The Brooklyn Navy Yard Has Become a Lab for Planet

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Once a building ground for battleships, the site is a city-within-a-city where companies can test their solutions for a greener future.

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By Winnie Hu

Brendan Hermalyn started a company in 2021 to reduce carbon emissions from buildings by making a special filter, one that captures greenhouse gases and converts them into a powder that can be recycled. But when he pursued testing of his company's carbon-capture system in New York City, some building owners were skeptical.

"It's a chicken-and-the-egg question," said Dr. Hermalyn, the founder and chief executive of Thalo Labs. "Everyone wants to be the first — after someone else has tested it."

So he turned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a former naval shipbuilding facility and now a sprawling manufacturing complex on a bay off the East River, to show what his technology could do. There, Thalo Labs set up a filter, about the size of a phone booth, on a rooftop. The filter sucks emissions from a nearby chimney connected to a boiler inside.

The site was made possible through Yard Labs, a new initiative that invites green technology companies to test out their ideas and products within the controlled confines of a city-within-a-city. Behind the gates of the 300-acre waterfront complex, there are 60 industrial buildings, a private road network, a Wegmans supermarket and a power plant.

"They need a baseline, they need a place to do trial-and-error," said Lindsay Greene, the president and chief executive of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, a nonprofit that manages the city-owned site. Here, she said, companies "can migrate from a lab setting or a desert setting" to an urban setting without the crowds and the traffic.

Yard Labs is part of a broader movement across New York City to create a green technology ecosystem. "The climate crisis is real, our economic recovery is urgent, and we need to provide pipelines for work force development for New Yorkers," said Maria Torres-Springer, the city's deputy mayor for economic and work force development.

More than 200 start-ups applied last year to an annual competition at the Urban Future Lab at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, which runs an incubator for up to 20 climate-tech companies. The two winners each received a $50,000 grant and a coveted spot in the incubator.

"I want more people doing this because it's an all-hands-on-deck moment," said Pat Sapinsley, the managing director of Cleantech Initiatives at the Urban Future Lab, about the new testing program. "We all have to be working on climate change."

The Brooklyn Navy Yard, where battleships like the U.S.S. Missouri were once built, has long been an important manufacturing hub. Even during the pandemic it remained busy as some companies there pivoted to make hand sanitizer, face shields and hospital gowns.

It also has become an informal testing ground for technology companies. Citi Bike, the popular bike-share program, got its start with a docking station there a decade ago before expanding to the rest of the city. In 2019, a start-up at that time, Optimus Ride, dispatched its driverless vehicles there to transport workers and visitors around.

Currently, about 30 of the more than 550 tenants at the Brooklyn Navy Yard are green technology companies.

After checking out other sites in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, Thalo Labs leased a 4,000-square-foot space at the Navy Yard last August to design and make equipment for its carbon-capture system. The technology can be used not just for boilers, but also for removing carbon dioxide from the air in lobbies and conference rooms.

"There is no space like this anywhere else in the city," Dr. Hermalyn said, adding that more all-in-one sites are needed to help green tech companies "accelerate from idea to product."

Ms. Greene, who worked as an economic policy adviser for former Mayor Bill de Blasio, said that Yard Labs offers a self-contained, streamlined alternative to companies that may struggle to navigate the city. "It's sometimes hard for a company to even know who to ask," she said. "You can't just walk around the street and guess."

Yard Labs will accept up to 16 companies a year. Each participant will pay fees starting at several thousands of dollars to cover the administrative and monitoring costs.

Though the approval process is rigorous, Ms. Greene said companies should not be daunted by the 12-page application and other requirements. "The whole thing is designed to get to a yes," she said.

Yard Labs has already drawn interest from 18 companies, eight of which have filled out applications. Three were approved, while the others are either awaiting a decision or have chosen not to go forward after both sides agreed that it was not a good fit or the right time, Ms. Greene said.

One of the approved companies is Connected Kerb, which is based in London and seeks to expand its electric vehicle chargers in New York City. It has partnered with a Navy Yard tenant, Newlab, and city officials to test two chargers in a parking area. Drivers have been recruited by word-of-mouth to try them out.

The chargers have a sleek profile — an advantage for a crowded city curb — because they do not come with bulky charging cords (drivers have to provide their own). The electronics for the chargers are buried underneath, making them more resistant to damage and theft.

While Yard Labs is open to any company, it could especially help start-ups that are already working at the Navy Yard, such as those connected with Newlab, which runs an "innovation studio" there with more than 200 start-ups.

"This is a steppingstone to bigger adoption and scale," Shaina Horowitz, the vice president of product and programs for Newlab, said of the new testing initiative. Entrepreneurs and developers can "make the mistake here with one unit," she explained, fixing any potential problems before going on "to develop hundreds of units."

The Navy Yard may also benefit directly from the green technology being tested there. Orenda, an energy storage technology company based nearby in Brooklyn that has signed up for the testing program, will collect data from all of the buildings, some of which date back to the 1800s, to generate a real-time simulation of energy use in a dense urban area.

Started in 2020, Orenda is in the process of converting 20 vacant lots in the city and Westchester County into energy storage sites, where electricity is stored in batteries and sold back to Con Edison during the summer to help prevent blackouts. Now, it wants to develop a blueprint for an industrial hub to manage its energy supply more efficiently, said Bill Grinstead, the chief executive and a founder of Orenda.

"We get a project in the ground and that helps us mature as a company," he said. "Having these proof points is incredibly important."

Winnie Hu is a reporter on the Metro desk, focusing on transportation and infrastructure stories. She has also covered education, politics in City Hall and Albany, and the Bronx and upstate New York since joining The Times in 1999. @WinnHu

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