EnterSolar, a New York City-based provider of solar solutions to commercial enterprises, and ZWILLING J.A. Henckels announced the launch of an 850 kW solar project at ZWILLING's US headquarters in Pleasantville, NY. The rooftop solar array is expected to offset 100% of the company's grid-supplied power.

The ZWILLING project is among the first commercial buildings in the region to be designed and built with solar in mind, rather than retrofitted. ZWILLING worked at the outset with Gallin Beeler Design Studio to design a building that would have a low environmental impact. The project is expected to generate approximately 1 million kWh of clean electricity per year, it will also provide significant environmental benefits to both ZWILLING and the Westchester community, including the avoidance of almost 406,000 lbs of CO2 per year.

"Today, we mark the opening of our United States headquarters,” said ZWILLING J.A. Henckels CEO Guido Weishaupt. “By designing this building with significant green elements, we hope to demonstrate our commitment to sustainability not only to our employees and customers, but to our Westchester, New York State and the greater US community at large.”

This project, originated and developed by EnterSolar and its partner, TriState Solar Alliance, is supported by funding from Governor Andrew M. Cuomo's NY-Sun, a $1 billion initiative to advance the scale-up of solar and move the state closer to having a sustainable, self-sufficient solar industry. The project was the first project completed in New York State to take advantage of the NY-Sun Megawatt Block program for systems larger than 200 kW, which allocates MW Blocks to specific regions of the State, breaks those regional MW targets into blocks to which incentives are assigned, and awards incentives based upon the block in effect at the time.

The system is comprised of 3,264 Hanwha 260W Q-Cell panel and also incorporates 1,632 SolarEdge P600 optimizers which increase energy output from PV systems by constantly tracking the maximum power point (MPPT) of each module individually. Equally efficient, the power optimizers monitor the performance of each module and communicate performance data to a monitoring portal for enhanced, cost-effective module-level maintenance.