Manhattan’s StuyTown, consisting of 11,250 apartments of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, will sport the largest collection of PV installations for a private multi-family development in the United States. The arrays on 56 buildings will total 3.8 megawatts (MW), covering 22 acres of roof area that will provide the equivalent electricity consumption for over 1,000 apartments.
A feature of StuyTown is that the buildings are master metered as opposed to individual meters for apartments and common areas. This enables maximum deployment of solar instead of a situation where the effective limitation for an installation in a multi-metered building would be for the common area only. StuyTown’s management and ownership, Ivanhoé Cambridge and Blackstone have been aggressive in employing a variety of energy efficiency measures and retrofits to control electricity consumption and costs.
Other green measures include building sited composting and water efficiency. These measures enabled StuyTown to attain ENERGY STAR building certification, the first New York City multi-family buildings to achieve this status.
The cost of the installation is $12.4 million dollars, coming out to about $3.26/watt. This is not a bad price for installations fixed on top of 15 floor buildings on one of the most expensive and regulated cities in the U.S. Fifteen floor buildings in Manhattan would normally suffer from shadowing by real skyscrapers, but StuyTown’s development is fortunately set far enough away from such taller structures.
The PV project is expected to be completed in 2019 and should result in a 6% reduction of energy costs, including the common areas. Onyx Renewable Partners is the project developer. The 3.8 MW addition will be about twice Manhattan’s present solar capacity, and would add about 4% to New York City’s PV portfolio.
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Solar power should be the number one project for housing in America. Until Federal legislation requires each state and our city should pass legislation let’s push it to require solar power to be included on all new residential and commercial buildings. Additionally there should be set a date by which all houses and buildings should have solar power that covers X percentage of the building’s needs based upon a five-year realistic study. There are Income Tax incentives federally already of 30%. Many companies already offer free installation in exchange for a percentage of the income from solar. Other options should be studied to make solar possible. Validator everywhere I go land owners should contribute a certain percentage but done in a way that does not interfere with the ecological system I’m good of the land. Cities such as Las Vegas should have a continuous building project to cover government needs for providing services to the city from street lights red lights plug-in lighting for building projects so that building can be done 24/7. Also to build a pipeline to relieve Hoover Dam from its water needs and drilling studies for water sources and recycling sewage and runoff water to replenish the city as part of City Planning.