Massive all-geothermal high-rise building set to open in trendy NYC neighborhood

Greenpoint is about to get a lot greener.

A new all-geothermal-powered apartment complex — the largest in the state — is set to be built along the trendy Brooklyn neighborhood’s waterfront by next year and could bring welcome relief from costly utility bills to residents.

The Riverie, a two-tower residential development at 1 Java St., is poised to use a vertical “closed-loop geoexchange system” – fueled by the Earth’s temperature – to heat and cool each of its 834 units, according to reps for the developer, the Australian-based construction firm Lendlease.

“We believe the overall utility cost for the building as a whole will be less than in a typical building,” said Brooke Nicholson, senior development operations manager and vice president at Lendlease, to The Post.

What remains to be seen is how much residents will be saving at The Riverie — a former bottling facility and gasoline storage site that went through major cleanup measures before construction could begin.

As the building is so unique, given its size and location in New York, “There is nothing we can use as a reference” for cost-savings analysis, Nicholson said.

But “a more efficient system uses less electricity in theory, and that’s where we believe the savings will be coming from,” the rep said.

The city-block-long project will use a geo-exchange system using 300 bored holes going nearly 500 feet into the Earth to capture the thermal energy – which will heat the facility’s rooftop pool, power its gym and provide heating and cooling to individual apartment units inside the 37- and 20-story towers.

Thirty percent of the units have been set aside for affordable housing, with those one-bedrooms set to start at $1,639 a month. A market-rate one-bedroom pad will begin at about double that cost, or $3,016.

The geothermal process mostly happens underground and won’t generate any unwanted noise for residents or neighbors, Nicholson said.

“Ultimately, it behaves very similar to any well-built high rise apartment building,” Nicholson said of the set-up. “Residents will have their own thermostat and heat pump.”

Greenpoint residents showed excitement for the project at a meeting with Lendlease at the Greenpoint Library last week. 

“In terms of not having a building in the neighborhood – especially a large-scale building – burning fossil fuels to heat the apartments and make hot water, this is a relief,” said Steve Chesler, chair of Brooklyn Community Board 1’s Environmental Protection Committee, to The Post.

Local Daniel Stroik, 28, said, “It’s the best thing that’s going into the ground in Greenpoint in a long time.

“I see in the summers here … all the energy systems are taxed because everyone just has window units, which are not very efficient.”

Katherine Thompson, 62, a climate and open-space activist and president of Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park, said, “With the climate emergency we want to get off of fossil fuels, we want to be all electric – however, the grid is going to be overloaded.

“What’s amazing about this kind of technology … is that it reduces the load on the electrical grid,” Thompson said. “So we won’t have as many outages, and it will reduce the cost of electricity. 

“Right now, people are facing incredible rate hikes in gas and in electricity,” she added. “It’s horrible.” 

While geothermal energy is far from new, New York City has been moving on the trend in recent years, according to Zachary Fink, president of consulting agency ZBF Geothermal, who answered questions from Greenpoint residents at Thursday’s meeting.

The Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island off Manhattan, the Queens Botanical Garden Visitor Center in Flushing, Queens and even St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown are some of the most recent geothermal projects to be completed, Fink said.

555 Greenwich St., a k a Hudson Square, in Manhattan and 1515 Surf Ave. in Coney Island, Brooklyn, are among the first market-rate developments in the city to use a geothermal system, too – but pale in comparison to The Riverie’s massive 7,900-square-foot blueprint.

“It hasn’t been done at the scale that it’s being done at the Riverie,” Nicholson said of geo-thermal-powered residential buidings in the Big Apple. “And that’s something we’re all very proud of to be part of. 

“And hopefully, other buildings of this scale can replicate it,” she said.

Nicholson said recent city legislation– which among other measures mandates new construction to be all-electric and that greenhouse gas emissions from large buildings be cut by 40% by 2020 – made the Big Apple the perfect stage for the record-setting construction.

It didn’t hurt that Greenpoint residents in particular appeared to be “very interested in our sustainability elements,” she said.

“We had a commitment from Lendlease not to do fossil fuels in buildings anymore. So how do we eliminate those, how do we eliminate gas, gas boilers, which are typical in New York City?” Nicholson said.

“So we … looked at what renewable energy is available and due to the size of the site and the proximity to the water, we thought, ‘Hey, maybe geothermal would work here.’ ”

Aside from its geothermal specs, The Riverie is also vying for LEED Gold, Fitwel, ENERGY STAR and WEDG, or Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines, certifications before tenants move in — the latter of which would apply to the site’s public waterfront esplanade.

The new 18,000-square-foot park is helmed by the same designers behind the High Line in Chelsea and will include a “living shoreline” to help protect the area from future flooding events, Nicholson said.

The esplanade will also connect to a new entrance to the NYC Ferry’s India Street pier – which says it typically brings residents to Manhattan in 5 minutes – complete with new landscaping, benches and planters.

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Stephen Collopy

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