How I Grew To Love The Aesthetics of Rooftop Solar
I worried my panels would be ugly. Now I think they look awesome
That picture above?
It’s the solar array on the roof of my house in Brooklyn.
When I first had them installed four and a half years ago, I worried they’d look terrible.
It’s partly because they’re jacked up high in the air like that. In Brooklyn — where the houses have flat roofs and are joined together — fire regulations require that roofs have plenty of clear space for firefighters to move around. If you want to have a lot of panels (and I did), you need to have them raised up high so firefighters can walk around beneath. (The “canopy” design is by Brooklyn SolarWorks, my installer.)
Back in 2018, I definitely wanted a solar array; prices had dropped and electrical yield had risen so much that I could amortize the panels in about seven and a half years, so after that — dirt-cheap energy with a dramatically lower carbon footprint! (And a significant boost to the value of my home.)
But the look of the panels? Eh. I worried it’d look like a weird Meccano contraption stapled to the top of my building. Cool engineering, to be sure, but … fugly.
