Suffolk County Community College’s new, 26,000 square foot, $21.3 million  Renewable...

Suffolk County Community College’s new, 26,000 square foot, $21.3 million  Renewable Energy STEM Center opened Thursday. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.

Ample good-paying jobs either building, designing or thinking big thoughts about the next generation of green energy will be the result of a gleaming $21.3 million, 26,000-square-foot, two-story hub of science and innovation on Suffolk Community College's Brentwood campus. That is, if the goals set out for the Renewable Energy STEM Center Thursday at an event marking its opening are eventually achieved.

The net-zero energy building — meaning it consumes only as much energy as can be produced on-site through renewable resources — will be a place for students at the college "to realize their full potential as the next generation of technicians, engineers, and professionals,” said the Edward Bonahue, the school's president at the opening.

Building the facility on the Brentwood campus also had strategic aims, Bonahue said. The demand for workers, sparked by the demand from industry and consumers for renewable energy technology and products is expanding, he said, as is the need for ways to help those who have been "historically underrepresented in those fields which are a pathway to the middle class.”

Earlier in the day students from Bay Shore, Brentwood and Central Islip took a tour of the building, its roof covered in solar panels. The National Grid Center for Workforce and Energy Education, an open symposium center with seating for 300 and computer and network accessibility, also is located in the building. A combination of state and county dollars as well as a $850,000 federal grant funded the facility.

The building has labs for biology, cybersecurity, solar technology and other programs. There is also a computer lab, two multiuse classroom/labs and a conference room.

Melanie Littlejohn, vice president of customer and community management at National Grid, announced an annual student $1,250 scholarship.

“Not only is this building such an impressive space but we are supporting the students who will be the minds that will be encouraged to think big,” Littlejohn said.

The building opens as Long Island has continued to see its population drop as people uproot and move in search of better-paying jobs and more affordable housing.

Newsday reported in March that Long Island's population fell by more than 15,000 in a 12-month span ending last July, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, driven by "domestic out-migration" of people priced out of the region, experts said.

The decadeslong trend of people leaving the Island is part of a broader trend of many New Yorkers leaving the state in pursuit of an affordable place to live. Between July 1, 2021, and July 1, 2022, people moved out of New York State at a higher percentage than anyplace else in the Northeast, according to census data released in March.

Jim Morgo, vice chairman of the college’s board of trustees, said the building communicates to the business community that Suffolk County and New York State are willing to make the investments necessary to prepare, develop and sustain a quality workforce. But he said the main thing is the opportunity it offers community college students who many times are the first in their family to go to college, are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves.

“The opportunities they will have here are for the jobs of the future, not jobs for English majors,” he said. “They can get their start here and go directly into the workforce or seamlessly into a four-year college.”

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