By Stephen Smoot
The Honorable William McCoy constructed his landmark Greek Revival style home exactly 30 years before Thomas Edison installed the first private residence electrical system in his own home in 1878.
Nearly 180 years into its existence, the McCoy House will soon get a powerful upgrade in the form of a solar energy system.
Jared VanMeter, along with his wife, Katie, owns and operates the Historic McCoy House across Main Street from the Pendleton County Courthouse in Franklin. They were able to take advantage of the Town of Franklin’s partnership with the Downtown Appalachia Revitalizing Recreational Opportunities program which helped them take their first step toward obtaining a USDA grant to pay for the array.
“I learned of the grant last year after working with Ray Moeller with the DARRE program,” VanMeter explained, adding that the program had also provided assistance to their efforts via a grant. Moeller informed the VanMeters about the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP.
“We applied for the USDA REAP Grant last year, as well as for window inserts, to help increase the R-value of the property,” VanMeter shared. According to Energy Star, “R-Value is a measure of insulation’s ability to resist heat traveling through it. The higher the R-Value, the better the thermal performance of the insulation.” They did not win an award at the time, due to not having enough energy history on their properties at that point.
Though they did not receive the grant on the first application, they partnered with West Virginia-based Solar Holler to try again. VanMeter added, “They helped us coordinate with the REAP program.” Additionally, “Solar Holler actually took care of the grant writing for us.”
VanMeter described the steps followed to obtain the grant. It started with reaching out to a United States Department of Agriculture loan specialist and energy coordinator, who connected them with experts from West Virginia University who conducted an energy usage assessment.
Next, they received for their businesses a Systems Award Management, or SAM, designation. Along with that came a Unique Entity Identity number generated by SAM.gov. It replaced the number system administered by Duns and Bradstreet and called a Duns number. All entities receiving grants, or doing business of any kind with the federal government, must have these.
From the contractor, they received an estimate of the cost of installation, which is one of the most crucial parts of a grant application. The next step lay in filling out the necessary applications. One of the final steps lay in submitting 12 months of electric bills as part of the energy assessment.
For the VanMeters, the grant provided an opportunity to save money on one of the key overhead costs of them doing business. That said, however, “the design will not offset 100 percent of our energy usage, but it will get us one step closer to a Zero Energy Building.”
Another major consideration lay in the historic structure and surrounding streetscape in the heart of Franklin’s Historic Downtown. They worked with the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office to ensure that the new solar array would not interfere with the vision of antebellum architecture.
After receiving input from that agency, VanMeter said that “we actually redesigned the whole array to relocate it onto the back side of the house where it could not be seen from either Main Street or Walnut Street.”
The historic McCoy House was not alone in the area in receiving a federal grant to construct a solar power system. A recent USDA release also announced that Pendleton County’s “Conrad Farms will use a $64,204 REAP grant to purchase and install more energy-efficient grain drying and storage equipment and improved moisture and temperature regulation . . . This project will realize $3,727 in savings annually.”
