Lucas Titolo, 30

Lucas Titolo is on a mission to bottle the power of the sun. In fact, he’s dedicated the latter half of his 20s to the idea, which has worked out well, careerwise. 

Titolo oversees a team of 14 engineers who play an essential role in expanding Solar Landscape’s portfolio of community solar projects across the Northeast.

The concept is more or less the same whether you’re in New York or Maryland. First, commercial owners give Solar Landscape access to the underutilized space on top of their buildings. Then Titolo and his team install a revenue-generating photovoltaic array to shrink the building’s carbon footprint while also lowering utility costs in the surrounding neighborhood. If you live near one of these mini power plants, you might be getting a discount on your energy bill. 

“We were early adopters of the community solar program in New Jersey at the beginning, when it was a pilot,” Titolo said. “Now it’s becoming more appealing to developers and commercial real estate owners because we essentially turn their roof into a tenant.”

Some big names in asset management and the warehouse, logistics and self-storage sectors have made the 12-year-old company their top pick for designing these rooftop grids. Think Prologis, Heitman, Public Storage and Extra Space Storage.

Titolo has brought more than 70 million square feet of rooftop solar farms to life. One of his projects — a 220,000-square-foot solar array at a Prologis property in Perth Amboy, N.J. — even won a “Sunny” Award from the U.S. Department of Energy last year. That helped score an enormous deal with Public Storage to design and build 87.5 megawatts worth of solar panels across 130 self-storage properties in three states. That’s what Titolo is in the middle of now.

“Each property is multiple buildings,” he said. “So there’s extra complexity. It’s not just one big, flat commercial warehouse. These are pretty unique.”