NEW YORK CITY-IKEA Brooklyn announced yesterday that the solar system on its roof is up and running. The array occupies 19,000 square feet and consists of a total of 1,104 panels – the equivalent of taking 32.5 cars off of the road. It will generate 240,00 kWh of electricity annually for the store.

John McGettrick, co-chair of the Red Hook Civic Association, thinks that this won’t amount to much and that the company would do better to pursue other initiatives. “It’s a very small step in the right direction but it in no way compensates for the incredible increase in pollution that the facility brings to the community,” he tells GlobeSt.com. “It would be helpful if they had their supplies delivered by water – that would dramatically reduce the amount of truck traffic and pollution.”

An IKEA spokeswoman tells GlobeSt.com that some freight does arrive to the Elizabeth, New Jersey store by water, but only because it’s a distribution hub. IKEA owns the majority of the land at the Industrial Park at Elizabeth, adjacent to the Newark/Elizabeth Marine Terminal, having bought it from the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.

Meanwhile, earlier this week at a public hearing, Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced several bills to facilitate the use of solar panels on city rooftops. “New York’s rooftops are one of our last great, untapped resources in terms of space,” Bloomberg said, “and these bills will help move us toward more beneficial and sustainable use of that space.”

The three bills pertaining to sustainable rooftop development would exempt solar panels from height and story restrictions contained in the building code, modify white roof requirements and exclude some distributed energy from building code height and story requirements.

Russell Unger, the executive director of the Urban Green Council, tells GlobeSt.com that he believes the bills will essentially update the codes and remove barriers to solar panel installations. “The very minimum the government can do is get out of the way of measures to improve our environment and health and energy security,” he says. “In a nutshell, that’s what this bill is doing.”

As for IKEA, Unger, who isn’t familiar with the particulars of IKEA Brooklyn’s energy consumption, thinks that IKEA has probably done its best to reduce its load. Indeed, the solar panels aren't the first the company has installed at a store, and it has implemented a variety of measures aimed at reducing its environmental impact. Solar panels, Unger says, won’t make a substantial reduction in the load at the Brooklyn store but it’s better than nothing. “You never want to fault a person or an organization,” he says, “for doing something rather than nothing.”