The below excerpts are from an interview with Elizabeth Yeampierre and Lourdes Pérez-Medina of UPROSE:
This fall, Sunset Park Solar, New York City’s first co-operatively owned solar garden, will be installed on the roof of the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Community solar projects are growing across the United States, providing much more than renewable energy. Once connected, the almost-two-acre array will feed back into New York City’s energy grid. The value of this electricity will then be converted into credits, reducing monthly energy bills for the 150 Sunset Park households and small businesses who have signed up to be co-op members. Beyond conventional single-family home rooftop installations, the project is a model for urban solar generation that can reduce reliance on fossil fuels and the proportion of household income spent on energy, while creating new jobs on an industrial waterfront. It’s exemplary of everything UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, fights for…
Lourdes Pérez-Medina (LPM): It’s the first community-owned solar cooperative in the city. The partners — UPROSE, Solar One, and Co-op Power — all of us bring different expertise to the table. Solar One provides technical assistance and Co-op Power has the expertise about building a cooperative structure for solar. And then UPROSE is really the community roots and advocate for the development of community-owned renewable energy in Sunset Park…
Elizabeth Yeampierre (EY): We’ve spent years talking to New York City Economic Development Corporation about the property that they own on the industrial waterfront and how it can be used for renewable energy, climate adaptation, mitigation and resiliency — in short, advocating for using the industrial waterfront to address local and regional needs. We have suggested they not respond to the market, but create it. There are some people at the EDC who are seriously concerned about climate change and are trying to think creatively about how to strengthen relationships with communities, and how to do something that’s innovative and that can be replicated and built up to scale. So this is a great opportunity for the NYCEDC to engage in a community-led initiative that begins the work of realizing that larger vision. But this does not happen overnight. The market we need is one that addresses the use of regenerative energy and rethinks an industrial waterfront that is now faced with climate change.
LPM: There are also many conversations going on about collective ownership structures. The fact is that for community-based organizations to be able to tackle this kind of project, they need site control. In a city like New York, which is very real estate heavy, that is amazingly difficult. So, city-owned structures and city properties become a huge asset in this type of development…
LPM: Along with the community outreach for membership of the solar array, we’re also tackling outreach to get residents of Sunset Park to go through a jobs training program to enable them to be part of installing the solar array. Half of the people building and installing the solar array are going to be people that have gone through that jobs training program…
EY: For a long time there have been industrial activities that use a lot of diesel trucks. There’s the Gowanus Expressway, a lot of power plants. But unlike other communities that see them as a problem, we see them as businesses that can be retrofitted, repowered, made adaptable so that the workers are safer and healthier. We see them as part of the solution. The industrial sector, the businesses and the trucks, can be re-powered. We can have a waterfront where container ships can plug in. When people talk about offshore wind benefitting Sunset Park, they usually expect that parts would all come from Europe via ship, and the ship would be parked on the industrial waterfront. And we thought, well, what if instead of just assembling it here, we made it here? What if we get American businesses that make wind turbines to invest in these industrial waterfronts? If the parts come in from Europe and the ships anchor on our waterfront and spew diesel, climate solutions can become environmental justice problems.
— Posted by JVS on 4.16.19, backdated to 4.10.19
Sunset Park Reports 