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City-owned rooftops and parking lots are ripe for solar and battery storage, NYC comptroller says 24%
By Adam Daly15%
7/22/2026, 12:30:03 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Anchoring Bias, Optimism Bias, and Negativity Bias, with Confirmation Bias as the most egregious example at 12.3% saturation with 219 hits. Analysis detected 1,869 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,776 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 36.9% and a BS Rank of 24% (15,306 of 19,901 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 76.90% of the article peer group.
New York City owns nearly 15,000 parcels covering roughly 14% of the five boroughs, but as of 2025, only about 31 megawatts of solar power had been installed across 187 city-owned facilities, according to a new report from City Comptroller Mark Levine.
Levine is calling on the city to make better use of that sprawling real estate portfolio by installing solar panels and battery storage on more rooftops, parking lots, fleet depots and other public properties.
Rather than developing projects one site at a time, the report calls for the city to bundle them into a coordinated portfolio.
Levine’s office argues that the approach could attract long-term investors, lower financing and procurement costs, support electric-vehicle charging, and ease grid pressure during peak demand, such as summer heat waves.
“The July heat wave underscored the urgency of strengthening New York City’s energy resilience,” Levine said in a statement.
“Localized outages and emergency conservation measures showed why every neighborhood needs more reliable, distributed sources of power.”
The report highlights four properties to illustrate the possibilities: the parking lot next to Queens Borough Hall, the Orchard Beach parking field in the Bronx, the Staten Island Teleport campus and the MTA’s East New York Bus Depot.
Their rooftops and parking areas cover more than 3 million square feet, or about 69 acres — nearly five times the footprint of a 12-megawatt solar canopy being developed at Kennedy Airport’s long-term parking lot.
The four sites are conceptual examples and have not undergone technical feasibility studies.
The report does not estimate how much power they could produce, what construction would cost, or how long development would take.
At Queens Borough Hall, the report points to a 302-space municipal parking lot covering about 122,360 square feet, or nearly three acres.
A solar canopy could generate electricity without eliminating parking, while batteries could store power during the day and release it later, when electricity use tends to peak.
The power could be used at Borough Hall or help ease pressure on the surrounding grid.
A community-solar arrangement could also provide credits to nearby residents, affordable housing developments or nonprofit groups, though that would require further legal, financial and procurement review.
The Orchard Beach parking field is much larger, with more than 5,600 spaces spread across more than 1.8 million square feet.
Solar canopies and battery storage over even part of the lot could generate electricity and lease revenue, reduce peak demand and provide resilience benefits during emergencies, the report says.
On Staten Island, the report points to the roughly 81-acre Teleport campus, which is being transferred from the Port Authority to the city’s Economic Development Corporation.
The property has an electrical substation, data-center infrastructure, surface parking and about 31 undeveloped acres that could make it suitable for a larger solar-and-storage project.
The East New York Bus Depot belongs to the MTA rather than a city agency, but Levine included it as an example of how publicly controlled transportation properties could double as energy infrastructure as the MTA electrifies its fleet.
A National Renewable Energy Laboratory study for the MTA found that pairing electric-bus charging with properly sized solar and storage systems could cut utility costs by more than 35% and save about $15 million at a depot over 20 years, according to the comptroller’s report.
NYC's power grid under growing strain
Levine released the report after a punishing stretch of heat and storms that brought localized outages, voltage reductions and emergency calls to conserve electricity.
Con Edison reported 80,000 outages across the five boroughs between July 2 and July 3, according to Levine’s office.
The figure rose to 173,700 between July 2 and July 5 when Westchester County was included.
The strain included targeted service cuts and voltage reductions intended to prevent wider failures.
Con Edison said it temporarily cut power to nearly 10,000 customers in southwest Queens on July 3 and reduced voltage to nearly 400,000 customers in Brooklyn and Queens as crews made repairs.
Another roughly 148,000 customers faced a voltage reduction two days later.
Demand is expected to keep rising as buildings, cars and municipal fleets shift away from fossil fuels.
The New York Independent System Operator projects annual electricity use in the city could increase by 25% to 30% by 2050, from roughly 50,000 gigawatt-hours today to nearly 65,000.
Solar still supplies only about 1% to 1.5% of the city’s electricity.
New York City has about 641.5 megawatts of installed solar capacity overall, roughly 64% of its 2030 target, while 84 battery-storage facilities total about 115 megawatts.
Batteries do not generate electricity.
They charge when power is available and discharge when demand climbs, such as on hot afternoons when air conditioners are running across the city.
Pairing them with solar panels on public property could reduce peak demand, cut reliance on expensive fossil-fuel “peaker” plants and put off some costly upgrades to substations and other infrastructure, according to Levine’s report.
The report also comes as the Champlain Hudson Power Express remains offline.
