ORANGE — Solar panels have been installed on Fisher Hill Elementary School’s roof, another step in a renovation project that began nearly five years ago.

Free activities and a talk about solar panels were held at the school for Earth Day and Bruce Scherer, chair of the Orange School Building Committee, explained how the 480 panels from Solect Energy will produce half the electricity that the school uses in one year.

“So we will save in direct electricity costs, this year, about $45,000,” he told the community members in attendance. “In addition to that, there’s certain incentives for employing a system like this that we get from National Grid. It’s about 3 cents a kilowatt. And so the town will get about somewhere north of $20,000 because of that.”

He said between incentives from National Grid, as well as two incoming grants, the project will pay for itself within a year.

Phil Valiquette-Lalonde, who works with Solect Energy, mentioned the panels last 20 years.

“They get put in the first time and then they’re just going to sit and produce and that’s it,” he said. “There’s no moving parts.”

Valiquette-Lalonde, a graduate of the Orange school system and now a parent, addressed concerns about impacts from winter weather by explaining that solar panels can still produce energy with an inch of snow on them “because the UV radiation goes right through snow.”

Also, small amounts of snow are melted by heat the panels generate. The system does, however, occasionally shut down due to massive amounts of snow and ice.

“We have a team that sits in an office and they monitor the sites digitally through all of the monitoring equipment we also install to cut down on [weather disruptions],” he said.

Orange residents voted in June 2020 to ratify a Proposition 2½ debt exclusion they had passed the week prior for the school renovation.

The Fisher Hill project cost $45 million, with Orange on the hook for roughly $22 million. Students through third grade moved from Fisher Hill’s pre-existing section to the new three-story, roughly 50,000-square-foot addition when the holiday break ended on Jan. 3, 2023, and returned to the gutted and renovated portion when summer vacation concluded on Sept. 7 of that year. The fourth, fifth and sixth graders at the longstanding adjacent Dexter Park Innovation School finished out the facility’s final academic year in June 2023 and now sit in Fisher Hill classrooms.

Dexter Park, built in the early 1950s, was torn down and is slated to be replaced with a wildflower meadow and retention pond for drainage for the renovated 97,000-square-foot Fisher Hill.

Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or 413-930-4120.