By JEFF EPSTEIN
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NEWPORT — The Newport Food Pantry gets busy with turkeys this time of year, but every month it serves hundreds of people.
Now food pantry director Jim Demers has found a way to cut costs, which he hopes to translate to more service: put solar panels on the roof of the Hoyt Community Care Center, which houses the food pantry. The building, rededicated last year, is 21 years old.
The food pantry won a total of $40,000 in grants through the New Hampshire Charitable Fund to outfit the building with solar electricity: $30,000 from the Thomas W. Haas Fund, and $10,000 from the Newport Charitable Fund, Demers said.
The installation, through local vendor Sol-Air, has been underway for a while, and “We hope to have it all wrapped up next week,” said Mike Nangeroni, director of the company’s strategic center.
With heavy snow on Tuesday, the work crew took a necessary break, but snow itself is not a problem for solar panels, Nangeroni said. Snow on the roof will be cleared off manually this week for purposes of the project, but after installation, “you use a plastic-bladed roof rake, and you can get the snow off that way.”
The panels use tempered glass and easily shed snow, and photovoltaic cells are actually more efficient in cold weather because the electrical resistance is lower, he said.
All this is happy news for Demers, who pointed out several large electric refrigerators the facility uses to store produce and other perishable goods. “These units draw a lot of power,” he said.
The units are already energy-efficient, he said, but “that solar is going to save me 60 percent of my electric bill.”
If excess power is generated on summer days, he added, it can be given over to the utility, Eversource, which Sol-Air has already alerted to the installation. Demers is applying for a usage agreement to allow that to happen.
With the expected savings, “we can then spend more money to fill our refrigerators,” he said. “So we’re going to save money in one place and spend it in another.”
In October, according to statistics Demers provided, the food pantry served 10,479 meals to 499 individuals in 158 households. That’s roughly the median for the households served each month going back to August, but in this Thanksgiving season, the food pantry is on pace to serve 300 households this month, he said. (In addition to the normal food allowance, clients this month also get a turkey, stuffing, gravy and cranberry sauce.)
The vast majority of the households served are in Newport, but the food pantry also helps approximately 40 households among the communities of Goshen, Croyden, Lempster, Grantham, Sunapee, Washington, Acworth, Unity, and Springfield.
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