With the flip of a switch on Monday, Village of Lake Success Mayor Ronald Cooper signaled the completion of his community’s nearly four-year long effort to stay on the cutting edge of the nation’s growing green energy movement.
During a ceremony at the village community center, Cooper joined with residents and several local public officials to commemorate the installation of two solar panel electric systems operating on Lake Success municipal buildings.
“This is a project that we really all can be very proud of,” Cooper said.
The solar panels, which are mounted on the roofs of the village community center and department of public works building, were made possible through a pair of federally funded stimulus grants totaling $50,000 administered by the state Energy Research and Development Authority.
When Cooper and village environmental commission committee member Rosalind Zitner flipped the switch to turn the solar panels on, the pair hoped to have initiated a system which will not only help the village conserve electricity and money, but also educate residents and other local communities about the importance of green technology.
“We hope that the solar installations here will inspire other municipalities to embrace this and other technologies to help reduce operating costs, as well as providing the kind of renewable energy that will help our environment and in a small way help to reduce our dependence on oil as our basic source of energy,” Cooper said.
The project to secure solar panels for the village began with a suggestion by Zitner to Lake Success Board of Trustee member David Milner, who chairs the village’s environmental commission.
“I’ve introduced many ideas to the commission,” Zitner said. “This is the first one that has really been brought to fruition. So I’m very proud.”
From there, village office manager Carol Pogrell was instrumental in assuring the grant was completed.
Beginning in October of 2008, she researched opportunities for the grants, which ultimately resulted in Long Island company Sunation installing the solar panels.
“We should think about solar panel power as another way to embrace the growing green goals of the village,” Cooper said. “We hope that our residents will become more knowledgeable about solar energy and see it working for their benefit.”
The ceremony included appearances by U.S. Congressman Gary Ackerman (D-Roslyn), Town of North Hempstead Supervisor Jon Kaiman and Nassau County Legislator Judi Bosworth (D-Great Neck).
“Something like this really doesn’t just happen,” Kaiman said of the solar panel system. “There’s community after community, village after village, town after town that might think about getting a grant such as this. Very few actually have the ability and wherewithal to get to this point.”
“This is some community,” Bosworth said, echoing Kaiman’s sentiments. “This is a village that knows how to do it, that has elected officials that are working as hard as they possibly can.”
“Lake Success is a model community for incorporating solar panels,” she added. “The hope is that it will go from municipality, actually into our private homes (so we can) continue to do whatever we can so that we are becoming less and less dependant upon foreign oil.”
Ackerman also praised Lake Success for its forward thinking in regards to energy solutions.
“These are federal dollars, the stimulus money, that’s come back, that’s put people to work, that’s going to benefit this community specifically and hopefully inspire other communities to do the same,” the congressman said.
Lake Success’s 70,000-watt solar panel system is broken into three different sites, two at the community center and one at the department of public works building. The 302 modules, which are incorporated into the system have a 25-year warranty and should be in operation for more than 35 years, Sunation President Scott Maskin said.
“This building did pose some challenges because there is a historical significance to the building,” Maskin said. “It was a long project that we worked on with Carol and Mayor Cooper. It will more than pay itself off. It’s a perfect machine up there. It doesn’t require any maintenance, rain washes it and all it’s going to do it provide trouble-free electricity for the town and the incorporated Village of Lake Success.”
The solar panels were manufactured by SunPower. Over the course of their operation, the panels will generate about 2.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity, Maskin said.
“This is a grid-tied, net-metered system, meaning that every kilowatt hour that is produced goes into the grid,” Maskin said. “At night time, they draw electricity out of the grid. During the daytime, they put electricity into the grid.”
And that electrical output should be very beneficial to the village.
“In effect, you have you’re your own little power plant now,” Maskin said. “Right now (Long Island Power Authority) has somewhere around 4,500 individual power plants through solar on Long Island. What we need is about 100,000 of them.”
With the solar panels now in use, the village can expect to offset a “significant amount of electrical consumption” for the community center, along with between 80 and 90 percent of the electrical usage for the department of public works building, Maskin said.
“This building has a gymnasium and a kitchen,” he said of the community center. “There’s a tremendous electrical load here. I wish he had another 400,000 square feet that we could load up with modules.”
The feeling was certainly mutual for Cooper.
“This contractor performed admirably well and brought the project in under the grant award, which saved the federal government some money,” Cooper said. “(Sunation was) most helpful in solving some difficult issues concerning the multiple roofs of the buildings.”
Reach reporter John Santa by e-mail at jsanta@theislandnow.com or by phone at 516.307.1045 x203
