In a suburb about an hour north of New York City, a former dairy farm is now producing solar energy.

Some of the people who will benefit live nearby, while others are dozens of miles away in Yonkers, which borders the Bronx, or in Downtown Brooklyn.

The 20-acre farm, in Yorktown, N.Y., is part of a community solar initiative, which allows people without their own solar power installations to opt into systems in other neighborhoods or towns.

In New York City’s dense, urban setting, where limited space can make installing solar panels impossible and where many people rent their homes, community projects are the only option some residents have for making a shift to solar power.

Property owners involved in such projects lease their land or rooftops to solar developers, who sell the power that is generated to a utility company. The utility adds renewable energy to the electric grid. A project’s subscribers get a discount on their utility bills, usually in the range of 5 to 20 percent.

In the past five years, the number of community solar projects in New York City and Westchester County, where Yorktown is, has mushroomed, to 700 from 72. About 78,000 households, a small but growing portion of the area served by Con Edison, the city’s utility company, now participate.