We’ve had solar power at our house for two decades now, and it remains a bonanza. The thing about solar energy is that the sun sends no bills. The 38 photovoltaic panels on the roof provide all the electricity we need.
Thus, I was sorry to read the article in Newsday last month headlined: “Solar Energy Company Closing.” The piece was about EmPower Solar, “one of Long Island’s largest” solar installers, “winding down operations.”
The article by Mark Harrington, who covers energy issues for Newsday, reported David Schieren, founder and chief executive of the Farmingdale-based company, saying “the ‘most acute’ factor influencing the decision was the Trump administration’s decision to end a 30% federal tax credit for residential rooftop applications at the end of 2025.”
“We just didn’t have any sales after that ended,” Schieren said, and thus, “We couldn’t continue operating our business.”
The company, “founded in 2003, once had annual sales volume of $45 million and 150 employees,” related the article. “It has installed more than 5,000 solar rooftop systems.”
An ironic element of the situation was the report, also last month, from Ember, the energy think tank based in London, announcing: “According to new data from global energy think tank Ember, the world installed a record 814 GW of new solar and wind capacity in 2025, 17% more than in 2024 (696 GW).”
“The latest additions bring the combined global installed capacity of wind and solar to 4,174 GW (over 4 TW),” it went on. (One GW, or gigawatt, equals a billion watts. A TW equals a trillion watts.)
“Solar,” said Ember, “accounted for the majority of new capacity additions, with almost 4 GW of new solar added globally for every 1 GW of wind.”
Or, as an article by Reuters also last month reported: “Renewable power made up almost 50% of the world’s electricity capacity last year after a record increase in solar installations.”
Making things still more incongruous with the closure of EmPower Solar was a piece by New York State Senator Pete Harckham of Westchester County in an Empire Report in January, headed: “Solar Energy is Our Best Bet in Fight Against High Utility Bills.”
“One of the biggest news stories of the year [2025] was the rising utility bills across the country—and with no end in sight for more increases. Electric bills nationwide jumped 9.6% on average this past year,” Harckham wrote. “That’s why utility customers—both households and municipalities—searching for a less expensive and more reliable form of energy are turning to clean, renewable energy sources, especially solar.”
The 30% federal tax credit for a residential solar installation was originally enacted by Congress in 1978. We were able to avail ourselves of it when we had solar installed on the roof of our century-old saltbox house in Sag Harbor. Also, there was a New York State tax credit of 5%—with a limit of $5,000—that continues. And there was a Long Island Power Authority rebate, which no longer exists.
After the credits and rebate, we paid $26,600—and with solar no longer had to pay a $200-plus monthly electric bill. Also, with solar, you get a check at the end of the year from PSEG for its “buy-back” of “excess electricity” produced by your panels and fed back into the grid—more electricity than what you used.
Meanwhile, today the price of solar photovoltaic panels has plummeted. In the past 20 years, their cost has declined by nearly 70%, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association—90% in the last decade.
Amazingly, too, the efficiencies of solar photovoltaic panels—the percentage of sunlight converted to electricity—have skyrocketed. Several decades ago, panels had efficiencies in the single digits. When a book I authored concerning energy was published in 1980, the average was 8%. Today, efficiencies are 20% and more, comparable to the 25% of solar panels used by NASA in space.
We had the panels at our house installed by Dean Hapshe, now of Islip Terrace-based Harvest Power, who entered the solar energy field in 1980 after his university graduation, seeking a life-affirming occupation. With his decades of experience, he has served as a teacher of solar installers on Long Island, including at Farmingdale State University.
With the elimination of the 30% federal tax credit, “Trump changed the playing field” for solar, says Hapshe. Still, he sees the future for solar as “stable” but “not as robust.”
Senator Harckham is now a leader in having New York State fill some of the absence of the 30% federal tax credit with legislation increasing the ceiling on the state tax credit from $5,000 to $10,000.
Some might say: what is it with these tax credits for solar anyway?
But as Wired magazine reported last year: “The Trump administration has already added nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies for oil, gas, and coal in 2025…sending an additional $4 billion out the door each year for fossil fuels over the next decade. That new amount, created with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer, adds to $30.8 billion a year in preexisting subsidies for the fossil fuel industry….The amount of public money the U.S. will now spend…stands at least $34.8 billion a year.”
The piece continued: “The U.S. has been subsidizing fossil fuel production for more than a century.” These subsidies still include “a tax break passed in 1913 that allows companies to write off large amounts of expenses related to drilling new oil wells.”
Solar power is important in countering the main cause of climate change, the burning of fossil fuels. Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine is a major advocate of solar power. He’s organized a “Solar-Up Suffolk” initiative, declaring: “The threat of climate change is not in the future. We are experiencing it right now with more intense storms, worse and worse flooding events, and extreme heat in summer. There is no silver bullet, but I believe that solar energy is one key piece of the puzzle.”
Government should help enable folks to go solar—with a goal of eliminating their electric bills—and, in the process, challenging climate change.