Dive Brief:
- Global Holdings is working to retrofit more than 2,000 windows at Nomad Tower, a 39-story office building in New York City, with LuxWall’s highly efficient transparent insulation , the company said Thursday.
- By reducing heat transfer at the building envelope, the LuxWall retrofit is expected to lower building energy use 20% and provide an “actionable path” toward Local Law 97 compliance, the company says.
- “Building owners have historically been forced to work around the limitations of conventional glazing, where their exterior walls are insulated and their windows are uninsulated,” said Scott Thomsen, CEO of LuxWall. “Transparent Insulation changes that notion [and] gives owners a practical way to address and solve the single largest source of energy loss in the building envelope, without compromising transparency or disrupting operations.”
Dive Insight:
The New York City office market is undergoing a shift that prioritizes higher-performing, energy-efficient buildings as occupants seek space that meets their climate goals and building owners work to meet Local Law 97 targets. The city enforces building energy standards through Local Law 97, which requires owners to reduce their building emissions 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050 or face fines. Penalties can reach up to $268 for every ton of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted above an annual allowance.
The retrofit at Nomad Tower highlights a scalable pathway to meet Local Law 97 compliance while helping building operators attract tenants with enhanced environmental comfort, LuxWall says. The project is part of the optimization strategy of real estate management company Global Holdings.
Other companies, including 3M and EnerLogic offer transparent building insulation, with others like Kalwal and Duo-Gard serving translucent options.
Improving facade performance at scale has tended to require a full glazing system replacement, a labor-intensive project that often means eight-figure investments and temporary relocation of tenants from occupied buildings, according to LuxWall. The glass-only retrofit approach enables high-performance upgrades within existing framing systems that can reduce costs and complexity without disrupting building operations, the company says.
Preliminary modeling indicates that transparent insulation can deliver reductions in building energy consumption while enhancing asset value and delivering investment payback in under five years, the company says.
For the Nomad project, windows were identified as the single largest source of energy loss in the building envelope. By using the glass-only retrofit, the upgrade delivered up to 18-times greater insulation performance than the existing glazing, LuxWall says. The glass insulation achieves an R-value of 18, which exceeds the performance of traditional R-1 single pane glazing and outperforms the conventional double or triple-pane systems typically used in high-rise applications, the company says.
The glass insulation also enables Global Holdings to enhance occupants’ accessibility to natural light and brightness in the workplace, “without requiring the time and capital expenditure of a full window replacement,” LuxWall said.
The transparent insulation reduces the transmission of outdoor sounds into the building by up to 30% compared to traditional single-glazing
“We’re confident this technology will deliver meaningful savings and further elevate the tenantexperience we’ve worked tirelessly to create at Nomad Tower,” Ian Morrell, vice president of operations at Global Holdings, said in a statement
