North Carolina food bank gets microgrid backup for future storms

Marshall’s Beacon of Hope was spared during Hurricane Helene. Thanks to a state grant, solar panels and batteries make it even better prepared to help its community.

By Elizabeth Ouzts

1 October 2026

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Overhead view of solar panels being installed on Beacon of Hope's white roof — Workers from Rhino Renewables install a 56-panel solar array at Beacon of Hope Food Pantry in Marshall, North Carolina. (Footprint Project)

Two years ago this week, Hurricane Helene’s floods nearly wiped out the little downtown of Marshall, North Carolina, about 20 miles north of Asheville. Situated along the French Broad River, an art gallery, coffee shop, restaurant, and other beloved community spaces were left without water or electricity — half-demolished and caked in mud. They closed their doors for months while they rebuilt. Some are still recovering.

But the Beacon of Hope Food Pantry was spared. The nonprofit is a five-minute drive from Main Street and higher in elevation — safe from the river that rose a historic 27 feet that day.

“We were one of the lucky ones,” said Jessi Koontz, executive director for Beacon of Hope, which has been in operation for nearly 30 years and provides food assistance to 1,700 families in Madison County each month. “We had water. We had power. And there was one small puddle in the corner of our thrift store.”

After the deluge, Koontz and many on her team did what they always do: gather resources and serve people in need. They wrestled with guilt over their good fortune, but they also realized, Koontz said, “If we had all lost everything, no one would be here to help in the recovery.”

When the inevitable next storm blows through, Beacon will be even better prepared to help its community. It has just installed a microgrid with 56 rooftop solar panels and three batteries, which can store electrons when the sun is shining and discharge them at night or on cloudy days. The system can power the internet, lighting, and heating, cooling, and refrigeration in the pantry’s food distribution area.

“It’s so great,” Koontz said. “It’s a $100,000 project, and Beacon has paid nothing.”

That’s because the food pantry received funds from a $5 million state grant program established last summer to install 24 sustainable microgrids in Helene-impacted counties.

“It is the first site we’ve gotten this far,” said Sara Nichols, energy and economic development manager at Land of Sky Regional Council, a local government organization and a lead ally in the state initiative. “This was one of the first sites that was selected. It ranked really high, given its community placement.”

Beacon’s solar array is not the only clean microgrid in the region — far from it. In the days after Helene, the nonprofit Footprint Project teamed up with Land of Sky, the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, green tech companies, and others to pool donations and set up dozens of them everywhere they could — from fire stations to nursing homes to mobile home parks.

The partnership endured and expanded after blue skies returned, with more climate tech installed seemingly every week, thanks to in-kind donations and an array of private grant and loan programs.

But Beacon’s rooftop solar and battery system is unique because it is financed almost entirely by the state. Last August, the administration of Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat elected in 2024 who has prioritized Helene recovery, announced it was allocating funds from the Biden-era bipartisan infrastructure law to set up the microgrid initiative, in collaboration with Land of Sky and area nongovernmental organizations.

Woman in black tank and jeans in front of green-sided building with workers on roof

Jessi Koontz, Beacon of Hope’s executive director, in front of her organization’s building as solar panels are installed (Footprint Project)

State officials have been advertising the program and taking applications for months. Beacon will be the first — or possibly the second, depending on exactly when it flips the switch on its solar array — to make it all the way through the process. A microgrid at Bill’s Creek Community Center in Lake Lure, another small town devastated by Helene, about 70 miles southeast of Marshall, is also close to completion.

The two projects are furthest along in part because they’re small and their wiring is relatively simple. While Nichols and the selection committee have drawn interest from plenty of larger, more complex microgrids, those necessitate foreign components that don’t comply with Biden-era rules for federally funded infrastructure. The Department of Energy can waive those rules on a case-by-case basis, but the process is time-consuming.

The wrinkle means the state initiative, which is scheduled to wrap up by next summer, is shifting focus away from more complicated microgrids to ones like those at Beacon and Bill’s Creek, Nichols said. “Our projects will trend smaller and more rural — and there are still a lot of outstanding options.”

In Beacon’s case, the state is the biggest but not the only financier. BuildUS, a philanthropic foundation aimed at speeding the transition to a cleaner and more equitable economy, chipped in. Invest Appalachia, a regional fund for economic development, provided a bridge loan. While nonprofits can earn federal rebates to cover 30% of solar installations, it can take over a year for them to get that money back.

“A lot of nonprofits don’t have $27,000 of cash on hand — or whatever the amount — to make these projects happen. A lot of for-profits don’t either,” said Lauren Sowers, director of communications and impact for Invest Appalachia. “We’re really just trying to make that timing gap for reimbursement work.”

With the microgrid in place, Beacon will be more resilient in the face of the next storm, even a minor one. “It doesn’t take a Helene to have a power-grid failure in rural western North Carolina,” Sowers said. “Even those brief outages can have a huge impact.”

The panels will also save the nonprofit money. Over the course of an average year, the solar panels will shave at least a quarter off Beacon’s electric bill, netting it some $5,600 to reinvest in alleviating food insecurity — a problem that became more acute last summer when the Republican Congress sharply curtailed federal food assistance.

“Programs were being defunded left and right,” Koontz said,” and we saw a 50% increase in the number of families seeking food.”

That surge in need prompted Beacon to relocate its thrift store last year to free up more room for food distribution. She and her team found a place for rent on Main Street, giving the nonprofit a small role in revitalizing downtown Marshall.

“[The storefront] was only available when we were looking because it had been completely washed away during Helene,” she said. “They were just finishing up the remodeling, and we had perfect timing.”

After Helene, Koontz is clear-eyed about extreme weather in western North Carolina, once thought of as a climate haven. “We now know that hurricanes in the mountains are possible,” she said. “Our world is changing in some very scary ways.”