Mammoth solar array coming to Stamford
STAMFORD — The developer of Stamford’s Harbor Point district is installing a rooftop solar array on its sprawling Silicon Harbor building that will be among the largest in Connecticut.
Building & Land Technology envisions more than 1,450 solar panels atop the former Pitney Bowes headquarters on Elmcroft Street, where it moved its office operations after spending $38.5 million for the building in 2015. BLT has yet to announce any tenants after touting the 470,000squarefoot building as an ideal home for technology companies, a year after a company executive told Hearst Connecticut Media that Silicon Harbor was attracting strong interest from businesses scouting new office space.
Commencing Harbor Point’s construction a decade ago, BLT is now inching the development’s footprint south toward Silicon Harbor, with the Allure apartments going vertical on the waterfront.
The Silicon Harbor solar panels will be sourced from LG and operated by Engie, a Parisbased renewable energy firm with its main U.S. office in Houston which traces its history to the man credited with developing the Suez Canal. In the first half of this year, Engie installed 1.3 gigawatts of solar, wind and hydroelectric systems globally. Its corporate clients include Stamfordbased Nestle Waters, which taps windgenerated electricity from Engie for facilities in Pennsylvania and Texas.
Neither BLT nor Engie provided immediate comment on the project in response to Hearst Connecticut Media queries.
With 2.7 gigawatts of photovoltaic installations in the first three months of this year, U.S. solar companies completed the most on record for any first quarter, crossing the 2 million mark, as tracked by Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association. The increase was driven by utility and residential installations, but SEIU and Wood Mackenzie said new community solar mandates in New York and New Jersey will help reverse declines in the market for commercial installations such as the Silicon Harbor project.
Connecticut and its two main utilities, Eversource Energy and Avangrid, offer multiple incentives, including a Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy program
that allows building owners to finance installations through future surcharges paid alongside property taxes, as opposed to loans.
After record installations last year, as of March, Connecticut was deriving about 1.5 percent of its total electricity from solar panels — nearly 590 megawatts, according to SEIU’s state affiliate, sufficient to provide power to all of the housing units in Stamford and Norwalk combined.
Property owners (including state government) have invested more than $1.6 billion to date in solar power generation across 35,000 installations, with Brookfield Properties having two of the largest in a 1.4megawatt array at its Brass Mill Center in Waterbury and an 800kilowatt plant at the Shoppes at Buckland Hills. Ikea’s New Haven store has a 940kilowatt system. The Silicon Harbor system would total nearly 590 kilowatts of capacity.
Even as owners of large buildings open their rooftops to solar, engineers continue to figure out ways to squeeze more juice out of any available footprint, including using a substance called perovskite that offers better efficiency and easier production than traditional, siliconbased panels. And emerging designs include dualsided solar panels that can absorb sunlight reflecting from rooftops in addition to the sky above, providing as much as an extra 45 percent juice from any single panel.