A Clever Canopy Brings Solar Power to Brooklyn at Long Last

GOING SOLAR IN New York is a hassle. Despite interest from residents and incentives that can cut the cost of a residential install by 75 percent, the city has been slow to adopt the technology—especially compared to the far reaches of Long Island.

Blame architecture, says T.R. Ludwig, co-founder of Brooklyn SolarWorks, a startup trying to bring solar panels to Big Apple rooftops. The market is vibrant, he says, but limited to pitch-roof, suburban-style homes. The brick and brownstone homes of Brooklyn and Manhattan tend to have flat roofs rife with obstacles like skylights, hatches, and HVAC systems. What’s more, city code requires a cleared pathway at least 6 feet wide and 9 feet high. It doesn’t help that panels on flat roofs are more susceptible to shading and tougher to position for optimal efficiency, which Ludwig says is a 33 degree pitch and pointed due south.

Overcoming these challenges required clever design. The Brooklyn firm Situ Studio created a canopy that elevates 2.5- by 5-foot photovoltaic panels (generating around 320 watts each) 10 feet above the roof. The panels are affixed to brackets and trusses mounted on 9-foot A-frame columns bolted to rails secured to the building parapets. Situ created a parametric system in which a canopy can be easily adjusted to suit each roof’s measurements. This ensures that the canopies adhere to city codes and makes fabricating them more efficient. This drives down cost, though it still isn’t cheap. A canopy of 15 to 18 panels—the size required to offset the 6,000 to 8,000 kilowatt hours a family of four consumes in a typical year—costs about $30,000. After incentives, most canopies that size costing closer to $7,000. “Payback on these things is typically about six years,” Ludwig says.

In New York, where space is at a premium, a roof often functions as a communal space, much like a yard. Therefore, Situ wanted the canopies to obstruct as little space as possible. “We imagine what happens underneath these things will vary greatly from home to home,” says co-founder Brad Samuels. “You have to imagine this as an infrastructure that primarily supports solar but also creates a new space on top of roofs. Every person will customize it a bit differently. That can’t be designed exactly, but it can be designed for.”

The canopies are sleek, but not discreet. They’re a conspicuous addition to the skyline. Ludwig considers that a good thing. “We think as more people go on their own roofs and they see their neighbors going solar with canopies, that’s going to add a viral effect to going solar,” he says. “That’s our dream of course.”