Planning Guides
Strategic decarbonization planning (SDP) is a comprehensive, often multi-year approach to retrofitting buildings to deeply reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It results in an investment roadmap that helps avoid missed opportunities, prevent stranded assets, and unlock long-term value.
This guide distills proven practices from the Empire Building Challenge and other leading retrofit efforts. It offers a flexible set of strategies that can be tailored to your building, team, and timeline—whether the work is led internally or supported by consultants.
In most large office and multifamily buildings, the elephant in the room is the heating system—particularly space and domestic hot water heating. These systems are the dominant source of Scope 1 emissions and a central challenge for decarbonization. Addressing them typically means replacing fossil fuel–burning equipment with electric systems, most often heat pumps.
Even with a grid still transitioning to renewables, the high efficiency of heat pumps leads to lower emissions—and that advantage will continue to grow. While first costs and electricity rates can present challenges, they can be addressed through careful planning, smart phasing, and strategic investment. This guide provides the best practices needed to meet those challenges and achieve deep, lasting emissions reductions and increased asset value.
Design Resource Efficient Solutions
Deep decarbonization isn’t just about swapping systems—it’s about rethinking them. Feasible solutions for large buildings often require a whole-system approach, best achieved through integrative design.
To make integrative design more actionable, this guide distills best practices from real-world decarbonization projects. A consistent takeaway: controlling heating system capacity is essential—to manage costs tied to demand charges, equipment sizing and first cost, and electrical service requirements.
Together, these approaches help avoid overbuilt infrastructure, reduce cost and complexity, and future-proof buildings for a low-carbon, all-electric future.
Reduce Energy Load
Reducing energy loads early enables system right-sizing and positions the entire decarbonization plan for success. It also unlocks a range of co-benefits: envelope upgrades and other load reduction strategies can enhance resilience, improve occupant comfort, and increase asset value, all while lowering long-term operating costs.
Many of these strategies are passive, durable, and low-risk—making them a solid foundation for long-term performance. Common approaches include improving the building envelope, managing air infiltration, enhancing controls, tightening operations and maintenance, and upgrading to efficient equipment.
In planning, be sure to account not only for the direct energy savings from load reduction measures, but also for their impact on HVAC system capacity. Smaller loads may enable downsizing of major equipment, reducing first cost, electrical infrastructure needs, and long-term demand charges. Where possible, quantify co-benefits such as improved comfort or resilience—these may strengthen the business case or support access to funding.
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Recover Wasted Heat
Waste heat isn’t waste—it’s an opportunity. Capturing energy that would otherwise be rejected from the building can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and significantly improve project economics.
Integrating heat recovery strategies early in the planning process boosts overall system efficiency and allows for smaller, lower-cost equipment. Common approaches include:
- Tempering ventilation air
- Transferring heat between zones
- Raising source temperatures to improve heat pump performance
Maximizing the value of existing heat is a smart first step—before investing in additional capacity.
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Reconfigure Systems
System reconfiguration is often a critical enabler of deep decarbonization. Upgrading water or air distribution systems can unlock major gains in efficiency and flexibility—while setting the stage for full electrification.
For example, transitioning to a modern low-temperature hot water system can future-proof a building by enabling energy recovery, thermal storage, and compatibility with a broader range of heat pump technologies.
These upgrades may not be flashy, but they’re foundational—especially in older buildings, where outdated distribution infrastructure can severely constrain decarbonization pathways.
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Replace Fossil Fuel-Burning Heating
Most of the best practices in this guide point to one essential step: replacing fossil fuel–burning equipment. This is critical to eliminating Scope 1 emissions and achieving long-term decarbonization goals. The most common path is electrifying space and water heating, typically with heat pumps.
Unlike combustion systems, heat pumps move heat rather than generate it—making them several times more efficient than fossil fuel alternatives. This efficiency helps offset higher electricity prices, often resulting in lower operating costs even when utility rates are less favorable.
Heat pumps come in a range of configurations suitable for large buildings, including:
- Centralized systems distributing hot water or steam
- Ambient loop systems connected to decentralized heat pumps
- Packaged units installed throughout the building
Each approach carries tradeoffs in efficiency, capital cost, control, and long-term flexibility. For example, ambient or low-temperature distribution systems may require higher upfront investment but can unlock long-term benefits—such as improved efficiency, thermal storage integration, and expanded heat recovery opportunities.
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Manage Peak Demand
Electrifying heating systems can increase peak electric demand—but it doesn’t have to. With smart design, some projects have kept peak demand flat—or even reduced it—compared to fossil fuel baselines.
Avoiding costly demand charges and maintaining grid-aligned performance depends not just on how much energy systems use, but when they use it. Managing equipment capacity and runtime is critical.
Key strategies include:
- Load reduction
- On-site renewables
- Load shaving (reducing brief demand spikes)
- Load shifting (moving loads to off-peak hours)
These strategies should be reflected in both the decarbonization roadmap and the day-to-day operation of systems. Just as important: ensure electric demand charges are included in the financial analysis. Excluding them can result in inaccurate projections of operating costs, which can result in selecting the wrong investment pathway.
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Right-Size Equipment and Partial Electrification
Most existing heating systems are significantly oversized. While that was manageable with fossil fuels, it can be a major liability for electric systems—driving up capital costs, demand charges, and electrical infrastructure needs.
Right-sizing is challenging in practice. Standard engineering procedures tend to favor conservative sizing, and contractual structures often disincentivize downsizing—whether due to liability concerns or compensation models tied to equipment capacity. Overcoming this requires collaboration among owners and engineers to align incentives and share risk.
Retrofits offer an advantage: real buildings generate real data. Measuring delivered heating output during peak conditions provides a more accurate basis for sizing than static design assumptions. Short-term monitoring can help avoid overbuilding while maintaining confidence in system performance.
When full electrification isn’t feasible, partial electrification is a practical bridge. Size electric systems to cover typical loads, and retain a smaller fossil system for rare peaks. This adds redundancy, reduces infrastructure costs, and supports phased transitions to full electrification.
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Convene a Design Charrette
A charrette is a focused, collaborative workshop that brings together key stakeholders—owners, consultants, contractors, tenants—to align on strategy, surface challenges early, and build momentum. In the context of decarbonization planning, charrettes are a powerful tool for developing a shared understanding of a building’s existing conditions, goals, and constraints. They support creative problem-solving and help accelerate the retrofit design process.
While charrettes can be useful at multiple stages, Playbook resources focus primarily on using them to review and refine a preliminary retrofit plan.
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