2019 will be a big year for Brooklyn Solar Canopy Co.
The first Brooklyn Solar Canopy was installed just about three years ago on 12th Street in Park Slope. Since then, over one hundred have popped up on roofs all over Brooklyn, with a handful in other boroughs and cities. The pace is accelerating every month and following our debut exhibition at last week’s Solar Power International (SPI) in Anaheim, the world’s largest annual solar convention, we’re now poised to rapidly scale up our national network of partners in the very near term. As we look to partners in other markets far from the five boroughs we see enormous opportunities for the canopy to meet different needs and serve different functions, many completely removed from the local factors that made the canopy appealing and even necessary here in flat roof Brooklyn.
We learned a lot from the hundreds of visitors to our booth, and we are grateful for and inspired by the feedback.
Post-Anaheim, what was a hunch is now a certainty: we’ve only just begun to tap the potential of ground mounted applications, like residential car ports and backyard pergolas – utilizations that have caught on with homeowners, (particularly in Southern California) but for which the market has produced very few attractive solutions. With nearly every conversation we had at our booth we seemed to discover new possibilities for creative canopy deployment. Our canopy may indeed be niche, but we’re discovering very quickly that there are a whole lot of niches out there that it can fill; niches that conventional products and design and installation approaches simply haven’t even come close to addressing. This reality fully set in for us even before our Wednesday chat with an Ogden, Utah based installer who suggested that the canopy would be an optimal structure for an outdoor gas fire pit, apparently quite common in his area. “You could just leave out one module in the center, and pop the chimney through.” Needless to say, this was an opportunity that we hadn’t yet sized up back at the office in Gowanus, prior to SPI. And this is just one example of an installer walking by the booth, taking one look at the canopy and seeing a perfect solution for a very specific local demand.
We have no doubt that 2019 will be a big year for Brooklyn Solar Canopy Co. After SPI, it’s now much clearer that as the canopy takes root in different markets across the country, it will continue to evolve, solving new problems and enabling new use cases.
If you have an idea for how the canopy an meet your specific needs, please reach out and talk to us!