On June 24, Sustainable CUNY and NYSEIA convened the clean energy community at John Jay College in Manhattan for the NYC Solar + Storage Summit, presented alongside NYSERDA and Con Edison. A full house of developers, installers, financiers, agency leaders, and labor partners gathered around a single throughline: solar and storage are now central tools for keeping New York City's grid affordable, reliable, and clean.
The day opened with remarks from NYSEIA President Dan Montante, CUNY Vice Chancellor Mohamed Attalla, and State Senator Pete Harckham, followed by a morning keynote conversation with NYSERDA President & CEO Doreen Harris, Con Edison President Matthew Ketschke, and CUNY's Tria Case on charting a path forward for the city's energy future.
From there, the program ran across three different tracks covering the issues defining the market right now:

• Energy storage moving from development to deployment: with more than half a gigawatt of community-scale BESS projects reaching interconnection and incentive milestones, the conversation turned to getting projects over the finish line.

• Public sector and Local Law 97: how city agencies, NYCHA, and CUNY are scaling solar and storage across municipal buildings, and how LL97 has become a real driver of deployment.

• Federal policy and project economics: a timely session on the latest FEOC guidance, the ITC, and domestic content and prevailing wage requirements.

• Flexible interconnection: findings from a new New York–specific EPRI study on how smart-grid controls can unlock gigawatts of cost-effective hosting capacity.

• Rooftop solar and cleantech innovation: how the industry is adapting to the federal incentive phaseout and high interest rates while NYC's cleantech ecosystem builds what comes next.

CUNY and NYSEIA presented their Solar Champion Award to Julie Tighe and the New York League of Conservation Voters in recognition of her work advancing solar and storage across the state.
Thank you to our presenting partners NYSERDA and Con Edison, our sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and everyone who joined us. The momentum was unmistakable — 2026 is shaping up to be the year of deployment.