In the last couple of weeks, the roof of the building at Lincoln Center that houses the Juilliard School and the School of American Ballet was converted into a construction site.

The 36 solar panels atop the Rose Building in Manhattan should yield more than 11,000 kilowatt-hours per year, enough to light the building’s lobby for that time. Credit – Ángel Franco/The New York Times.

More than 900 square feet of what had been empty space are now covered by solar panels that will convert sunlight to electrical current.

Lincoln Center officials say the 36 solar panels — on the roof of the Rose Building, on West 65th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue — symbolize another step in their operation to go green. They announced a deal in 2012 to supply electricity generated by wind power equal to most of the buildings at Lincoln Center and the central plant that heats and cools them. (No, there are no wind turbines whirling above Lincoln Center; it buys power from a company that supplies wind-generated electricity to the conventional commercial power grid.)

The solar array was arranged through the same company behind the wind-power contract, Green Mountain Energy, and was paid for with federal and state grants. A $100,000 donation also came from Sun Club, a program run by Green Mountain that donates solar power to nonprofit groups.

Lincoln Center will still draw electricity from Consolidated Edison, but it will pay Green Mountain, which will channel electricity from the solar array to the conventional commercial power grid. Green Mountain will make up the difference if the panels fall short of the 11,331 kilowatt-hours a year that they are expected to yield.

Steve DeStefano, Lincoln Center’s director of engineering, said that was enough to light the lobby of the Rose Building for a year, or to run the washers and dryers in the student dorms on the 11th floor for four months. He said the panels had been placed to receive the most sunlight possible — 800 to 1,000 more kilowatt-hours a year than if they had been installed elsewhere on the roof.