SYRACUSE — The Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency (OCIDA) is seeking to buy a property it would lease to Onondaga Community College for the school’s Food Innovation Center, a program the school is developing to train students in food business management.

 

OCIDA, at its June 9 meeting, voted on and approved a proposal to begin pursuing the property. Another vote would be needed to approve the purchase.

 

The property OCIDA would lease to Onondaga Community College (OCC) is one of two adjacent parcels it is looking to buy, located at 435 and 437 North Salina St., respectively, according to OCIDA documents. Both are owned by the Greater Syracuse Land Bank, which is responsible for rehabilitating and selling foreclosed properties claimed by the city.

 

The parcel that would be leased by OCC, 435 North Salina St., is the former site of Mediterranean restaurant La Cuisine. It has been priced at $99,000 by the land bank, according to Honora Spillane, an economic development specialist in the county’s Office of Economic Development, OCIDA’s parent organization.

 

The second property, at 437 North Salina St., which is priced at $40,000, would be used for another project, Spillane tells CNYBJ. She declines to reveal that project.

 

The property OCC wants for its Food Innovation Center already has some kitchen equipment in it that still belongs to the former owner, according to Spillane. 

OCIDA would purchase the equipment, along with both properties. It has estimated the total cost of all three to be $200,000, according to meeting documents.

 

OCIDA would sign OCC to a five-year lease agreement, with monthly payments of about $1,650, according to Spillane, meaning OCIDA would make back its investment over the life of the initial lease. She says there would be renewal options to extend the lease agreement.

 

“We have not done this before,” Spillane says of OCIDA purchasing property to lease to another entity. “IDAs across the state are in this sort of workforce incubation business, so this is a common practice.”

 

The former restaurant is in need of renovations, all of which would be paid for by OCC, says Spillane, from the $2.5 million workforce grant the school was awarded by U.S. Department of Labor last year.

 

Spillane says OCC would like to get the facility up and running for the fall semester. Projected employment generated by the Food Innovation Center over its first four years is 72 jobs, according to OCIDA documents. She says the idea was brought to OCIDA by OCC.

 

Training

The Food Innovation Center would teach students how to own and operate a restaurant, according to OCIDA documents. The school plans to target returning veterans, working adults seeking career changes, displaced workers, refugees who need specific training or certification for employment opportunities, and others, according to the documents.

 

An entrepreneur-training program is planned for the center if it is established at the former La Cuisine site, according to the documents. Each quarter, aspiring restaurant owners will compete to be granted use of the facilities and staff at the site, determined by who is deemed to have the strongest business plan.

 

The effort by OCC is part of a larger workforce training expansion plan that was made possible through the grant it received from the Department of Labor (DOL). The grant was originally intended to be applied solely to workforce training in the agribusiness and food industry fields, but OCC petitioned the DOL to expand the set of industries because it thought those areas would produce too few “family sustaining wages,” according to OCIDA documents.

 

The DOL approved the expansion, and now OCC is planning workforce-training programs for warehouse employees, the health-care industry, and manufacturing, according to the documents. The school is projecting those programs, including the Food Innovation Center, will produce more than 300 jobs in their first four years.                 

 

 

New York state’s transition to competitive electricity markets has contributed to “dramatic benefits for consumers and the state’s power grid, including nearly $7 billion in savings and reduced costs and significant reductions in emissions, among numerous other impacts.” 

 

That’s according to a new report issued June 8 by the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the nonprofit that has operated New York state’s power grid since December 1999.

 

The report, entitled “Powering New York — Responsibly,” looks at the 15-year period since the start of New York’s competitive market for wholesale electricity in 2000. The organization quantifies the major contributions it says it made to help the state meet its future energy needs and achieve its goals for cleaner energy and improved efficiency.

