Thursday, October 1, 2026
On a hot July afternoon, when air conditioners across the South Shore kick into overdrive, Long Islanders feel it two ways: in the strain on an aging electric system and in the monthly bill that follows.
For IT professional Brian Leight, that moment came during his first full summer in his Long Island home.
“The first summer when I was running air conditioning and was in the home a little bit more, I looked at my electric bill and went ‘oh my God,’” he said.
Between $400-$500 heating costs in the winter to now $400-$500 electric bills in the summer, “you never get a break,” Leight added.
That realization — paired with repeated neighborhood outages tied to transformer overload — pushed him to look for something more reliable and more affordable. As an IT professional who works from home and runs servers in his basement, reliability is essential, and that’s where battery storage became critical.
“The independence is great,” Brian said. “It means I can still do my job when there's a power outage or there's a storm. It means I can also still have my fridge and my air conditioning running in the summer if we go out for any reason.”
Now, he said, “In the summer I probably use maybe 2% grid and you know 98% solar.”
Brian’s story reflects a broader shift happening across the Island. Long Islanders aren’t just looking for cleaner energy — they’re looking for stability. They want predictable utility costs, fewer disruptions during storms and a system that feels more within their control.
Jane Fasullo’s solar story started with a deep love of the outdoors — and a growing grief over what’s been lost. A Sierra Club advocate on Long Island, she remembers childhood summers in a tent on the sand, swimming in clear water and watching fish take the bait in the ocean below.
“I've seen that change, and I hate the loss of that experience. I think more people should be exposed to it,” she said. “I'm sort of in that position where I will do almost anything to try to get back the beauty of what we have and the richness of what we had.”
For her, solar felt like a tangible way to protect the air and water that shaped those memories.
Fasullo and her husband installed their first rooftop solar system in roughly 2006. At the time, electricity was about 13 cents per kilowatt hour, and they calculated they could pay the system off in roughly 17 years.
“That was okay because the panels would last 20 or 25 years, and we would have pure savings after that,” she said. The system ended up outperforming expectations and was paid off in less than 14 years.
As solar technology improved, they added a second system to their garage roof. Today, she says, the system is able to manage about 93% of their electric usage, even with a plug-in hybrid vehicle and additional electric features added to the home. For the remainder of their usage, they rely on the grid.
Through her solar journey, although initially fueled by environmental preservation, she’s found a huge benefit financially.
“You're not dependent upon the constantly increasing charges,” she said. “The cost of the sun does not go up. It's free.”
Solar panels paired with battery storage allow Long Island homeowners to store excess energy produced on sunny days, providing backup power during outages and on overcast days when solar production is lower. (Photo provided by Alliance For Clean Energy New York)
Long Island’s growth in solar adoption mirrors these personal stories. New York now ranks #1 in the nation for installed community solar, powering more than 550,000 homes and delivering 5–10% savings to subscribers. During the June 2025 heat wave, distributed solar reduced peak load by 5%, cutting statewide electricity costs by more than $90 million.
These experiences are part of a much larger shift happening across New York — and especially on Long Island.
New York now ranks #1 in the nation for installed community solar, with projects producing enough clean energy to power more than 550,000 homes and delivering 5–10% savings on electricity bills for subscribers. That growth isn’t just symbolic — it has measurable grid benefits.
The region’s grid is geographically isolated and heavily reliant on aging infrastructure and peaker plants that run during high-demand summer periods. Solar production aligns almost perfectly with those peak hours — sunny afternoons when air conditioning use surges — meaning local solar generation directly reduces strain on the system when it matters most.
“If you look at the heat dome that we experienced on June 24, 2025, you can actually look at the data for Long Island for Zone K, and you can see that solar and storage actually shaved our peak load 5%,” explained Carrie Meek Gallagher, CEO of the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA). “It really helped us have sufficient power supply because people were able to utilize solar and storage as opposed to the grid during those critical peak hours of 3-7 p.m.”
That 5% cut statewide electricity costs by more than $90 million. And the Island isn’t slowing down.
In January 2026, LIPA and Suffolk County announced a new partnership to evaluate large-scale industrial solar development across major business corridors, including the Long Island Innovation Park at Hauppauge, the Route 110 Corridor, Heartland Business Center in Brentwood, MacArthur Business Park, Brookhaven Rail Terminal and Wyandanch.
The initiative will analyze rooftop solar potential across industrial areas, assess grid interconnection capacity, and identify ways to streamline permitting and multi-building coordination. The goal is clear: deploy solar in a way that strengthens grid reliability, reduces operating costs for businesses and advances local economic growth.
Industrial rooftops — vast, flat, and often underutilized — represent one of Long Island’s greatest untapped clean energy assets. By taking a data-driven approach to scaling distributed solar across these corridors, leaders aim to reduce dependency on aging power plants while keeping affordability and reliability at the forefront.
That strategy reflects what homeowners like Brian are already doing on a smaller scale: generating power locally to reduce strain on centralized infrastructure.
“If everybody's generating for their own house, enough to the point where the strain during the summer comes off or the strain during a storm is lessened,” Brian said, “you'd be able to have fewer people screaming when power outages happen.”
For Long Island, solar leadership isn’t just about climate goals. It’s about practical resilience — lowering costs, strengthening infrastructure and building a more reliable energy future from the rooftops up.
