Tag Archives: solar

Stuyvesant Town going solar

Nov9 solar rendering Stuyvesant Oval.jpg

Rendering of Stuyvesant Town as it would appear following installation of solar panels (Photo courtesy of StuyTown Property Services)

 

By Sabina Mollot

On Wednesday, Stuyvesant Town’s owners, Blackstone and Ivanhoé Cambridge, announced plans to install solar panels on all of the roofs in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. Additionally, they said, it will be the largest private, multi-family residential solar project in the country.

The 3.8 Megawatt (DC) solar energy system will span across the property’s 22 acres of rooftops.

According to the owners, once the project is completed, StuyTown will have tripled Manhattan’s capacity to generate solar power. Renewable energy developer Onyx Renewable Partners is the project developer for the installation, which is expected to begin this winter and be completed in 2019.

The installation will consist of 9,671 high efficiency solar panels and will generate enough energy to power over 1,000 New York City apartments annually. The project is expected to offset approximately 63,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, which is comparable to removing 12,000 cars from the road for a year.

“We are incredibly proud of the long-term partnership we are building with the StuyTown community,” said Nadeem Meghji, head of Real Estate Americas at Blackstone. “In 2015 we made a commitment to preserve StuyTown’s unique heritage and be responsible stewards of its future. This innovative solar project is one of many initiatives we designed and implemented to make the community more sustainable and environmentally friendly.”

A spokesperson for Blackstone added that there will be no major capital improvement rent increase for the project, and that early on in the new ownership, environmentally friendly projects were actually suggested by residents in response to surveys issued by management. According to the Wall Street Journal, the project will cost $10 million.

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Stuy Town gets city’s first solar-powered bus shelter

Mar24 Solar powered bus shelter

Solar-powered bus shelter at Avenue C and 16th Street (Photo courtesy of DOT)

By Sabina Mollot

The city has installed its first solar-powered bus shelter, with a location outside Stuyvesant Town picked as the place for a pilot program.

According to a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation, the project was being funded not by the city but a Paris-based company that runs outdoor advertising campaigns called JCDecaux. If the lighting works out well, the company will also pay for other transitions to solar panel-powered lighting at non-powered shelters throughout the city as part of a franchise agreement.

Currently, JCDecaux is responsible for 3,000 bus shelters throughout the five boroughs as well as 300 newsstands. The company is now in its 10th year of partnership with the city and handles installation and maintenance of street furniture.

Meanwhile, the new lighting outside Stuyvesant Town at the shelter on Avenue C and 16th Street comes two and a half years after an elderly woman was fatally struck nearby by a Con Ed truck. The woman, 88-year-old Stuyvesant Town resident Stella Huang, had attempted to cross the street in the dark.

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Letters to the Editor, Apr. 16

Apr16 Toon Hillary gray

Critical letter writers shouldn’t hide

Re: Letter, “Rude behavior should not be expected” by an author whose name was withheld, T&V, Apr. 9, which was written in response to a letter by Billy Sternberg, “What tenants can realistically expect,” T&V, Mar. 19. This was one of several letters that ran recently on the topic of disruptive, noisy neighbors.

“Hey, Billy, I don’t know if you’ve seen it but someone took a cheap shot at you in the Town & Village.”

“Yeah,” I shot back, “and they didn’t have the courage of their convictions to sign it.”

“That’s right,” my neighbor recalled with a look of surprise, “they were withheld names from Peter Cooper Village.”

A week earlier, ironically, another neighbor stopped me to ask, “Was that your letter in the Town & Village?” When I confirmed that it was, she said, “Thank you. Keep writing.”

More ironic, since the topic of the many letters to T&V was noisy neighbors, my neighbor who alerted me to the anonymous letter is the world’s quietest, and, he lives in the apartment above the woman who wants me to write more frequently. She’s elderly and frail. Neither of them can endure our area’s Saturday night revelry. You call security when you want to call. I’ll call them when I want to call. Disability exemptions; senior exemptions, rent guideline rollbacks, MCI rebates and vacancy decontrol are the critical, priority matters.

I can’t understand why T&V would publish anonymous “cheap shots” but I ask that they change their policy to not doing so. If mine is “one of the oddest letters,” my critics have ever read in T&V, please show us the others.

Billy Sternberg, ST

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