The New Solar Economics

With the highest energy costs in the continental United States, New York City would seem like fertile ground for exploring alternative sources of cheap energy. And, increasingly, it is. Consider the recent rise of solar power.

A decade ago, there was one megawatt of solar power operating in the city. Today, thanks to high energy costs, the declining cost of solar installations, and the abundance of grants and incentives, that number has mushroomed to about 80 megawatts, enough to power more than 21,000 city residences. An additional 2,844 solar projects are currently in the works. Solar proponents are now pushing hard to sign up multi-family dwellings, including co-ops and condos.

“We’re at the tipping point,” says Laurie Reilly, communications director for Sustainable CUNY, the leading implementer of solar initiatives in the city and state. Sustainable CUNY was founded a decade ago to help eliminate the barriers – physical, financial, and bureaucratic – that once prevented New Yorkers from harvesting the sun’s energy. “We’ve gone beyond the early adopters,” Reilly adds. “People are shocked to find that the payback time can be just five to seven years, depending on the size of the installation.”

Sustainable CUNY has built a comprehensive, user-friendly website called the New York Solar Map and Portal that can educate co-op and condo boards about costs, tax breaks, financing options, and reliable installers. The site allows users to type in the address of any of the one million buildings in the city and get an immediate reading on solar energy’s viability for that particular property, including roof area, sun exposure, and shadows caused by trees, buildings, and other obstructions.

One factor in solar’s rise in the city is the growing army of facilitators – organizations that put homeowners together with installers and help negotiate the dense thickets of red tape, including filings, tax breaks, and other incentives. Chris Neidl is the director of Solar One’s "Here Comes Solar" (HCS) initiative, which is working to expand on its success with owners of one- to four-family homes and break into the vast – and still largely untapped – multi-family market.

“In New York City,” Neidl says, “the challenge now is to figure out how to make solar work for the predominant housing arrangement we have in the city – multi-family buildings with flat roofs. That’s our mission.”

With 72 contracts signed in Brooklyn, HCS is turning its attention to lower- and middle-income neighborhoods in central Brooklyn and Manhattan that would especially benefit from reduced energy costs. Neidl is working to get several clusters of neighboring limited-equity co-ops to join the program by the end of this year.

“The formation of groups of buildings is important for two reasons,” says Noah Ginsburg, HCS’s multi-family program manager. “You get more competitive pricing [on installations], and there’s a greater sense of comfort in a collective decision. People don’t want to walk alone into the unknown. Also, solar energy reinforces what affordable housing is all about.”