With funding from Google, Appalachian Voices is leading new solar and battery storage microgrids in the towns of Duffield and Dungannon in Southwest Virginia. The aim is simple. Lower energy costs year round and keep essential community services powered during emergencies.
Each site will serve as a resilience hub so residents have a dependable place for information, device charging, refrigeration for medicine, and climate control when the grid is down. The need is clear after repeated flooding, severe storms, and widespread outages in recent years.
Dungannon will install a 30.5 kW solar array with a 115 kWh battery at the town hall. The building doubles as a community center, library, and meeting space and was upgraded in 2025 with a new heat pump and weatherization to reduce load. Solar Alliance of Knoxville will deliver the system.
Duffield will install a 75.6 kW solar array with a 246 kWh battery at Appalachian Sustainable Developmentās Appalachian Harvest building. The food hub aggregates, stores, and distributes produce across the region and supplies food boxes to pantries and civic groups, so staying powered during a crisis protects both farmers and families. Tiger Solar of Charlottesville will deliver the system.
The projects are funded by a Google grant administered through the Sharing the Power Foundation with additional support from Invest Appalachia and the Appalachian Solar Finance Fund. Support is structured through recoverable grants and repayable financing to make the model repeatable in other communities.
For local governments and nonprofits the template is practical. Select a public building that already serves the community. Right size solar and storage to essential loads for a realistic duration. Put clear procedures in place so staff can shift into resilience mode without confusion. With the right playbook, hubs like these can be added as part of routine facility upgrades rather than one off projects.
Telepath Systems trains the people who make projects like these real. Our six week Microgrid Systems Foundations course with Cleveland State University covers the essentials of electricity and grid architecture, the core components of microgrids including DERs, storage, power electronics and controls, and load management with power quality and prioritization. We then build systems thinking with model-based systems engineering and finish with practical integration and stakeholder considerations. Missed our October cohort? Register for our upcoming April cohort.