“We still have internet available, even with the power out.” That’s Carol Miller, a board member at the Ojo Sarco Community Center, describing the biggest change since a Taos solar company gave her tiny New Mexico village something most rural nonprofits never get: a solar and battery system, installed at no cost.
Solar Power World first reported the donation, and Paradise Power Company, known as PPC Solar, confirms the basic numbers on its own site: a 7.5-kilowatt solar array paired with 10.6 kilowatt-hours of battery storage, finished last fall. It’s a small system by industry standards. But as a solar donation to a community center with almost no other resources, it’s already changed what the building can do.
A One-Room Schoolhouse Becomes a Lifeline
Ojo Sarco is an unincorporated village of about 300 people, roughly 43 miles northeast of Santa Fe. The community center sits in a building that started life as a one-room schoolhouse. Today it runs a food bank twice a month, feeds kids through a summer meal program, hosts safety classes and outings, and recently qualified to operate as a branch of the state library system.
PPC Solar donates a system like this once a year, and Ojo Sarco didn’t get picked on the first try. The community center applied three years running before the company said yes. CEO Daniel Weinman says the company wanted “to make a good impact for this community center,” and that the team “felt resiliency was the best way to do that.” PPC Solar built a partial backup setup through a critical loads panel, so the building’s most essential circuits, like the internet connection Miller mentioned, keep running when the grid goes down. Project manager Larry Miller and PPC’s Preston Bastardo worked the install alongside Weinman’s team.
Why It Matters to You
Picture what a power outage usually means for a small, remote community center: the food bank closes, the Wi-Fi goes dark, and the kids who depend on summer meals or library computers lose access right when they might need it most. That’s the gap this system closes, at least partly. Miller says the center’s electric costs have already gone down, though nobody has published a dollar figure yet. The bigger win might be the backup power itself.
“We still have internet available, even with the power out,” says Carol Miller, OSCC board member.
That matters more in a place like Ojo Sarco than it would in a city. Rural New Mexico can go hours or longer without power after a storm, and a one-room-schoolhouse-turned-library doesn’t have a backup generator sitting in a closet. A similar push toward backup power is showing up elsewhere too. Central Georgia EMC recently started offering members a whole-home battery for $95, a sign that utilities and co-ops are starting to treat backup power as something regular people should be able to afford, not just a nice-to-have for people who can pay full price.
How Other Communities Can Get a Solar Donation Like This
PPC Solar’s giveback program isn’t open to just anyone, and it isn’t fast. Ojo Sarco applied three years before it got picked, which tells you the program draws more requests than it can fund in any given year. If you run a food bank, library, school, or community hub in PPC Solar’s service area around Taos and northern New Mexico, the company’s Community Commitment page is the place to start, though patience is clearly part of the deal.
Other states run bigger, more structured versions of the same idea. Minnesota’s Solar for Schools program has now funded arrays on 400 campuses, with one superintendent reporting $22,000 a year in savings that stays in the classroom budget instead of going to the power company. New Mexico doesn’t have a program at that scale yet. For now, a one-off corporate giveback like PPC Solar’s is what fills the gap for a village the size of Ojo Sarco.
What We Don’t Know Yet
- No dollar figure for the center’s actual savings. Miller says costs went down; nobody has published by how much.
- No price tag on the donation itself, so there’s no way to know what PPC Solar’s gift was worth.
- The reporting names no county, and no electric co-op or utility serving the area.
- The backup only covers critical loads through PPC Solar’s panel, not the whole building, so some circuits still go dark in an outage.
- Much of what’s public here traces back to PPC Solar’s own account of its work, corroborated independently only by on-the-record quotes from two OSCC board members.
Ojo Sarco didn’t get its solar system because it was the biggest or the neediest applicant. It got picked because it kept asking, three years running. If your town has a building that still matters when the power goes out, a library, a food pantry, a school, it might be worth finding out whether anyone offers this kind of gift, and being willing to ask more than once.
Sources
- Solar Power World: Donated solar project powers community center in unincorporated New Mexico village (Nov. 2, 2026)
- Paradise Power Company (PPC Solar): homepage (accessed Nov. 7, 2026)