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Not all rooftop solar panels arrive with fanfare and ribbon-cutting.
Earlier this month, passersby tipped the RoundTable to a solar story quietly playing out at the corner of Green Bay Road and Simpson Avenue. A truck was unloading solar panels at the Public Storage facility there.
A permit from the City of Evanston, displayed on the office door, confirmed that installation of a 408.32 DC kW rooftop solar system was underway.
That’s “a substantial installation,” said Joel Freeman, retired Grumman-Butkus engineer and member of the city’s Healthy Buildings Technical Committee. For comparison, the solar system recently activated on the Robert Crown Community Center comprises 1,600 panels with roughly twice the capacity of the Public Storage system.
From street level, it wasn’t easy to see what was happening, but a call to project manager Vinny Busano confirmed that installation is in progress. Busano has worked in solar for about 10 years and is now with Solar Landscape, a New Jersey-based commercial rooftop solar developer that is partnering with Public Storage to manage installation of the system and enroll subscribers. The company’s pitch to owners of commercial real estate: “Turn Your Rooftops into Revenue — Zero CapEx Required.” According to the Solar Landscape website, since 2012, when the company was founded, they’ve “turned 75M+ sq ft of rooftops into revenue.”
Busano says that for him, it’s about helping the community. All of the net electricity generated by the system will go to the grid for use as community solar, he says. Solar Landscape marketing director Samantha Kanipe confirmed that the project is open to residents and businesses throughout Cook County. “We worked with a range of nonprofit and community-based organizations across the Chicago area to help educate potential subscribers about community solar and facilitate enrollments for this and other projects within our portfolio,” she writes. The project is already about 90% subscribed.
More clean renewable energy in the grid is a positive development. But for owners of self-storage companies, there’s also a straightforward financial calculation.
It helps to understand that Public Storage is a real estate investment trust, or REIT. So are a number of other big self-storage companies. The logic goes like this, according to Pivot Energy. Self-storage companies have a lot of roof space, mostly flat. They are interested in increasing the market value of their property. The value of the property is based on projections of future net operating income (NOI) — as the Cook County Assessor defines it, “the estimated income a property generates from its operations, minus the estimated Operating Expenses required to maintain and manage the property.”
Utility costs are one of the biggest operating expenses for self-storage facilities, many of which are climate-controlled. Cutting the cost of electricity increases NOI, and the value of the property goes up.
Incentives have helped nudge this calculation in the direction of renewables, as EnergySage points out in a 2024 post about “why commercial solar could make sense for your business.” Although federal policies are shifting under the Trump administration, one key incentive remains: Many states, including Illinois, offer a property tax exemption for the incremental value a solar system adds to a building. In other words, the company “will not be taxed on the increased property value from installing solar panels.”
The Federal Investment Tax Credit, which has helped accelerate the move to solar, expires on July 4. Hence the rush to get new systems installed. But as Solar Landscape, the company handling the Public Storage installation here, wrote in a blog post last month, “The [tax credit] deadline is the most urgent reason to act, but it isn’t the only one. A shifting energy landscape, rising power demand, and tightening margins are all pushing rooftop solar from a nice-to-have to a competitive necessity.”
With move-out time coming at Northwestern, there was more activity than usual around the Public Storage entrance just off Green Bay last week, as customers scanned themselves through the gate and unloaded their belongings. Nearly all the 800-plus units are rented now, according to the on-site property manager.
Meanwhile, the solar installation going forward behind (or above) the scenes is part of what Public Storage trumpets as a massive “commitment to energy independence, reducing operating costs, and driving down our carbon footprint.” That’s according to the LinkedIn profile of Gareth Thomas, vice president of the company’s energy, renewables and sustainable Initiatives across some 3,200 properties.
Public Storage recently received permission to operate its 1,000th solar installation, located at the property in Hawaii where it installed its first solar projects in 2014. “Our Solar Program has officially come full circle,” Thomas writes, “but we’re not stopping here, with a plan to install Solar at 1,300 properties across 25 states by 2026.”
The company’s solar program is attracting attention. In April, Black Bear Energy, based in Boulder, Colorado, released its 2025 Real Estate Solar Leaderboard, which highlights the sector’s “growing adoption of solar energy for both revenue generation and power reliability.”
Public Storage stands out for having “single-handedly established a new Self Storage category that now rivals the Retail sector in solar scale” and “its commitment to rolling out solar at scale to generate new portfolio value,” according to Black Bear.
Public Storage is not alone. Several other self-storage companies with facilities in the area advertise their rooftop solar.
One is Extra Space, with a location on McCormick Boulevard in Skokie. The company brags about its commitment to “sustainable business practices and reducing our carbon footprint” and advertises that the Skokie facility is “equipped with green technology like solar panels.” As of June 2025, the company had “completed solar energy installations at over 800 wholly-owned self storage properties nationwide” and had “over 100 projects in various stages of planning, development, and installation.”
Busano of Solar Landscape, who’s managing the Evanston Public Storage project, says he is also working on a solar installation with CubeSmart, another REIT and self-storage company with Chicago locations.
How does this latest solar installation fit into Evanston’s commitments to cutting climate-warming emissions and strengthening resilience?
Buildings are the source of 80% of emissions here, and big buildings are responsible for nearly half that. That’s why the Benchmarking Ordinance requires owners of the city’s biggest buildings (with some exceptions) to report their energy and water consumption annually. Data is public and can be viewed through the Benchmarking and Building Performance Standards section of the city website. Public Storage has begun reporting data for the two buildings that make up the Green Bay Road facility, so it will be possible to track results of this solar installation.
Solar Landscape’s Kanipe writes that “a portion of the rooftop (typically ~20%) is reserved for on-site use to help offset the building’s electricity needs through a behind-the-meter system serving the facility. The remaining rooftop space is leased to Solar Landscape, which develops, builds, owns, and operates the community solar system.”
Once the rooftop system is switched on later this year and produces solar energy, “they can be a model for other Evanston buildings to follow,” Freeman said.
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Environment Editor Wendy Pollock, now a steward of the Ladd Arboretum, worked for three decades in the science museum field and served as co-chair of the Evanston Environment Board. More by Wendy Pollock
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