Disseminated on behalf of PowerBank Corporation.
New York State is moving quickly to increase its use of clean energy. The state has set strong new goals to add up to 7 gigawatts (GW) of solar, wind, and battery storage capacity by 2030. This is part of New York’s plan to have 70% of its electricity come from renewable sources by 2030 and to reach 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040.
These targets come from the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), a law that guides the state’s climate strategy.
A key part of the strategy is community solar. This type of solar project lets many people and businesses enjoy the benefits without installing panels on their own property. New York is a leader in community solar, with over 2 GW of capacity already online and many more projects in progress statewide.
How Community Solar Supports New York’s Clean Energy Plans
Community solar projects are designed to include groups that might struggle to install solar panels themselves. People who rent their homes, families with low incomes, and households without usable roofs can all join these projects.
Members get credits on their electricity bills based on the amount of solar power their share produces. This helps lower monthly energy costs and makes clean energy more affordable.
New York aims to increase community solar projects owned by public entities, like local governments. This will provide clean power that goes directly into the grid. These projects also provide bill credits to subscribers, allowing more people to benefit from renewable energy without incurring upfront costs.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) reports that New York accounted for one-third of all new community solar installations in the U.S. in 2023.
There are now more than 500 community solar projects either operating or being developed in the state. This rapid growth shows how community solar is already a key part of the state’s clean energy future.
Moreover, the U.S. community solar market is set to double. By 2029, Wood Mackenzie expects 7.3 GWdc of new installations in state programs. This will raise total capacity above 14 GWdc.
Growth is expected to average 5% each year until 2026. After that, it may drop to 11% annually until 2029 as mature markets become saturated.
Turning Landfills into Clean Energy: PowerBank’s Geddes Project
PowerBank Corporation, a company focused on clean energy, plays an active role in New York’s solar development. Recently, PowerBank completed a 3.79-megawatt (MW) community solar project on a capped landfill in the Town of Geddes. This solar farm now supplies clean electricity to the grid and produces enough energy to power roughly 450 homes each year.
The project benefits from the NY-Sun program, which is run by the NYSERDA. Since 2011, NY-Sun has delivered over $1.8 billion in solar incentives across the state. These incentives lower the cost of solar projects. This makes it easier for developers to build them and for communities to access.
Using closed landfills for solar energy is smart because these sites can be difficult to develop for other purposes. They are often large and no longer in use, making them good places for solar panels without taking away farmland or natural areas.
PowerBank’s Geddes project proves that solar systems can be built even on complex sites that need extra permits and engineering work. This solar farm is the largest PowerBank project in the U.S. so far.
The Company has plans to expand its portfolio in New York. This includes a 14.4-MW project in Skaneateles and a 5.4-MW project at Boyle Road that are under development.
PowerBank has developed more than 100 MW of renewable energy projects and has roughly 1 GW of projects in its development pipeline.
- SEE MORE (SolarBank is the former PowerBank):
The Importance of Public-Private Partnerships
Achieving New York’s clean energy goals requires teamwork between public agencies and private companies. The state will own some solar projects. Meanwhile, private developers like PowerBank bring the skills, experience with permits, and funds needed to plan, build, and run solar farms.
Local governments and utilities help find great spots for solar power. This includes sites like landfills, brownfields, and other unused lands. Focusing on these spaces lets communities create clean energy. This approach avoids harming farmland or protected nature areas.
PowerBank’s success with landfill solar puts the company in a good position to take advantage of this approach as New York expands its clean energy programs. In addition to providing electricity, such projects can also support community benefits.
These may include offering solar subscriptions specifically to low-income households, working with local schools on clean energy education, and creating job training programs to prepare workers for employment in solar installation and maintenance.
Growth Opportunities and Broader Impact
New York’s climate law has sparked big investments in renewable energy. It also improves the electric grid to manage more clean power. The state now wants to increase the number of local solar projects. These allow communities and residents to directly benefit from clean energy and lower bills.
Solar projects on landfills were once rare, but they might soon become common. Many states are seeing the value of using such underutilized land for clean energy.
A 2024 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that over 10,000 landfills in the United States could host solar panels. Altogether, these landfills could produce up to 60 GW of electricity — enough to power 10 million homes.
PowerBank’s 3.79-MW Geddes project is just a small piece of this nationwide potential, but it shows how landfill solar can work in practice. The company is well-positioned to partner with public agencies and communities on similar projects in the future.
PowerBank can support clean energy in other ways, too. It can help connect clean energy with education, community engagement, and workforce development while building solar farms.
Overall, New York is advancing rapidly toward its ambitious clean energy goals. Community solar and the smart use of unused land, like landfills, will continue to play a vital role. Private developers like PowerBank bring the experience and capital needed to transform policies into real projects.
These efforts will help New York cut greenhouse gas emissions. They will also lower energy costs for residents and boost local economies. As the state redefines what public clean energy can look like, Powerbank will play a key role in turning policy into real-world results.
- READ MORE: PowerBank Embraces Bitcoin and Tokenized Energy in Bold Treasury Shift to Digital Finance
Please refer to “Forward-Looking Statements” in the press release entitled “Bitcoin Purchases to be made by SolarBank Using Net Cash from Geddes Solar Power Project” for additional discussion of the assumptions and risk factors associated with the statements in this report.
Disclosure: Owners, members, directors, and employees of carboncredits.com have/may have stock or option positions in any of the companies mentioned: None.
Carboncredits.com receives compensation for this publication and has a business relationship with any company whose stock(s) is/are mentioned in this article.
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Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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