NEW YORK — Mayor Adams teamed up with Comptroller Brad Lander on Thursday to announce a pilot program that’d bankroll rooftop solar panel installations for working class homeowners in the city — but funding for the initiative isn’t locked in yet.
The pilot, which is modeled after a proposal the comptroller has advocated for since his time as a Council member, aims to install solar panels at 3,000 homes in the city over the next five years, Adams and Lander said during a press conference in Brooklyn.
The subsidized installations, a component of a multi-tiered sustainability effort called PlaNYC unveiled by Adams, will be available for one-to-four-family homes owned by low-income New Yorkers, officials said.
The city is not setting an eligibility income cap for the program, but will rather focus on installing solar panels in “historically disadvantaged neighborhoods that are experiencing disproportionate impacts from climate change,” according to Adams spokeswoman Kayla Mamelak Altus.
Adams told reporters the solar pilot is the type of initiative the city can get to work on right away, unlike more complex components of PlaNYC, like implementing congestion pricing in Manhattan.
“There are things we can do now, like the solar job,” Adams said. “They are low-hanging fruit before we get to the top of the tree to accomplish what we want to accomplish.”
Still, funding streams for the solar panel pilot are not fully hashed out yet.
Mamelak Altus said the Adams administration expects the pilot to cost between $60 million and $100 million. The administration will apply for that cash from the federal Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created by Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act last year.
“Application will be submitted in coming weeks,” Mamelak Altus said.
The city government will chip in $1 million to fund marketing, planning and some staffing for the pilot, officials said.
Solar panels can help New Yorkers save on energy costs while contributing to lowering the city’s carbon footprint. Expanding the use of renewable energies is part of a string of actions the city has pledged to take to make good on a promise to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
Under an initial “Public Solar NYC” plan floated by Lander’s office last year, the city would set up solar panels on rooftops of 25,000 homes over the course of eight years.
Ultimately, the 3,000 homes set to get panels under the new pilot are a drop in the bucket as compared to the city’s more than 700,000 residential buildings.
Asked what he thinks of the administration only committing to 3,000 installations off the bat, Lander said the effort has to start somewhere.
“We are excited about the model, but we can’t scale it up to all 700,000 homes without making sure it works first,” he said.
The pilot rollout comes on the heels of Adams ordering budget cuts at all city agencies, belt-tightening directives that Lander and other progressive Democrats have vehemently opposed.
Adams, who has cited the need for spending cuts to fiscal concerns driven by the local migrant crisis, suggested the pilot is a significant achievement at a time of great economic uncertainty.
“In spite of the fact that we have to do [budget cuts], in spite of the fact that we are inundated with a national financial crisis, in spite of all of that, we are still focused on executing these plans that we think are important,” he said.
Environmental scientists say curbing the use of fossil fuels on a large scale in coming years is critical to avoid the absolute worst consequences of climate change. Still, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific body established by the United Nations, released a scathing report last year concluding that global temperatures are already increasing to such a degree that it’s too late for the world to avoid some devastating impact.
