In the Bronx, community solar solutions conquer leaky roofs

The roof of Bronx native Emily Weisberg’s family-owned commer­cial building on the Grand Concourse kept leaking. Her family couldn’t find a defin­i­tive solu­tion — even after spending about $8,000 trying to fix it. 

Then came an unex­pected solu­tion: installing solar panels.

Fieldston Power, a renew­able energy company that develops rooftop solar projects founded by her husband Alex Weisberg and his partner Adam Zucker, replaced the roof at no cost to the building and installed solar panels that feed elec­tricity into New York City’s grid. 

The building now hosts a commu­nity solar project, a model where resi­dents and busi­nesses subscribe to a share of a solar array’s output and receive credits on their elec­tric bills. For the Weisbergs, partic­i­pating in New York’s growing commu­nity solar market also addressed a recur­ring main­te­nance headache.

“More than anything, my tenants are just happy that they don’t have a leak in the roof anymore,” said Emily Weisberg, who also owns the commu­nity staple Moss Café in Riverdale, about a 20-minute drive away. 

Subscribers to this commu­nity model can receive credits on their elec­tricity bill from a shared solar instal­la­tion without having to live in the building where the panels are installed: Moss Café subscribes to elec­tricity gener­ated by panels on the Weisberg-owned building, connecting the neigh­bor­hood busi­ness to the property. 

The project brings together two things she cares about: main­taining her family’s prop­erty and making sustain­able energy more accessible.

Cleaner build­ings 

Fieldston’s approach offers bene­fits for all parties involved; in exchange for hosting solar panels, owners get a new roof and discounted elec­tricity rates. On top of this, the city gets more solar on its rooftops as it inten­si­fies its efforts to cut emis­sions from build­ings, which account for roughly two-thirds of New York City’s green­house gas emis­sions. Local Law 97 (LL97), passed in 2019, requires most build­ings larger than 25,000 square feet to reduce their emis­sions, with stricter limits starting in 2030. 

In general, the city is on track to meet the ambi­tious goal set out by LL97. On Sept. 25, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s admin­is­tra­tion announced that about 95 percent of the roughly 20,000 privately owned prop­er­ties covered by the law had filed compli­ance reports, and that about 95 percent of those demon­strating compli­ance had met their emis­sions targets. These build­ings improved effi­ciency through methods such as improving insu­la­tion, elec­tri­fying HVAC systems, and embracing solar energy.

Weisberg’s building is smaller than 25,000 square feet, so it isn’t covered by Local Law 97. For her, the main draw was the roof.

“We saw the oppor­tu­nity back to Local Law 97 as a way to not only meet the city’s admirable inten­tion and goals of decar­bonizing the built envi­ron­ment, but as a way to recap­i­talize and rein­vest in these build­ings as well,” Adam Zucker, Fieldston Power’s co-founder, said. ​“Our model is to not only lease these roofs, but to provide these owners a fully financed and hassle-free solu­tion towards our Local Law 97 requirements.”

Still, rooftop solar does not auto­mat­i­cally bring a building into compli­ance with Local Law 97. Whether a partic­ular instal­la­tion helps an owner meet its carbon emis­sions limits depends on the property’s energy use, the amount of elec­tricity it gener­ates, and the rules applic­able to said building. Solar can contribute to a broader energy effi­ciency strategy, but it alone doesn’t neces­sarily offset other emis­sions sources.

How it works 

Fieldston, founded in 2024, leases the rooftops from building owners and finances the entire devel­op­ment, instal­la­tion, and oper­a­tion of the solar systems, including feasi­bility studies, equip­ment procure­ment, proper permits, and design. 

Once the solar panels are installed, the elec­tricity they generate feeds into the broader Con Edison grid, powering New York City. Fieldston makes money by selling those credits: subscribers pay the company less than the credits are worth, and the differ­ence is the amount subscribers save each month. The company also relies on state incen­tives and federal tax credits to cover its costs.

The company targets older multi­family prop­er­ties, many built in the 1930s and 1940s, where roof repairs can often be an expen­sive and recur­ring concern, but the ideal rooftop isn’t severely damaged either. ​“We do very exten­sive analyses of all of our projects before moving into permit­ting it,” Zucker said. ​“So we’ll assess the roof’s condi­tion from a mois­ture stand­point, from a struc­tural feasi­bility stand­point, from a condi­tion standpoint.” 

After the initial repairs, they install a light­weight, fluid-applied elas­tomeric membrane, which comes with a 20-year warranty. The final step is attaching the panels. 

For new projects, they gener­ally look for land­lords with port­fo­lios of multiple build­ings large enough to support an econom­i­cally viable group of solar instal­la­tions. The ideal candi­date has at least 100,000 square feet of rooftop space across a port­folio, with indi­vidual roofs around 7,500 square feet. Building dimen­sions, sunlight expo­sure, struc­tural condi­tions, roof mois­ture and obstruc­tions such as telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and cables can also affect whether a project would work.

Fieldston also screens prospec­tive prop­erty owners for their history of main­taining their build­ings, Zucker said, because the company expects to have long-term growing rela­tion­ships with the land­lords whose rooftops they lease. 

According to Zucker, the company has completed 73 solar system instal­la­tions, 71 of which are oper­a­tional as of the date of this publi­ca­tion, most of them in the Bronx. The rest are in final commis­sioning, and several hundred more are in early devel­op­ment phases. 

The company has already bought equip­ment for about 40 megawatts in a purchase made ahead of a federal tax-credit eligi­bility dead­line, as a way to preserve the ability to develop its future projects under the applic­able rules. Building those projects will cost an esti­mated $200 million.