 

“The federal and state policy decisions that produced electric industry restructuring were founded on the conviction that competitive wholesale electricity markets expeditiously and effectively facilitate evolution of the grid,” NYISO president and CEO Stephen Whitley said in a news release announcing the release of the report. “Throughout its first decade and a half, New York’s competitive marketplace for electricity has helped achieve that vision by sustaining and enhancing reliability, fostering efficiencies to reduce costs, and cultivating the growth of cleaner, renewable supplies of electricity.”

 

The report says New York has realized the following benefits since 2000:

 

• $6.4 billion in fuel cost savings from increases in fuel efficiency in electricity generation from 2000 through 2013. This exceeds national fuel efficiency gains by 300 percent.

 

• $540 million in consumer cost savings from reduced power-resource reserve requirements.

 

• The reduction in annual carbon emissions associated with power generation, including the elimination of nearly 25 million tons of carbon emissions in 2013 when compared to 1999. That’s a 41 percent reduction and the equivalent of taking 4.8 million passenger vehicles off the road.

 

• The Empire State’s wind-power generation has jumped from 103 gigawatt-hours in 2003 to 3,541 gigawatt-hours in 2013 — enough electricity to power 490,000 New York homes.

 

Many of the benefits have come from the competitive auctions of wholesale electricity that the NYISO conducts and monitors every five minutes throughout each day, the organization said.

 

In the competitive market, utilities have sold most of their generators while retaining ownership of the transmission and delivery system. Electricity producers, which had previously received predictable revenues from utility rates, now compete for revenues in an open market, the NYISO added. Before 2000, energy rates were set by state regulators and provided utilities with “guaranteed returns” on their investments.

 

“The story of New York’s wholesale power markets is a successful one. The NYISO’s competitive wholesale markets have provided consumers significant value in the form of dramatic cost savings, new investments in cleaner and more efficient technologies and improved electric grid reliability,” State Senator Joseph Griffo (R–Rome), New York State Senate Energy and Telecommunications Committee chair, contended in the news release.

 

Heather C. Briccetti, president and CEO of the Business Council of New York State, Inc., added, “This report highlights what we’ve all known for a long time; the NYISO works. Since its inception, the NYISO has dramatically reduced consumer costs, while at the same time increasing system reliability and ensuring New York is prepared for future changes in the generation and delivery of energy.”

 

The NYISO said that between 2000 and 2013, nearly 6,000 MW of older, noncompetitive generation was retired from service in the state, while private and public power suppliers added more than 10,400 MW of new, more efficient generation.

 

Based in the Capital Region, the NYISO is governed by a 10-member independent board of directors. The NYISO, which monitors a network of almost 11,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines across the state, generated nearly $160 million in revenue in 2013, according to its annual report.       

 

 

SYRACUSE — The Syracuse Housing Authority (SHA) has plans to purchase energy-saving appliances and materials for 13 Syracuse housing sites throughout the city.

 

First Niagara Bank (NASDAQ: FNFG) is the lender in the $5 million financing deal for the conservation equipment, the Buffalo–based banking company announced in a June 3 news release. 

 

The Syracuse Housing Authority operates at 516 Burt St. in Syracuse.

 

SHA owns and manages 15 housing developments with more than 2,500 apartments, according to its website. Just over half the apartments are designated for the elderly or disabled with the remainder set aside for families.

 

Improvements will include new lighting, insulation, water-conservation measures, temperature controls, and weather stripping. 

 

First Niagara expects the energy and water savings to total $7.5 million over the 16-year contract term, the bank said.

 

“The funding from this loan will bring tremendous value to our communities,” William Simmons, executive director of SHA, said in the news release. “The improvements will be beneficial both economically and environmentally. We found an ideal partner with First Niagara, the team worked with us to tailor the finances to our needs.” 

 

CNYBJ left messages with Simmons for additional program details but didn’t get a response before press time.

 

First Niagara is helping SHA in its ongoing efforts in energy conservation and overall efficiency, Robert Fenner, vice president of government banking at First Niagara, said in the news release. 

 

“The First Niagara team designed a financial package that helped the agency provide quality, safe and affordable housing,” said Fenner.

