Local Law 97 · New York City
Compliance advisory for co-op and condo boards — the benchmarking, the filing, the incentive money, and the plan your shareholders will actually approve.
A board commissions a one-off energy audit. A PDF arrives. It gets filed in a shared drive and the discussion is tabled another quarter. The number was never the hard part.
Consultancies built for institutional portfolios assume a capital planning team and a sustainability budget. Their deliverables land on a board table and paralyze the room instead of moving it.
Meanwhile $268 a ton accrues every single year. A building 200 tons over its cap bleeds $53,600 annually — money that could have funded the retrofit that ends the problem.
Renewable Energy Certificates offset Scope 2 emissions — the electricity you pull off the grid — under NYISO Zone J and NYSERDA's Tier 4 program. We run REC work two ways: sourcing certificates directly from the open market when the timing and price make sense, and structuring a bespoke arrangement when your building's mix calls for it.
They're one part of a larger plan, not a standalone fix. If your building burns gas or oil for heat and hot water, that's Scope 1 — RECs don't offset it directly, so we sequence sourcing and structuring alongside the retrofit and filing work rather than selling it in isolation. That's the difference between a certificate broker and an advisor who's managing your whole compliance picture.
We'll tell you plainly what a REC purchase covers for your building, then run the sourcing or structuring ourselves. Read the full breakdown in the Journal →
"RECs, retrofit timing, and the electrification credit are three moving parts of the same plan — we run all three together, not as separate vendors." Why REC sourcing & structuring is a core part of the practice
For a large wave of co-ops and condos, the first mandatory filing.
Buildings could file a BEAM Portal extension for a $60 fee.
If you filed the extension, this is your hard stop. If you never filed at all, your exposure is accruing today.
Qualifying equipment installed before 2027 earns double Beneficial Electrification Credit — applicable against penalties through 2036.
Retrofits take 18–36 months to design and install. 2030 is decided by what you start now.
The Beneficial Electrification Credit lets you apply a negative emissions coefficient to electricity used by qualifying equipment. Install before 2027 and the coefficient doubles.
For a board weighing whether to replace a dying boiler this year or next, that single date is worth more than most of the advice you'll be given.
Start here
Try the free penalty calculator — see what a typical building of your size and type faces, modeled from 12,700+ real NYC buildings.
Then ask for your building's exact numbers: your current emissions, your cap, the projected annual penalty, cumulative exposure through 2030 — and whether you still qualify for the double electrification credit. Written to be forwarded straight to the rest of your board.
Estimates are modeled from City benchmarking disclosure data — built to show the shape and scale of your exposure, not a filed compliance report.
GHG benchmarking and emissions calculation, prepared for filing and written in language a board can vote on. We handle the submission, not just the math.
Sequencing electrification and envelope work against the incentive calendar — NYSERDA, C-PACE, the electrification credit — so you spend in the right order. We vet contractors and read the quotes with you.
We source certificates directly from the Zone J and NYSERDA Tier 4 market, and structure bespoke REC arrangements when a standard purchase isn't the right fit — run alongside your retrofit and filing work, not separately.
We model your whole portfolio against 2026, 2027 and 2030 in one pass and tell you which buildings carry the risk.
You should use NYC Accelerator — genuinely. What it gives you is education, general guidance, and a referral. What it doesn't do is file on your behalf, sit in your board meeting and answer the treasurer's questions, read a contractor's $400,000 heat pump quote and tell you which line items are padded, source or structure your REC arrangement, or stay accountable to you across four reporting cycles. We do the execution the free program hands back to you.
Two things break that math. First, the penalty is annual and it's running now — five years of $50,000 is $250,000 you could have put into the building. Second, retrofits take 18–36 months to design, approve and install, and the double electrification credit closes at the end of this year. Waiting doesn't defer the cost, it removes your cheapest options.
That's the normal case, not the exception. We write deliverables to be voted on — a clear recommendation, the cost, the penalty avoided, the funding path, and the documented reasoning that gives you a defensible record if a shareholder challenges the decision later. We'll present to your board directly, and to the shareholders if that's what it takes.
We run REC sourcing and structuring as one part of a bigger plan — our fee depends on the whole plan working, not on pushing a single certificate purchase the way a broker does. We'll tell you plainly what a REC arrangement covers for your specific building before we run it. We'd rather be the advisor you can check than the one you can't.
No — this is the most common call we get right now. If you took the BEAM extension you have until August 29. If you filed nothing, you're accruing exposure — but late and correct beats absent. Book a call and bring your address.
Thirty minutes, no cost, no engineering jargon. Worst case, you leave knowing your number.
The LL97 Weekly
Deadlines, the arithmetic your board needs, and what to do first — written for volunteer boards, not engineers. No spam, unsubscribe in one click.
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