Workers secure solar panels to a rooftop during a SolarCity Corp. residential installation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S., on Monday, Feb. 8, 2016. SolarCity is scheduled to release earnings figures on February 9. Photographer: Sergio Flores/Bloomberg via Getty Images Bloomberg

This New York City project is taking a landmark step towards solar use in multifamily and the results will be in soon. The investors are expecting to generate six percent of the resident's energy use with the program, which will not only generate electricity, but will progress the residents thinking about energy use and production.

StuyTown Property Services (SPS), the manager of Manhattan’s largest residential property, will install a 3.8MW PV energy system across the eight hectares of rooftop space at the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.

The building complex on the east side of Manhattan in New York City is home to 27,000 residents and represents 1.7% of the population of Manhattan. The PV project will start development in the fall of 2017.

The rooftop project, which will be comprised of 9,671 solar panels, will be the largest private multi-family rooftop solar array in the US, tripling Manhattan’s current solar generating capacity.

Once complete in 2019, the rooftop project will generate 6% of the total energy consumed by StuyTown’s 110 residential addresses, or the equivalent of powering 1,035 New York apartments annually.

The PV project will be installed atop all 56 buildings in the development, with the solar arrays expected to have a 30-year lifespan.

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