In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy, a tropical cyclone, devastated large parts of the East Coast. The Sunset Park sector of southwest Brooklyn, New York, long a working-class, Latine neighborhood, was hit particularly hard.
“After Superstorm Sandy, we had a community gathering in our old office on 22nd Street and the place was packed,” recalls Elizabeth Yeampierre, an attorney and executive director of UPROSE (United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park, in an interview with The Progressive. “I think it really landed on people that [climate] change was real.”
Those who showed up, Yeampierre says, set out to address four issues: energy, food sovereignty, drinkable water, and wellness. One of the initiatives that emerged as a result was Sunset Park Solar, New York City’s first community-led solar project, in which “priorities are set by people on the ground.”
Designed to serve zip codes 11220 and 11232 in Sunset Park, the project will lower electric costs for 200 families and small businesses, many of whom are still feeling the impacts of COVID-19. “There are also a lot of underlying economic problems right now in our community,” Yeampierre says.
Solar projects can be implemented by private corporations, by individuals, families or small businesses, and by community groups. With community solar, environmental activist Bill McKibben tells The Progressive, “Solar power is liberatory—it’s a way for communities to take control of their own energy destiny, which is precisely why the oil companies and their faithful servant Trump hate it so much.”
John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, echoes McKibben’s assessment. “I think community solar is terrific,” he says. “It is something our organization has long been committed to.” He identifies three underlying reasons that community solar is important.
First, “community solar can be deployed very quickly compared to larger-scale power facilities.” Second, “it can be placed in places or areas of the grid without having to wait for a big infrastructure upgrade because it is smaller and more modular than larger-scale power projects, thus it doesn’t require a lot of grid upgrades.” And third, “it allows people who couldn’t get solar on their own property because they rent or don’t have the up-front investment to get utility bill reductions by subscribing to community solar projects.”
Farrell notes that, in Minnesota, for example, there are now 25,000 subscribers of community solar, which “includes individual families but also public institutions, cities, libraries, and other entities that are able to reduce their bills and have more money for public investment.”
As of June 2024, the United States had more than 3,400 installed community solar projects generating enough energy to power about one million households. New York leads the nation in community solar capacity, with more than 1,300 projects built as of March 2025.
Sunset Park Solar is a 685-kilowatt solar project now being built on the rooftop of a building in a city-owned industrial park. It’s a joint venture of UPROSE, NYC Economic Development Corp., Working Power and Sunlight General Capital. Sunset Solar says participants can get a 20 percent discount on their utility bill.
Yeampierre notes that each subscriber-member of Sunset Park Solar has a vote in deciding how to invest the group’s resources, including any operating profit from the solar installation. The profit can be reinvested in additional solar projects, used to launch complementary energy efficiency campaigns, or distributed to members as dividends. The group convenes regular meetings that are open to all members.
Since concern about global warming emerged as an issue in the 1970s, the United States has been on a virtual roller-coaster coming to terms with this world-changing development. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof, initiating a new era of non-carbon energy awareness; in 1986, President Ronald Reagan had the panels removed.
In 2015, 195 countries, including the United States and China, signed onto the Paris Climate Agreement seeking to limit global surface temperature increases; in 2021 and again in 2026, Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement.
Trump is a dirty politician—not only in the sense of the offensive behavior and corruption that defines his presidency, but also in terms of his commitment to oil, gas, and coal that drive climate change and global warming. Upon beginning his second term in January 2025, Trump declared, “My goal is to not let any windmill be built.”
Trump has moved to end the development and deployment of renewable wind and solar energy facilities. According to a recent analysis in The New York Times, the Trump Administration has obstructed “[m]ore than sixty large wind and solar farms under development on federal lands” by denying and stalling once-routine federal approvals.
Farrell argues that Trump “is trying to encourage the maintenance of existing coal plants and keep them running even after they’ve been planned to be shut down. We are really going backwards right now and in a way that is, financially, very harmful to most American consumers. We are going to be paying more for electricity that is dirtier. We are going to harm projects like community solar and that could have helped people not only in terms of electricity costs but have solar on their roof or community projects.”
Yeampierre concurs: “I think the administration has expressed the fact that they are interested in accelerating climate change. They are investing in fossil fuel companies [and] have engaged in taking away all the protections that we have fought for for generations—that is, air quality, safe food, natural systems, clean and restored oceans.” She adds, “These policies have been stripped to their core.”
Community solar projects are a way to bring some of that lost power back, in more ways than one.