Ben Milbank.
Ben Milbank, 31
Senior project development engineer at Ecosystem
For Ben Milbank, it started as a boy with Formula One racing. Milbank grew up in a part of England where it was all the rage, and that was that.
“I really wanted to do aerodynamic design for Formula One racing cars,” he said.
The budding engineer most definitely did not want to move to a metropolis such as London or New York, and not work with racing cars. Such is life. Milbank earned admission to Columbia University’s master’s program in mechanical engineering, and off he went to New York City in 2014.
Eight years later, Milbank is part of the vanguard of decarbonization efforts in commercial real estate through his position at Ecosystem. His work originally came from higher education institutions that seemed to get the need for cutting carbon emissions — from both a financial and a social point of view.
Lately, Milbank’s work has come from real estate owners and developers. Part of that is the newfound recognition of how much money can be saved in making a building more energy efficient. Part of it, too, are regulations such as New York City’s Local Law 97 that will penalize the owners of inefficient buildings. He is also the technical adviser on the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s Empire Building Challenge, an initiative to drive decarbonization in commercial real estate.
The changes that Milbank recommends and works on, including streamlining energy sourcing and use in buildings, are often incremental and around the proverbial edges — aiming to have them all add up to holistic efficiency.
“I think a lot of people looked at decarbonizing buildings as really an infrastructure problem — as in, you had to completely rip out your existing systems,” Milbank said. “It was almost like perfection was the enemy of the good.” That needn’t be the case: “You look at the problem in smaller chunks, and it just becomes so much more feasible.” —T.A.
