Battery Park City seem to have a disproportionately high number of residential buildings with solar panels. The best example of this is Riverhouse, which has a tall crown of solar panels that move throughout the day to maximize energy production. I wonder if buildings in BPC do this to try and partially offset their high land lease fees?
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I think its a matter of roofop solar becoming more and more viable and it seeming to be an upward trend at the time.
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Building on BPC required strict adherence to all sorts of regulations about # of units, massing and height of buildings, window and brick color, etc… one of the major components of the developer rulebook was environmental codes which from the 2000s onwards included an LEED certification requirement. A lot of these buildings have all sorts of water recycling systems and green roofs…
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For buildings like Riverhouse and Solaire, I seem to recall reading that the solar panels produce only a tiny fraction of the buildings’ energy needs. Perhaps it’s this failure of solar in BPC to reduce residential buildings’ use of non-renewable energy and lower residents’ utility bills even when you coat the sides of the building with solar panels that helps explain why solar has not been more widely adopted in Manhattan.
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