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| Fig. 1: Times Square. (Source: Wikimedia Commons). |
New York City (NYC) is home to over 8.5 million people living in roughly 3.1 million households. [1] From 1990 to 2020, the city has seen an average temperature increase of 2.5 F. [2] This increase, combined with central air becoming more common in new buildings, has led to an overall increase in the amount of air conditioning used in New York City every summer. In 2015, it was estimated that air conditioning was responsible for over 9% of the energy consumption of large buildings over the entire year. [3]
As such, it is not a surprise that New York City views residential and commercial air conditioning as a potential target for energy consumption reduction. In recent years, Consolidated Edison (Con Ed), the company that controls NYC's power grids, has often urged residents to turn off their air conditioning during heat waves to help conserve energy and reduce the risk of a blackout. [4] Controversially, however, the notorious Times Square, as seen in Fig. 1, is never turned off during these high-power consumption summers. This report will explore just how much of an impact Times Square might have on the city's energy consumption.
Times Square is an area of NYC known for its extensive digital billboards. Buildings in the neighborhood are covered with these displays, and most run continuously throughout the day and night. In reality, however, they are not as energy-draining as they might seem.
To quantify this, Times Square Tower is the skyscraper that serves as the center of Times Square, and the most impressive billboard attraction in NYC. At 111 meters (364 feet) high, it takes up an entire city block, and the front of the building is nearly entirely covered with LED screens used for digital ads. [5] The width of the building is roughly 34.5 meters. [5] Therefore, we can estimate there is a maximum of nearly 221.5 m × 34.5 m = 7642 m2 (82255 ft2) of LED screens on this single building.
On average, a digital billboard uses 18 Watts per square foot. [6] The estimated energy consumption of the billboards on this building is thus 18 W ft-2 × 82255 ft2 = 1480590 W. While this might sound impressive, it is ultimately negligible when we consider the total energy usage of the city.
On average, New York City uses 5,500 MW of power, and this figure can increase to 10,000 MW in the summer. [7] Therefore, during peak energy usage time, the billboards on the largest building in Times Square accounts for only 0.0148% of the citys energy usage. If we say that each of the 24 blocks in Times Square have an equal number of LED square footage (which is a generous overestimate), then the entire neighborhood of Times Square can be estimated to use 35 MW of power, which would account for only 0.35% of the city's total energy usage.
Unfortunately, a shutdown of Times Square is not a reasonable fix to NYC's power consumption issues. NYC's power issue will only get more dire as temperatures increase and AC units become more commonplace. Barring a miraculous decrease in residential energy usage, forced, rolling blackouts are likely to become a part of NYC's future.
© Lauren Taylor. The author warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.
[1] "A Roadmap to Achieving a Complete 2020 Census Count in New York State," New York State Complete Count Commission, October 2019.
[2] R. Frankson and K. E. Kunkel, c"New York," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2022.
[3] "New York City's Energy and Water Use 2014 and 2015 Report," New York City, October 2019.
[4] M. Zaveri and A. Wong, "'Conserve Energy': New York City Begs Residents to Help Avoid Outages," New York Times, 30 Jun 21.
[5] E. B. Gottlieb, "Times Square Tower, New York, NY, USA," Struc. Eng. Int. 15, 8 (2018).
[6] B. Kundu, D.Young and S. Schneider, " Digital Billboard Energy Use in California," Energy Solutions, July 2014.
[7] "2022 Load and Capacity Data Report," New York Independent System Operator, April 2022.
