On Earth Day, locals gathered around to celebrate the new solar array on the roof of the Whallonsburg Grange. (Photo provided — Emily Russell / NCPR)

WHALLONSBURG — On a recent sunny spring day, a little crowd formed outside the Whallonsburg Grange, a big, red, barn-like building in the eastern Adirondacks.

“Good morning everybody,” said Ken Hughes, town supervisor of Essex, which includes the hamlet of Whallonsburg. “On behalf of the town board, I’d like to say welcome to Whallonsburg, lovely beautiful Whallonsburg and Happy Earth Day!”

Hughes and others marked Earth Day by unveiling the town’s first-ever solar installation. There are now 38 solar panels on the roof of the grange, a historic building that dates back to 1915.

“This was a challenging install,” admitted Stan Dobert, owner of the Queensbury-based Apex Solar. “We were so nervous about touching the roof.”

Still, a crew from Apex got the job done and they did it in the middle of a snowstorm back in February. But Dobert said the real hurdle for a project like the one in Whallonsburg is funding. Since it’s a public project, the town of Essex had to offer a higher level of pay to the installers at Apex.

“We’ve been doing this for ten years and one of the challenges for a municipality is you have to pay prevailing wage,” said Dobert. “It makes the cost really expensive and somehow Nancy [Bernstein] and Ken, you pulled it off, where many municipalities can’t do it and to make your building net zero is a huge win.”

Bernstein, an energy circuit rider from the Adirondack North Country Association, helped put all the puzzle pieces together for the project.

The total cost of the project was nearly $44,00. It was funded by a $6,000 grant from NYSERDA, $5,000 from Climate Smart Communities and the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism, as well as money from Essex County’s occupancy tax.

If a town like Essex can reduce its carbon footprint, Hughes said others around the North Country can and should do the same.

“We’re a little town, we have 621 people in our town,” said Hughes. “We have a budget of about a million dollars, but I believe that for large changes to be effectuated, small, little towns need to get on board.”

Not only will this solar array save the town money, but it’s also reducing local carbon emissions. In the two months since the panels were installed, they’ve generated 2.2 megawatt hours of solar power, more than what the Grange generally uses. The excess energy then gets put back into the town’s grid.

Mary-Nell Bockman, who manages the Whallonsburg Grange, said it’s hard to believe this project has come to fruition.

“It seemed like a fantasy, in a way, that we were going to power our concerts, our lectures, our movies from the sun,” said Bockman. “You just can’t quite wrap your head around it until you realize, hey that’s exactly what we’re doing now.”

Other upstate localities like Glens Falls and Saranac Lake are pivoting more towards green energy like solar or hydro.

There is pushback, though, against some much larger projects, like the 1,700-acre Rich Road solar farm proposed in Canton in St. Lawrence County. Projects of that scale often feed into the state’s grid, rather than powering the localities directly.

Bockman said it’s special knowing that a community center like the grange is now powered by the sun.

“It’s magic. I don’t know how else to say it, but it feels like exactly what the people who founded this building would want to see happen.”

So, on a sunny Earth Day, locals gathered around to watch as a red ribbon was cut in front of the Whallonsburg Grange, officially celebrating their community’s commitment to solar power.