New York University
OP-22: Water Consumption

Currently, due to billing and payment mechanisms in association with New York City government, and antiquated metering infrastructure, it is not possible to simply sum digital-format billing or metering data to accurately reflect NYU buildings' consumption or demand reduction. Instead, a representative subset of NYU's building stock has been analyzed and vetted in depth to control for billing and metering errors, rebills and back billing, buildings coming on and off line, and other factors. This sample represents a very sizable portion of NYU's total building stock and includes buildings of all types. While NYU's data tracking systems for water consumption are highly imperfect and must be improved in order to accurately reflect total consumption, this methodology captures the intent of the credit and recognizes substantive efforts that have reduced water consumption, while leaving the door open to better data sources in the future. Recent efforts, such as comprehensive low-flow showerhead and sink aerator retrofits in dorms, are estimated to have reduced demand by approximately 90 million gallons of water. The baseline data and current data for each account included here have been pulled from the web-based NYC Department of Environmental Protection database. NYU is halfway through a process of coordination with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection to install effective automated water meter readers (AMRs), an effort which will improve the data's reliability in the future.