It’s not of­ten you hear about a so­lar-pow­ered dou­bles food truck, but if you make your way to Cross Cross­ing in the heart of San Fer­nan­do, you might just find one.

Nar­ine’s Hot on D’Cross has been serv­ing up dou­bles for over 20 years. But about two months ago, they de­cid­ed to spice things up with a big change—us­ing so­lar-pow­ered ap­pli­ances.

Nar­ine’s own­er, Mar­lon Nar­ine ex­plained:

“I had a sep­a­rate bat­tery just to run the ex­haust fan, to pull out the smoke, be­cause when you’re fry­ing bara, there’s a lot of smoke. I used to charge the bat­tery up at night with a charg­er and that is how I kept do­ing it for years. We tried gen­er­a­tors, and that didn’t re­al­ly work out… the noise lev­el, the gas smelling, then to go and main­tain the gen­er­a­tor, some­times the gen­er­a­tor would break down.”

That’s when he had a light­bulb mo­ment to ex­plore some­thing dif­fer­ent.

“I al­ways had this so­lar pan­el idea, but I just didn’t know [how it worked]... I won­dered if I could take a so­lar pan­el and hook it up to the bat­tery… so, my friend said he knew some­one who could do it,” Nar­ine said.

That some­one was Lau­ren Pe­ters, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Nu­ance Se­cu­ri­ty and So­lar Sys­tems Ltd. While this was un­chart­ed ter­ri­to­ry for Pe­ters’ com­pa­ny, she was buzzing with ex­cite­ment about the idea, be­cause she is com­mit­ted to light­ing up the world with re­new­able en­er­gy.

“When you’re pur­chas­ing your food, you want to have your fam­i­ly around in an area where it is nice and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly … Peo­ple are mov­ing from us­ing the gas gen­er­a­tors which are cost­ly, with the fu­el prices go­ing up... and al­so the noise, so the so­lar sys­tem is re­al­ly a good so­lu­tion for that,” she said.

There may be some mis­con­cep­tions about what a so­lar-pow­ered food truck en­tails. The ve­hi­cle it­self doesn’t run on so­lar pow­er, but its ap­pli­ances do.

Lau­ren ex­plained how the sys­tem works,

“You get all the sun shin­ing on the so­lar pan­els and it works with DC (di­rect cur­rent) pow­er. It is a DC pow­ered fan, it’s DC pow­ered ap­pli­ances that you use. So, you use that di­rect cur­rent from the sun go­ing through the charge con­troller and pow­er­ing up the ex­trac­tor fan and oth­er ap­pli­ances.”

It’s on­ly been about two months since the so­lar pan­els were in­stalled, there­fore, Nar­ine said he can’t es­ti­mate ex­act­ly how much he’s saved yet, but Pe­ters be­lieves it will prove fi­nan­cial­ly ben­e­fi­cial in the long run.

She men­tioned the sys­tem cost Nar­ine about $6,000, but not­ed costs may vary for dif­fer­ent se­tups.

Aside from the fi­nan­cial sav­ings, the en­vi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits are the ic­ing on the cake, or rather, the sweet sauce on the dou­bles.

Pe­ters be­lieves this is the fu­ture, a way to care for your bel­ly, your wal­let, and the en­vi­ron­ment.

“We love dou­bles, you can’t de­ny that. That’s a Tri­ni thing and hav­ing a mo­bile so­lar-pow­ered truck, you’re get­ting the best of both worlds,” Pe­ters said.