Simple installations and a financial ‘no-brainer’

Ronnie Mandler, CEO of Best Energy Power, has been installing solar panels in resi­den­tial build­ings across the city for the last 18 years. 

On the day he leaves rooftop sites where he has installed solar panels, Mandler jokingly tells customers, ​“I don’t ever want to see you again,” as a testa­ment to how well he expects his equip­ment to endure. This, he says, is because his company uses ​“top of the line equip­ment… because the return on invest­ment is so good.”

As prop­erty owners now work to get their build­ings in compli­ance with carbon emis­sions stan­dards laid out by Local Law 97 (LL97), it’s imper­a­tive that land­lords know exactly how much of their energy systems need to change.

One advan­tage of using a solar array to meet LL97 regu­la­tions is that it can shift some of a building’s energy consump­tion to a local­ized, renew­able source, thereby reducing its reliance on the central­ized elec­tricity grid without divesting from it entirely. 

Mandler describes the deci­sion to pursue solar energy as a renew­able energy invest­ment a ​“no-brainer” because of how much federal, state, and city funding is avail­able to subsi­dize upfront costs, and the technology’s quick return on investment. 

The actual process of installing solar is quite simple: ​“It’s like building one of those closets from IKEA,” said Ali Gul, the super­in­ten­dent of Bluestone’s Oakcrest prop­erty. He said it took five workers less than six hours to install the solar array, using a crane to lift the panels onto the rooftop and placing them atop pieces of roofing membrane, or slip sheets. 

“In case there’s any move­ment, they don’t damage the roof below,” owner Eric Bluestone chimed in. Then the panels are ballasted and weighted down with blocks. Wiring the solar array-powered elec­tricity to the building’s main elec­tricity meter took about two days, he said. ​“They didn’t make any trouble to anyone.” 

Once an array is installed, the next deci­sion an owner needs to make is exactly how they’ll tie it into a building’s existing elec­trical infra­struc­ture. Roy Garzon is a program manager at Solar One, a nonprofit that provides educa­tion and tech­nical assis­tance on sustain­ability projects in cities. He explained how build­ings that draw some of their power from solar energy can still remain connected to the power grid via an elec­trical utility through a process called net metering. 

Buildings can contain several elec­trical meters which respec­tively track different areas of the building. These meters measure and record how much elec­tricity passes through the building’s common areas and indi­vidual tenants’ apart­ments on a monthly basis, so that owners and elec­trical util­i­ties purveyors like Con Edison can keep track of how much elec­tricity the building uses and gener­ates. The power the solar array creates for the building can offset the cost of the power it consumes, reducing the building’s overall elec­tricity bill. 

Under Con Edison’s net metering system, land­lords need to connect a solar array to a single elec­trical meter in their building, rather than connect solar-gener­ated elec­tricity to several indi­vidual meters. As it turns out, this limi­ta­tion prevents many prop­erty owners from offset­ting even more of their building’s elec­tricity with solar, forgoing using solar to power tenants’ indi­vidual units. 

Choosing the path of least resis­tance at Oakcrest, Bluestone hooked the solar array to a general meter that powers common areas like laundry rooms, hallway lighting, the boiler, and elevators. 

“Wiring all those conduits, and filing with Con Edison, and getting approval from the DOB, and getting inter­con­nec­tion approval, it’s hard to do that,” Garzon explained. 

Another part of the process involves getting approvals from various agen­cies, like the Department of Buildings (DOB) and Con Edison. The DOB needs to approve pre- and post-project building and elec­trical inspec­tions. Then Con Edison will provide a permis­sion to operate (PTO) letter. 

“That’s basi­cally turning on the system and acti­vating the net metering accred­iting portion of the system,” Garzon explained. 

The key, Garzon explained, is to design a solar system big enough to offset all the elec­tricity usage of a desired area. In the case of Oakcrest, this meant the common areas.

The right solar installer will do this by analyzing historic trends of energy usage. ​“Usually, an installer will ask for data for 12 months of usage so they can get a full bell curve of winter and summer usage char­ac­ter­is­tics,” he said. Then the installer will tailor a design to that usage. 

“Basically, before the system is even built, the installers do a lot of due dili­gence to analyze the Con Edison bills, and actu­ally go on-site to look at the elec­trical service and confirm meter inter­con­nec­tion details and so forth,” Garzon said.