Solar power has quietly become the workhorse of new electricity supply in the United States. It led every other source for a fifth straight year in 2025, when the country added roughly 43 gigawatts and solar made up 54% of all new generating capacity on the grid. The momentum carried into 2026: in the first quarter, developers added another 7.8 gigawatts, and the nation passed 6 million cumulative solar installations. Solar and battery storage together accounted for 91% of all new capacity added that quarter, with solar alone at 60%. Counting large utility farms and smaller rooftop systems, solar and wind supplied a record share of the country’s electricity in 2025, and utilities keep reaching for solar as the quickest, cheapest way to add power as demand climbs, including the surge tied to data centers.
Not everyone can put panels on a roof. Renters, apartment dwellers, and homeowners with shaded or unsuitable roofs have long been left out. Community solar was built to close that gap. Instead of owning any hardware, a household subscribes to a share of a nearby project and earns credits on its monthly electric bill for its portion of the energy produced. There are no panels to install and usually little or no upfront cost, and most subscribers save somewhere between 5% and 15% on the relevant part of their bill. The segment is smaller and more uneven than rooftop or utility solar, adding 247 megawatts nationwide in the first quarter of 2026, but New York remains the clear leader, home to more than 1,300 community solar projects.
That New York market is the setting for a project called SB-14, which recently reached what the industry calls commercial operation, meaning it is finished and feeding power to the grid. Located in upstate New York, SB-14 is a ground-mounted array rated at 7.01 megawatts on a direct current basis, or 5 megawatts alternating current, enough to power roughly 875 homes with clean electricity each year. It sits on a former industrial lot, a brownfield regulated by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which makes building there harder than working on open farmland. The project sells its output as bill credits to subscribers under the state’s NY-Sun program.
The developer behind SB-14 is PowerBank Corporation (NASDAQ: PBK, Cboe CA: PBK, FSE: 103), a North American company that develops, builds, owns, and operates solar and battery storage systems. PowerBank found the site, designed the project, and built it, then sold it in September 2023 to the industrial customer that now owns it, agreeing to finish construction. SB-14 is one of three neighboring projects, alongside SB 13-1 and SB 13-2, together totaling 21 megawatts of direct current capacity. The combined value of the sale and construction across all three came to roughly $41 million, and PowerBank kept the contract to operate and maintain them. With SB-14 now live, two of the three are running, bringing about 14.02 megawatts online for the community.
The customer is worth a note of its own. The three projects were originally sold to Honeywell International Inc. (NASDAQ: HON), the long-standing industrial group, and built on land it owned. Honeywell has now completed a long-planned breakup into three separate public companies. Its aerospace arm began trading independently as Honeywell Aerospace Inc. (NASDAQ: HONA), while the former parent, now operating as Honeywell Technologies, kept the HON ticker. Ownership of SB-14 moved to the newly independent aerospace business as part of that split.
Beyond this one site, PowerBank points to a track record of more than 100 megawatts of completed projects and a pipeline it puts above one gigawatt. Its pitch rests on a theme running through the power business: electricity demand is rising fast, pushed partly by artificial intelligence and the data centers behind it, while new grid connections can take years. Firms that can build generation quickly, whether community solar or on-site power, expect steady demand. SB-14 is a small part of that larger shift, yet it shows how the pieces fit, a cleaned-up industrial lot turned into a neighborhood power source, funded through the very bills it helps lower.
