SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: 206 Sunny Days A Year Makes LI A Hotspot For Solar

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“I still get the same thrill as when I did my first solar installation in 1980,” Dean Hapshe was saying the other day. The sign that the energy being harvested by sunlight is exceeding what the electric grid is providing—“the utility meter going backwards”—is something that “screams independence.”

Hapshe is the veritable dean of solar power on Long Island. This has included teaching how it’s done to solar installers here—including at the State University of New York at Farmingdale and at Long Island Power Authority seminars. 

He headed his own company, Majestic Son and Sons, based in Medford, for many years. The firm is now merged with 70-employee Harvest Power in Islip Terrace. Hapshe is project manager at Harvest Power.

Some 26 years ago, he and his workers installed 38 photovoltaic panels on the roof of our century-old classic saltbox house in Noyac. Our cost for electricity since has a been a small fraction of the cost it had been pre-solar.

These days, a Long Island Power Authority rebate for a solar installation no longer exists. However, that has been offset by a huge drop in the price of panels and other material. That “cost has dropped 50% from what it was 20 years ago,” notes Hapshe. Moreover, there is a federal tax credit of 30% of the total installation price, and there’s also a New York State credit of 25% for up to $5,000 back.

Further, the efficiency of solar panels—the percentage of sunlight converted into electricity—has nearly doubled from two decades ago to now 20% and more.

Solar is quite affordable,” says Hapshe. An average residential solar installation producing 10,000 watts of electricity would cost $30,000 before tax credits and have a “payback” of seven years for the cost of a solar investment to being recouped.

“Long Island is a real hotspot for solar,” he says.

The area has favorable climate conditions for solar—an average of 206 sunny days a year. A factor, too, is the otherwise high cost of electricity here.

In Suffolk, its new top county official, County Executive Ed Romaine, is a big supporter of solar power. Earlier this year, he announced a “Solar-Up Suffolk” program to encourage solar power use by Suffolk residents and businesses. This included a Suffolk County Solar Fair held on Earth Day in April featuring numerous solar vendors and exhibits of local research institutions including the Advanced Energy Center at Stony Brook University, environmental organizations and county government departments.

And on other local levels, solar is being promoted.

For example, near where we live is what had been the Southampton Town landfill in North Sea. Not only was it on its way to becoming a garbage mountain—like the even bigger landfill in North Bellport. On TV and in print five decades ago I exposed how it was the site at which trucks came to dump cesspool waste. The town supervisor then, Martin Lang, was incensed by how this cesspool waste was being dumped on among the purest portions of the underground water table of Southampton.

That has long stopped. The site is now called a “transfer station.” And the town has embarked on constructing an array of 12,000 solar panels on top of the former now capped landfill through which 500 Southampton residents—selected in a lottery—will get electric bill discounts for using solar energy as part of a “community distributed generation” initiative. “This will be the first CDG municipality-led program on Long Island,” says Lynn Arthur, the energy subcommittee chair for the Sustainable Southampton Green Advisory Committee. 

It’s a far cry from being a site for dumping cesspool waste. 

The Nature Conservancy and Defenders of Wildlife have published a “Long Island Solar Roadmap” which says that solar power has “the potential to generate more electricity than Long Island uses each year.” Participating in drafting the “Roadmap” was a “consortium” of “38 stakeholders” that included people from: Sierra Club; Renewable Energy Long Island; Long Island Regional Planning Council; Suffolk County Legislature; Peconic Land Trust; Clean Energy of New York; Sustainability Institute of Molloy College; Long Island Power Authority; New York State Power Authority; Suffolk Community College; Land Trust Alliance; and individual towns.

It not only covers what can be done but recommends strategies for implementation. It’s available online. Its 127 pages are literally a roadmap to a sunny energy future for this area. The link is: /solarroadmap.org/ 

It begins by noting “the solar carport at the H. Lee Dennison Building in Hauppauge” and how it “twinkles in the sun” and how “the solar canopies there, laid out in rows above the parking spaces, have generated…carbon-free electricity all year round…” 

Solar power is critical in dealing with climate change. “The threat of climate change is not in the future,” said Romaine in announcing “Solar-Up Suffolk.” “We are experiencing it right now with more intense storms, worse and worse flooding events, and extreme heat in summer”—and this was before this record-hot summer. “There is no silver bullet, but I believe that solar energy is one key of the puzzle.”

Dean Hapshe went directly into the solar field after graduating from Boston University. His lifelong commitment, he says, “comes from years of realizing how beautiful this planet is.”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY at Old Westbury and the author of six books.