A roof that gave out early is now generating Adelphi University's power. The university said this week that a 295-kilowatt solar array, 546 panels covering the roof of its Center for Recreation and Sports, is fully energized and feeding the Garden City campus, and that the project required no up-front capital from the school.

The university projects savings of $20,000 to $26,000 a year on electricity, roughly $600,000 over the life of the agreement, enough to cover what the roof replacement itself cost.

A problem that became a project

The story started with a failure. The roof over the recreation center wore out ahead of schedule, and the company that made it had gone out of business, leaving Adelphi with an unplanned replacement on its hands in 2022.

Rather than simply re-roof, the facilities team led by Robert Shipley, a 2005 Adelphi graduate who is now assistant vice president for facilities management, proposed pairing the replacement with a solar installation, so the new roof would go up once and earn its keep for two decades.

Adelphi brought in SolarKal, a solar advisory firm, to evaluate the site and run a competitive selection, and the university's trustees chose Greenskies Clean Energy to develop, build, own and operate the system. Installation began in July 2025 and worked through weather delays from a severe Long Island winter before the array went live this fall.

How the money works

The structure is a 20-year power purchase agreement. Greenskies owns the panels on Adelphi's roof and sells the university the electricity they produce at a discount to PSEG Long Island's standard rates. Adelphi puts up no capital, buys cheaper power for 20 years, and the projected savings over the term effectively pay for the roof that made the project necessary in the first place.

Campus operations vice president Carol Ann Boyle's team worked the project alongside Greenskies project delivery director Carson Mislick and SolarKal co-founder Neil Sharma.

Part of a longer campus pattern

The rec center array is the largest solar installation on the 75-acre campus, but not its first. Adelphi put a 50-kilowatt array on Swirbul Library in 2011, installed a two-megawatt cogeneration plant in 2016, and has run geothermal heating and cooling in one residence hall since 2003, a system that cut that building's electricity use by about 30 percent.

The university regained official arboretum status in 2025 and was included in The Princeton Review's Guide to Green Colleges the same year. A new sustainability committee launched this fall, and the school says it is studying additional arrays on the Hy Weinberg Center for Communication Disorders and the Angello Alumni House as part of a $55 million campus modernization plan that includes a data center upgrade, new windows and new heating and cooling in Hagedorn Hall.

For Garden City, the village that hosts the campus, the quiet fact in the announcement is that the panels went up without a tuition dollar behind them: the failed roof got replaced, the power got cheaper, and the bill went to the sun.

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