 

Installation of the energy-conservation measures began this past March and will be complete by the end of the year, according to the release.

 

“There is a growing trend in the industry to utilize this type of financing, and it is helping agencies like SHA save money and conserve energy,” Donna Scibetta, vice president of leasing at First Niagara, said.

 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funds the Syracuse Housing Authority. HUD is a federal agency that administers the cash flow of operating subsidy funds to all public-housing authorities in the U.S. 

 

SHA is one of 3,500 housing authorities located across the nation.

 

First Niagara is a multi-state, community-oriented bank with about 390 branches, $39 billion in assets, $28 billion in deposits, and about 5,300 employees across 

New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. 

 

First Niagara Bank ranked fourth in deposit market share in the 16-county Central New York market, according to June 30, 2014, FDIC statistics, the latest available. The bank had $2.2 million in deposits, good for an 8.4 percent share of the CNY market’s total deposits.        

 

 

THACA — Performance Systems Development, an Ithaca–based firm that develops tools and provides services to improve energy efficiency in residential and commercial buildings, was awarded $1 million by the U.S. Department of Energy on May 5 to pilot a new program called the OpenEfficiency Initiative.

 

The initiative seeks to improve the energy efficiency of commercial and multi-family buildings across the country by helping standardize the different programs — offered by utility companies, state agencies, counties, and cities — that incentivize building owners to invest in using higher-efficiency building models. That’s according to Gregory Thomas, founder and CEO of Performance Systems Development (PSD), which employs nearly 50 people.

 

The effort includes standardizing these programs’ use of different tools the Department of Energy (DOE) has invested in and helped develop, says Thomas. Of particular importance are the tools that look at whole-building energy use. In other words, the tools that would help improve an entire building’s energy efficiency, rather than just one component, like light bulbs. But the DOE has never been able to put those tools together into an enterprise-level framework for administering the programs, according to Thomas.

 

“That’s what we’re doing. We’re putting those tools together, and we’re hoping to drop the cost — to significantly drop the cost — of helping buildings achieve on deep-energy retrofits” and in making new buildings more efficient, Thomas says.

 

Efficiency tools

One example of a tool the DOE helped develop is OpenStudio, a collection of predictive energy–modeling software that run physics models of buildings in order to determine their energy usage, says Thomas.

 

The software factors the types of walls, windows, heating systems, and cooling systems into a model, as well as the weather in the area the structure is, or will be. Within the model, the user can change the type of window, for example, to determine how that would affect the building’s energy usage, according to Thomas.

 

Despite the DOE having worked on a number of such tools, says Thomas, much of it has been largely experimental, or used on a smaller scale. The DOE is providing PSD, Thomas’ company, with funding to “commercialize these tools so that people are not research projects, but that people are actually using them,” he says.

 

PSD is in an ideal position to accomplish this because of its existing relationships with several DOE-funded labs that help develop its building-efficiency tools, such as the Colorado–based National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state, according to Thomas.

 

Efficiency programs

In order to entice uninterested or hesitant building owners into making their buildings energy efficient, the government and utilities offer programs that provide up-front funding in return for such an investment.

 

“Fundamentally, it’s hard to give away money,” says Thomas, explaining that it’s often public money, so there are a lot of rules associated with administrating those funds, rules he describes as being burdensome and difficult.

 

“We’re trying to break through that,” he says.

 

One significant problem facing PSD is the sheer quantity of these programs, says Thomas. Programs like these are offered by utility companies, state agencies, and county and city governments — what Thomas calls “program administrators.” In order to improve the functionality of these programs, and to integrate the DOE tools so they can be commercialized, Thomas says the OpenEfficiency Initiative will also help create templates for program designs, so there is less variance among the programs.

 

The initiative

Tackling all of these layers — commercializing the DOE tools, applying them to the many existing programs, standardizing those programs — is intended to reduce the cost of delivering the programs, says Thomas, in turn prompting more building owners to make their buildings energy efficient.

