It will be a sustainable building milestone: a structure that generates every watt of power it needs from a 96-kilowatt (KW) canopy of solar panels, perched like a beetle’s black carapace above its roof. Ground source heat pumps will warm the structure, called Solar 2, in the winter, and heavily insulated walls will keep hot air out in the summer.

Solar 2, a green energy education center for the nonprofit group Solar One, won’t be built in the Sunbelt or in an off-the-grid national park. Instead, it will occupy a contaminated landfill site on Manhattan’s East River, near some of the most densely packed streets in the world. Solar One is currently raising money to construct the $12 million building, which has qualified for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum award from the U.S. Green Building Council.

Less than 20 years ago, a “net-zero energy building” building wouldn’t have stood a chance on New York’s mean streets, according to Gregory Kiss of Kiss+Cathcart Architects, the building’s designer. At the time, buildings outfitted with photovoltaic solar panels — called building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) — were coming into vogue in California and Northern Europe, but New York developers and homeowners wouldn’t bite. Solar panels were too expensive, there were no financial incentives to installing them, and the approval process was cumbersome. It was, in some circumstances, even illegal to install solar panels on a building and then try to connect to the grid, according to New York energy experts.

Times have changed.

“Now every project [we design] that is highly sustainable is right in New York City,” said Kiss.

An increasing number of high-profile projects, from commercial high-rises to mixed- and low-income housing in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, are putting solar panels in every conceivable spot: on rooftops, in vertical walls, and inside the skins of buildings. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and the federal and city governments offer incentives and rebates for installing solar panels but architects and developers say the drive for green architecture goes beyond the financial. Developers at some buildings, such as The Solaire in Battery Park City, see solar as a selling point for the (mostly affluent) buyers they seek to attract. “At The Solaire, they were very conscious about creating a solar entry canopy,” according to Marissa Vaish, a senior project manager at RELAB, an energy consultancy that designed the building’s solar power systems.

In the past five years, solar photovoltaic capacity in the Big Apple has almost quadrupled from about 1.5 megawatts (MW) to 5.7 MW, according to a recent report called New York City’s Solar Energy Future (pdf). The growth rate is accelerating and the city could add another 45 to 70 MW of solar capacity by 2015, according to the New York City Solar America City Partnership. (New York utility Con Edison claims 1 MW can power 1,000 homes.)

“We’ve doubled the amount of solar in the city in the last year alone,” said Tria Case, the university director of sustainability for the City University of New York, and the lead for the NYC Solar America City Partnership, which coauthored the report. “I have not heard of any other city with that percentage in growth.” *

New York, a city so gray that Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev once remarked, “it would make a stone sick,” might seem like an unlikely spot for a solar awakening. It still has only half the installed solar capacity of medium-sized California cities. But experts say the city’s high electricity prices and moderate sunshine makes it, in some ways, as good a spot for solar as sun-soaked Arizona.

Solar panels in New York get the most sun at the height of summer, when the air conditioning is cranked up, according to Richard Perez, a professor at SUNY Albany and a leading authority on solar power in New York. Thus, solar power can provide the most electricity when the pressure on the power grid is at its peak. This so-called “peak shaving” has two main benefits: it makes the grid less susceptible to blackouts, which cause around $100 billion in losses a year nationwide, Perez said; it also makes the city less dependent on peak power, which is dirtier because utilities must use carbon-intensive fuels such as coal and natural gas to generate the extra load.

“Because of its electrical demand profile, [New York] is probably one of the best places in the country and the world to take advantage of this capability,” Perez wrote in a 2008 study (pdf).

The public and private sectors first began waking up to New York’s solar possibilities toward the end of the last century. In 1999, the Battery Park City Authority —which controls development near the city’s southern tip — began requiring new buildings to generate 5 percent of their power from renewable energy. Since 2003, eight residential buildings there have incorporated 361 KW of photovoltaic solar panels. New York’s laws have also gradually changed to allow for “net metering,” which means the electricity dial will spin backwards if a solar installation produces more power than the building can use.

But solar’s true breakout moment arrived with the completion in 2000 of 4 Times Square, otherwise known as the Condé Nast Building. The soaring tower, the 12th tallest in New York, was developed by Douglas Durst, a Toyota Prius driver who was seeking a “smarter, more intelligent way to build.” The structure incorporated thin-film solar panels from the 37th to the 43rd floors, along with other sustainable energy features.

Still, not everyone is impressed by the “green” skyscrapers and buildings that 4 Times Square heralded. David Owen, the author of “Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability”, notes that 4 Times Square’s solar panels, which can generate a maximum of 15 KW of power, “are really just for show.”

“What people always say is that less than 1 percent of the [building’s] power comes from the panels,” said Owen, who is a staff writer at The New Yorker, which is located at 4 Times Square. “I assume that’s just a euphemism for zero percent. It’s not a good place for solar panels.”

Owen believes that packing buildings with people, increasing insulation and installing efficient heating and cooling systems do more for the environment than packing solar panels and other sustainable features on a building. People, he adds, are just trying to consume and spend their way out of the climate problem instead of making hard choices to conserve power. “It’s a way of looking busy on the environment without actually doing anything,” he said.

Anyone who is really interested in solar power should look to increase utility-scale projects, not put a few solar panels on buildings, he said.

Architects of sustainable buildings counter that even relatively small installations can make a big difference when they are installed on thousands of structures. “It’s the cumulative benefit of these things that people forget,” said Robert Garneau of Grimshaw Architects.

Grimshaw, along with Dattner Architects, designed Via Verde, a $100 million, mixed-income housing development in the South Bronx that is currently under construction and slated for completion in 2012 (see accompanying story). The building will use horizontal and vertical solar arrays to generate 66 kW, or about 15 percent of the electricity needed for the building’s common areas. The vertical solar panels on Via Verde leave flat spaces open for “green rooftops,” and the installation is projected to pay for itself in about 15 years.

Granted, the path to a solar New York isn’t bramble-free, particularly for small installations on home rooftops. High installation costs and a complicated permitting process involving separate approvals from the city’s department of buildings, the fire department, and local electric utility Con Edison, have limited growth. The permitting process in New York City, for example, can add up to $8,000 to the cost of solar installations, according to a CUNY study.

But city agencies and the utility Con Edison are now aiming to reduce the permitting process to 100 days, and are creating a single web portal for applications. A raft of other initiatives are focused on lowering installation costs, creating financing options, and easing connection to the grid. CUNY, which works with a coalition of city and state agencies, along with the federal Department of Energy in the New York City Solar America City Partnership, is also creating a solar map of the city, due out in June, to show building owners where solar panels can go.

And while not every building can be Solar 2, advocates of solar in the city argue that there’s no reason New York can’t be the prototypical solar city.

“One’s aspirations should go as far as they can possibly go,” said Gregory Kiss. “A building should have a real positive contribution to the environment.”

*Tria Case’s title was corrected on April 15.

Top image: Courtesy Flickr user ChrisGoldNY