Brooklyn Navy Yard

New York, USA

Established in 1801, Brooklyn Navy Yard served as the United States’ leading naval shipbuilding facility for 165 years, launching the likes of USS Monitor, USS Arizona and USS Missouri. At its peak during the Second World War, more than 70,000 people worked at the yard.

Decommissioned by the navy in 1966, the site was purchased by the City of New York. While some commercial shipbuilding continued, much of the yard remained unused for decades. But in the 21^st century, the 300-acre site has been reborn as a hub for business and innovation, with a particular focus on the burgeoning renewable energy technology industry.

Other parts of the site have been adapted as spaces for filming movies, while some of the dry docks continue to be used for shipbuilding.

Brooklyn Navy Yard served as the United States’ leading naval shipbuilding facility for 165 years.

The 300-acre site has been reborn as a hub for business and innovation, with a particular focus on the renewable energy technology industry.

We developed five use cases for opportunities for the Brooklyn Navy Yard to play a key role in the development of innovative sustainable energy technologies.

The proposals included green hydrogen generation and storage and a testbed for 5G communication across the air-water interface.

Challenge

With the waters around New York increasingly being used for offshore wind generation, the city holds ambitions to become a hub for businesses focused on developing cutting edge technologies around renewable energy generation and storage.

Buro Happold was commissioned by New Lab to help develop new innovations for the Brooklyn Navy Yard fostered by this growing offshore wind market. The maritime industry is evolving away from the fossil fuel industry and port assets that were once fallow are now in increasing demand to serve the renewable energy economy. Once stranded assets and relics of former shipbuilding days have the potential to be at the forefront of this new era of innovation.

Our team brought their industry expertise to assess the challenges of the site, such as the limitations posed by some aging infrastructure and the need for significant interventions to successfully reimagine and retrofit buildings and structures for proposed new roles.

Solution

Buro Happold’s team of experts identified the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s strategic advantages and conducted detailed economic modeling to highlight potential benefits of proposed interventions, including an analysis of the demand signals from the wider market to highlight the value of significant strategic initiatives to investors.

This process also saw our experts identify the public sector opportunities to align with municipal, state and federal goals, aligning public and private funding opportunities and coupling these to local workforce development. The vision was to create new, sustainable and well-paying jobs in the marine and urban environments. 

Our experts uncovered five innovative uses for the existing facilities at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which could allow the site to become a hub for the developing technologies around renewable energy generation and storage.

The proposals included green hydrogen generation and storage, port electrification with large-scale microgrid and battery development, repurposing unused docks and wet berths to host new prototype testing for offshore renewable energy, prototyping marine carbon capture and storage capabilities, and providing a ground-breaking testbed for 5G communication across the air-water interface.

It is envisaged that the growing array of wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean off the eastern seaboard will increasingly work on a largely automated basis, served by a fleet of autonomous vehicles, and connected by a 5G communications network.

Value

Our team brought a wealth of experience across a range of disciplines – including port and maritime, energy consultation, transport and mobility and economic modeling.

The result was a detailed proposal that showcased the opportunities for the Brooklyn Navy Yard to play a key role in the development of technologies that will be integral to sustainable energy generation in the coming decades as well as highlighting pathways to allow the client to tap into the key funding streams for the development of this potentially lucrative and critical industry.

It is envisaged that this transformation could regenerate this expansive dockland site and deliver many thousands of highly skilled jobs to the city’s economy. Buro Happold is continuing to support the client with the development of its vision, as well as working with other ports around the world to unlock their own unique strategic advantages.