 

A news release issued by the DOE announcing the award money states that last year, 20 percent of the country’s energy usage was by commercial buildings, leaving room for billions of potential savings annually by making them more efficient.

 

The first real step for the initiative is to have collaborative meetings with administrators, says Thomas. There are a whole bunch of puzzle pieces that his company needs to make fit together, he says. And PSD also needs to work with the individual administrators to help them deploy the software to support their programs. After that, it will begin training people — architects and engineers — to use the tools.

 

A concrete goal that PSD is working toward right now is getting commitments from program administrators in at least three states to run the pilot of the OpenEfficiency Initiative. Thomas says he has commitments from the Los Angeles County Office of Sustainability in California, and from the utility provider Xcel in Colorado and Minnesota.

 

PSD is also in talks with program administrators in New York and Pennsylvania, but has not yet received commitments, according to Thomas, declining to name the administrators.

 

Xcel has already utilized some of the tools that the initiative will be marketing, says Thomas, so it’s looking to further extend its use of the tools. They began implementing them a little over one year ago, and he says Xcel is estimating that it is saving about $500,000 per year as a direct result.

 

PSD also has two partners in the initiative. Cadmus, a Massachusetts–based evaluation consulting firm, is helping the utilities with regulatory issues related to the calculation of savings, says Thomas, and helping to make those calculations.

 

Its other partner is the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. It developed some of the tools being used in the initiative, and has been funded to add new features, says Thomas.

 

DOE funding

The OpenEfficiency Initiative will provide 300 buildings with at least 20 percent in energy savings, two requirements for receiving the grant money. The initiative is expected to easily overshoot the 300 building minimum, says Thomas.

 

Seven other companies received awards (PSD is the only New York–based company) from the DOE as part of a larger effort to improve the energy efficiency of buildings across the country, according to the DOE news release. None of the other awards was larger than $1 million.

 

Thomas say PSD submitted the application for funding to the DOE this past January. Without the grant, he says it would have been very difficult to develop a business model for the initiative.

 

“We were very excited to win it,” he says. “There was a lot of footwork that went into it, a lot of preparation.” Part of that footwork was securing $1 million in funding from other sources to match the DOE award, says Thomas, another requirement. PSD secured the funding from its partners, particularly Xcel and the L.A. County Office of Sustainability, according to Thomas.

 

The total cost of the OpenEfficiency Initiative pilot will be more than $2 million. Thomas says being more precise than that is difficult because it depends on what is counted. He says if incentives that will be provided by program administrators are included, the cost of the program increases significantly.

 

The DOE would like to see the initiative become huge, says Thomas. It expects PSD to recruit more program administrators, in part, with the grant money, but Thomas says his company’s focus right now is on getting the initiative up and running. Additional recruiting will come after. He expects a lot of administrators that don’t want to commit to the initiative right now will warm to the idea once successful implementation of tools and programs has been achieved.

 

The company

Thomas, the majority owner of Performance Systems Development, founded the company in Ithaca in 1998 as a solo venture. Since then, it has added three more offices — all in Pennsylvania — in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Meadville. PSD leases space at 124 Brindley St. in Ithaca for its headquarters office, which has about 20 employees. The company has 47 employees in total, nearly all of whom are full-time, says Thomas.

 

The business plans to hire two more employees in the engineering and programming fields as a result of the DOE grant, says Thomas, adding that it will hire more as participating program administrators need additional support.

 

The company’s biggest years for growth came following the 2008 financial crisis, when significant money was being invested in energy-efficiency companies and technologies, according to Thomas. He declined to disclose PSD’s revenue history.

 

Thomas lived in Syracuse for 10 years before moving to Ithaca to start PSD. While there, he says he worked for a now-defunct consulting firm, called Synertech, developing new energy-efficiency technologies for low–income programs in the state. He was able to apply those years later after he took over an energy service nonprofit called Syresco (Syracuse Energy Service Company).