The sun shone on Morgan Stanley”™s office campus in Purchase ”“ with a light that could save money for the corporate tenant ”“ as executives from the financial services firm celebrated the completion of a construction project that has made Morgan Stanley a pioneer in its industry in New York.
They gathered recently outside Morgan Stanley offices at 2000 Westchester Ave. on a hill that overlooked a bulldozed 6-acre field formerly used for softball games. Arrayed there now are rows of solar panels ”“ 3,091 panels supported by more than 400 piers ”“ that convert sunlight into direct current electricity fed into the 725,000-square-foot office building in the town of Harrison.
The 820-kilowatt photovoltaic system will produce approximately 1,000 megawatt hours of electricity per year and supply about 5 percent of total electricity use in the building, where 2,900 Morgan Stanley employees work. The building also is headquarters for another major tenant, Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings Inc. James Cullen, vice president of Morgan Stanley corporate services, said the solar facility will supply up to 25 percent of the building”™s electrical needs during peak production in spring and fall.
No estimate of annual savings on power from the Consolidated Edison grid that solar generation will offset was available from Morgan Stanley. The company also did not disclose the cost of the installation project.
Morgan Stanley”™s project contractor, the German company Phoenix Solar AG, began construction in June. “It was just in time for the rainiest summer on record, unfortunately,” Cullen told a small crowd of Morgan Stanley employees at the recent ribbon-cutting ceremony. “The mud was not as bad as the rocks and boulders” that had to be cleared from the site.
Cullen said it is the first solar installation that Morgan Stanley has done with its own company as the user. For such a project, “We really don”™t have the real estate in Manhattan,” where Morgan Stanley has its headquarters. “It”™s just not viable.”
A spokesperson at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority in Albany said Morgan Stanley is the first large financial services company in the state to install a photovoltaic system of that size.
The project was partly funded by an incentive grant from NYSERDA”™s NY-Sun Competitive Photovoltaic Program to spur the development of customer-sited solar projects of more than 200 kilowatts. Grants are based on applicants”™ incentive bids in dollars per kilowatt-hour.
Peter Douglas, research and development director at NYSERDA, said the agency does not disclose the dollar amount of awards to Morgan Stanley and other private partners.
When creating the NY-Sun initiative, a public-private partnership, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo last year announced a goal to quadruple customer-sited photovoltaic capacity in the state this year from the level of 2011. Douglas told the Morgan Stanley crowd that 300 megawatts of photovoltaic power have been developed in the last three years in the state, creating 3,300 solar industry jobs.
Citing Morgan Stanley”™s role as a leading investor in solar projects and the firm”™s recent launch of its Institute for Sustainable Investment, Douglas said photovoltaic generation, once largely the realm of “true believers, today has become a rational decision for a broader market.”
John B. Rhodes, president and CEO of NYSERDA, in a prepared statement for the Purchase ceremony said the Morgan Stanley project is “a model that we hope other corporations will follow” to expand the state”™s clean energy economy and increase the availability of clean, renewable energy.
Morgan Stanley”™s corporate services division teamed on the Purchase project with the firm”™s commodities solar desk, MS Solar. MS Solar was started in 2009 as a separate business unit, said Martin Mobley, its executive director.
“Instead of doing 200-megawatt projects out in the middle of the desert, when we started looking at those larger projects we realized that solar is something you can slice and dice and put right at the user site ”“ distributed solar,” Mobley said. Morgan Stanley has been investing in those smaller generation projects, which often serve school districts, libraries and municipalities.
From California to Bridgeport, Conn., MS Solar has become a leading developer and financier of photovoltaic projects in North America, facilitating the development of more than 70 megawatts of distributed generation projects such as the 6-acre solar field at the firm”™s Purchase office. In Canada, MS Solar developed and financed 8.6 megawatts of solar power on commercial buildings in the Toronto area.
In 2012, MS Solar launched a “MySolar” program to fund residential solar leases and to work with companies integrating photovoltaic systems in homes in Arizona, California, Colorado and Hawaii.
The photovoltaic technology that is the focus of Morgan Stanley projects “is becoming more and more financially feasible,” Mobley said. “If you can save money from solar, the question then is, Why not?”
Though solar power in various forms previously “has come and gone” in the U.S., “I think it really has a lot of staying power right now,” Mobley said.
