renovation projects, Lindberg pointed out. Unlike the consumer credits for heat pumps, EVs, and other clean energy tech, the Rehabilitation Credit was left unscathed by Republicans’ federal budget law enacted this summer, he said.
Building One’s retrofit has slashed energy use by about 25%, Pietrocola said. Still, due to the area’s relatively high cost of electricity, he doesn’t expect the structure’s utility bills to fall.
Pietrocola plans to apply the lessons learned at Building One to other Port Authority structures as their fossil-fueled systems age out, he said. He’ll approach each project with a fresh eye to the building’s particular needs and the technology available. Next time, he added, the agency may go with hydronic heat pumps instead of the electric-resistance boilers.
Decarbonizing buildings “is a very important cause to me, personally and professionally,” Pietrocola noted. Recently, he worked with his 14-year-old daughter, Kayla, on a climate-change science project. “It made me realize, well, I’m part of the problem — the way I’ve operated facilities [in the past], perhaps with a closed mind.” After guiding the electrification of one of the country’s most storied structures, he feels like he’s become part of the solution.
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