The $6 billion transmission line entered commercial operation in May and was built to carry Canadian hydropower into the city’s grid in Astoria, Queens.
The 1,250-megawatt line can supply as much as 20% of New York City’s electricity.
It is expected to remain out of service through the end of July because of a cable problem, Reuters reported.
NYISO said it was not counting on the line to meet demand this summer even as statewide power reserves remained “extremely tight.”
Reuters also reported that the city relied more heavily on fossil-fuel generators as temperatures neared 100 degrees.
A July 14 NYISO assessment identified a 189-megawatt New York City power deficiency during the 2026 summer peak without the hydropower line having demonstrated its planned capacity.
That calculation assumed fossil-fuel generators on the Gowanus and Narrows barges would remain in service.
NYISO said grid operators would likely have to use emergency measures more often until other planned projects become available, including public conservation appeals, demand-response programs, voltage reductions, emergency power purchases and cuts to operating reserves.
The grid operator also found that the early July heat wave brought roughly two to three times as many generator outages in New York City and the Lower Hudson Valley as planners typically account for, along with several transmission outages.
NYISO said the conditions pushed the grid “well beyond established planning criteria and practices.”
Levine’s report describes the Champlain Hudson line and the forthcoming Empire Wind offshore project as essential, but warns that large transmission projects alone cannot solve every local bottleneck or reliability problem.
Battery projects face neighborhood resistance
Battery energy storage systems, known as BESS, have become contentious in several parts of the city, with proposed facilities drawing protests in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island over fire risks, their proximity to homes and schools, noise and a lack of community input.
One ongoing fight is in Middle Village, Queens, where NineDot Energy is pursuing a facility across from PS/IS 128 and near homes, a daycare center and an animal hospital.
More than 100 residents, educators, business owners and community leaders rallied against the project in June, calling for it to be moved to a less residential area.
The Department of Buildings said at the time that the application remained under review, although foundation work had been approved and permitted.
NineDot says the site would contain four Tesla Megapacks and meet FDNY requirements, including around-the-clock monitoring, heat-sensing cameras, fire-rated walls and systems designed to shut down overheating cells.
The company also says none of the more than 30 BESS facilities operating in the city has experienced a fire-safety incident.
FDNY officials have strongly defended the city’s oversight.
At a City Council hearing last year, Bureau of Fire Prevention Chief Thomas Currao called the department’s review system “the benchmark for the safety of urban energy storage systems,” pointing to full-scale fire testing, plan reviews and inspections.
Officials said industrial storage systems are highly engineered and fundamentally different from the uncertified batteries commonly associated with e-bike fires.
But hazardous-materials chief Joseph Loftus also acknowledged that firefighters may contain a battery-storage fire and allow it to burn rather than immediately extinguish it because trapped gases could create an explosion risk.
Levine’s report similarly credits the city and the FDNY with developing one of the country’s most rigorous battery-storage safety frameworks.
But it argues that lengthy reviews, changing technical requirements and limited transparency can slow projects and drive up costs, and calls for more predictable permitting without weakening safety standards.
Scaling up existing efforts
The city has already begun pursuing projects along those lines championed by the comptroller.
The Department of Environmental Protection is advancing a 10-megawatt solar installation paired with 10 megawatts of battery storage at its Wards Island wastewater treatment facility.
The Department of Citywide Administrative Services has installed a solar canopy at Rikers Island that supports electric-vehicle charging and sends power to the grid.
The city’s PowerUp NYC plan identified about 400 megawatts of potential battery-storage capacity on city-owned parking lots and vacant land, with roughly 300 megawatts already passing an initial agency review, according to the report.
However, Levine wants the city to move beyond those isolated projects and treat multiple properties as one coordinated portfolio.
The report calls for planning across city agencies and Con Edison and argues that bundling projects could attract private investment.
His report also backs City Council legislation that would direct the FDNY to establish an expedited permitting process for certain small and medium-sized residential battery systems while maintaining safety standards.
A separate proposal would require the city to identify municipal properties suitable for battery storage and set deployment targets for city-owned lots.
Interconnection poses another obstacle.
The report says Con Edison has paused new large-scale battery projects across 85% of its territory following a surge in requests, while restricting large connections and shifting attention toward smaller systems located behind customers’ meters.
Levine is also calling on the city to pursue available state and federal incentives and create a central “Direct Pay Dashboard” to track eligible projects and maximize federal reimbursements across agencies.
Eligible battery-storage projects can generally receive tax credits worth up to 30% of their costs through direct payments to municipalities, with additional incentives available for some projects, according to the report.
The proposal does not come with a price tag or construction timeline.
But an analysis cited in the report estimated that expanding solar and storage could deliver nearly $481 million in annual avoided energy costs downstate by 2035, with average annual savings of about $46 for residential customers - including those who do not own solar panels or batteries.
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