A crowd formed at the Friends of Forgotten Children food pantry in Concord on Sunday, but not because meals were being served inside. The crowd was outdoors.

“We had about 30 people there. We had probably a dozen on the roof, four on scaffolding, four on the ground … a number filling out paperwork,” said Steve Ettelson, vice president of a group called HAREI that came to the pantry to run one of its barn-raising-style events to install solar panels. “It only took a couple hours.”

The Hillsborough Area Renewable Energy Initiative, a volunteer-run non-profit that, despite its name, also operates outside Hillsborough County, has been around for almost 15 years. Its goal is to help people decide whether, and how, to get their own solar power. It gives advice and helps organize the project, then comes together to help with installation on roofs or ground-mounted arrays, which can greatly cut the owner’s costs. They’ve done some 125 events, mostly on single-family homes, totaling well over a megawatt of capacity.

Just as importantly, HAREI has created a community that appreciates solar power, the pleasures of home improvement, and the idea of gathering together to help neighbors.

“These days we seem to get between 20 and 50 people who show up at these events,” Ettelson said. It’s not unusual for organizers to struggle to find enough jobs for everybody to do on-site.

The food pantry project is the group’s third such installation, following a Greenfield food pantry and the Mont Vernon library, for a non-profit rather than a homeowner who could afford solar panels. “We had been helping the people who need it the least and decided we should be helping those who need it,” said Ettelson.

Sunday’s installation placed 54 panels totaling 21 kilowatts DC, a little more than twice the amount placed on a typical home. As with most installations, the panels’ electricity will power the pantry when necessary and send any excess into the grid, which will make a little money for the pantry and slightly reduce the amount of electricity that the neighborhood needs to bring in from afar.

That last point is the reason that solar on roofs can help everybody. The biggest added cost in electricity these days comes from building wires, poles, transformers and other equipment to move power between producers and consumers. Having solar panels at lots of buildings, each of them furiously generating electricity on site, reduces the need for transmission, which can reduce everybody’s future cost on power bills.

The actual placement and hook-up of panels is almost the easiest part of the work. Figuring out the power need and how much solar is worth it, getting local approval (details differ from town to town), upgrading electrical systems, putting anchors on the roof — all that and more needs to be done. Much of the value of HAREI comes from its long experience with solar installations, providing advice that isn’t linked to a corporate sale.

“We went in and we monitored their usage, so we could see what’s going on,” Ettelson said of the Concord work. “We gave them a road map of what else they can do to save energy.”

The building’s relatively flat roof also made it perfect for training volunteers on installing the racking that holds the panels.

Total cost of the work, including buying the panels, is being split between HAREI and the food pantry, Ettelson said. Donations helped: Sentry Roofing sent an installer to put in the roof anchors for free. Greentech Renewables, a solar equipment distributor in Bow, has also been helpful.

To my knowledge, there is no other group like HAREI operating in New Hampshire, but there should be. Solar power is a perfect local-control technology; doing it with the construction equivalent of town meeting makes it the perfect Granite State activity.

Cutting down on your monthly electric bill is kind of nice, too.