The roadmap

In densely-popu­lated New York City, where the majority of resi­dents and small busi­nesses are renters, commu­nity solar offers a way for more people to partic­i­pate in carbon-free energy gener­a­tion without buying the infra­struc­ture. As of August 2026, New York City had 607 commu­nity solar projects, according to data from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA): less than 1 percent of all solar instal­la­tions in the city, but roughly a tenth of its solar capacity. 

The model works like this: Subscribers to a commu­nity solar project buy into a solar company’s array and receive credits on their elec­tric bills for the power gener­ated by their share of the project, usually at a discount of 5 to 20 percent. But that discount applies to the credits, not to the ratepayer’s entire monthly bill.

Each month, the elec­tricity produced by a subscriber’s share of the project is converted into a dollar credit that appears on their Con Edison bill and lowers the amount they owe for their energy supply. The subscriber then pays the solar company for those credits at a discount.

A subscriber with a $100 monthly bill, for example, might receive $60 in solar credits, meaning they owe Con Edison only $40 and $60 to the solar company. But with a 20 percent discount, they would actu­ally pay the solar company $48 for the $60 in credits. Their total cost would be $88, a savings of $12, or 12 percent of the bill. The discount applies only to the portion of the bill covered by the credits, not to the entire bill. Depending on the program, a subscriber either pays one consol­i­dated bill to the utility that includes their commu­nity solar subscrip­tion, or receives two bills — one from the utility with the credits applied, and another from the solar company for the discounted credits.

How much someone saves depends on how much of their bill the credits cover.

New York State also pays solar devel­opers extra to steer savings toward low- and moderate-income house­holds. Through NYSERDA’s Inclusive Community Solar Adder, projects receive addi­tional funding if they reserve at least 40 percent of their capacity for those house­holds and guar­antee them a discount of at least 10 percent. Projects that offer 15 or 20 percent discounts and meet other commu­nity-benefit require­ments, such as local hiring or commu­nity part­ner­ships, qualify for a larger incentive.

Zucker explained that Fieldston partic­i­pates in NYSERDA’s NY-Sun Program and that its projects are eligible for the Adder initia­tive: Approximately 60 percent of the power gener­ated by their systems is allo­cated to low-income subscribers, who receive a 20 percent discount through the program.

The chal­lenges

For owners of older build­ings, major projects compete for limited capital. Installing solar panels can create another source of clean elec­tricity, but the economics depend on each building, the partic­ular instal­la­tion, and the terms of arrangement. 

Although Weisberg’s building is almost 100 years old, she described the process as surpris­ingly straight­for­ward, taking about a year and a half from start to comple­tion. The leaks stopped, and both she and her tenants have seen a reduc­tion in energy costs — but not everyone is opti­mistic about commu­nity solar’s finan­cial benefits. 

McGowan Southworth, co-founder of Daisy Chain Energy, an AI-enabled soft­ware plat­form that works on energy systems, argues that most of the value from solar energy goes to whoever owns the project and favors models in which owner­ship — and the profits that come with it — stay in the commu­ni­ties that host the panels.

“I would argue that commu­nity solar doesn’t really save resi­dents a mean­ingful amount of money,” Southworth said, unless the commu­nity itself owns the projects. 

“I’m much more inter­ested in co-op living and co-op owner­ship,” McGowan said. ​“I think that when you’re selling those to a third party, ulti­mately most of that money goes upstream to a large head fund, large investors, high net worth, you know, people who don’t neces­sarily need a great deal.”

He also sees solar as only part of the solu­tion. Shifting when build­ings use elec­tricity away from the hours when the grid is most strained could matter more, he said. 

The model has its own set of chal­lenges: devel­opers must find suit­able rooftops, navi­gate permit­ting and grid connec­tion require­ments, finance instal­la­tions, and recruit customers to subscribe. Even when a project is finan­cially viable, delays or costly elec­trical upgrades can affect how quickly it proceeds, and grid-inter­con­nec­tion work can create substan­tial expenses.

Southworth described projects that required costly upgrades to existing elec­trical infra­struc­ture, illus­trating how expenses beyond the panels them­selves can compli­cate development. 

Fieldston faces another constraint: the avail­ability of expe­ri­enced workers. Zucker said the company has had lots of interest from land­lords and that financing has not been an obstacle. But the limited pool of qual­i­fied crew members on the instal­la­tion and engi­neering side and construc­tion contrac­tors able to handle the complexity and volume of rooftop projects in the city compli­cates things. Because the company awards contrac­tors several projects at a time, reli­able crews are essen­tial to its expan­sion plans.

The future 

Zucker expects Fieldston to continue to expand its solar port­folio signif­i­cantly in the coming years, whilst the company is currently exploring battery storage to comple­ment its gener­a­tion projects. 

Rooftop projects like Fieldston’s could offer one option for prop­erty owners exploring cleaner energy, but the model’s value depends on more than the panels. Their long-term promise will hinge on whether devel­opers can scale instal­la­tions, over­come labor and grid constraints, and demon­strate that the savings reaching subscribers are mean­ingful and transparent. 

For Weisberg, the project solved a problem she and her family had strug­gled with for years and allowed her café to partic­i­pate in commu­nity solar, but she sees a broader chal­lenge for New York’s aging building stock: ensuring envi­ron­mental improve­ments do not leave smaller prop­erty owners behind.

“We have to keep prop­erty in the hands of many,” she said. ​“That’s impor­tant and essential.”