This year two Statesboro churches are powering up with light from above – through solar panels installed on their roofs as part of a new statewide initiative. Trinity Episcopal Church in August and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Statesboro in November became the first two churches to complete solar energy installations with Georgia BRIGHT.
Created by Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit, U.S. Treasury-certified community development financial institution, Georgia BRIGHT is a solar equipment leasing program intended to help low- to moderate-income communities cut power bills and reduce carbon emissions. Georgia BRIGHT offers residential and commercial rooftop solar and battery storage leases and power purchase agreements to homeowners making less than $150,000 a year and to “mission-aligned organizations.”
So it’s not limited to churches. But the two congregations in Statesboro are the first faith organizations that, as participants in the program of a separate 501(c)3 nonprofit called Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, or GIPL, chose Georgia BRIGHT and its Solar Energy Procurement Agreement.
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Statesboro, or UUFS, had explored various solar options but chose this program because of its affordability and maintenance and repair benefits, according to a media release from Georgia Interfaith Power & Light, which quoted the Rev. Dr. Jane Page, minister at UUFS.
“We have wanted Solar for a while now as we seek to live more fully into our values of caring for the Earth,” Page said. “We are thrilled to have worked with GIPL and Georgia BRIGHT to achieve this goal. We challenge other faith communities to join us and our neighbors at Trinity Episcopal in this effort.”
Sunpath Solar, a Georgia-based company, installed both churches’ solar electric systems.
Federal incentives
The relatively small 4.8-kilowatt system at UUFS is expected to offset 76% of the building’s energy needs and save the congregation $9,000 over 25 years, according to the GIPL release. The project summary that Sunpath provided the church’s board shows that federal incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 totaling $3,744 were taken into consideration. It also notes that a direct-pay provision is available to certain nonprofit and tax-exempt organizations.
Tables in the summary document show that a comparison with the church’s 2023 and 2024 electric utility bills was used in calculating the monthly cost savings.
“They pay less than their power bills to receive (solar). They pay a lease for space on their roof for solar panels and they pay for the power that comes off the solar panels, it’s less than the rate that they would be paying to Georgia Power,” Jay Horton, communications manager for GIPL, said in a phone call this week.
The solar installation that Sunpath completed for Trinity Episcopal Church, Statesboro, in August, under an agreement signed last spring, is a much larger, 31-kW system. Trinity’s building is much larger than the nearby UUFS building, and the solar panels cover a larger area of the Episcopal church’s roof, as can be seen in aerial photographs.
So Trinity Episcopal’s expected savings are also larger in total dollars, Horton noted. Over the next 25 years, Trinity Episcopal is projected to save $62,000, according to Horton, and offset 705 tons of carbon dioxide (78% of the church’s total energy consumption), according to GIPL’s original release about the church’s leasing plan.
Awaits Georgia Power
Trinity Episcopal has a “Green Team” chaired by Lissa Leege, Ph.D., the Georgia Southern professor who also chairs the city of Statesboro’s Greener Boro Commission. Phoned this week, she said that although the installation was completed in August, the system is not supplying power yet either to the church or to the utility company’s lines.
“We’re expecting to save about $2,000 a year, which is over $60,000 over the life of the system, which is pretty great for any church community,” Leege said. “Our solar has not been hooked up yet to the grid, so we’re waiting on Georgia Power to basically flip the switch there.”
That, she said, will allow Georgia Power to receive the church’s excess solar-generated electricity onto the grid, for which the church will receive payment.
Federal incentive payments of about $30,000 under the Inflation Reduction Act are also part of the calculation, according to Leege.
“So it was the Inflation Reduction Act that really made it possible for us as a congregation to be able to support this change,” she said. “It’s something we’ve been looking to have done for years, but it just wasn’t economically feasible until the federal incentives kicked in.”
Working with GIPL and the Georgia BRIGHT program, “made it really easy for us to get the estimates and know that we were confident in the vendors,” Leege said. “They all made it really easy for us to take this leap.”
GIPL’s other efforts
The Georgia BRIGHT program is one of several options that GIPL helps congregations interested in clean energy access, Horton explained.
“We work with faith communities, we walk them through different solar options, various ways to go about procuring solar, and the one that they chose is a Solar Energy Procurement Agreement, or SEPA, which is what Georgia BRIGHT offers,” he said.
GIPL also offers faith communities a zero-waste program and an energy efficiency program called Power Wise, and recently launched a “rewilding” program aimed at sustainable land use.
“Our mission is to inspire and equip communities of faith to organize, so the first way we do that is to build Green Teams, two or three or more people who are committed to leading environmental impact in their communities, and then we help them implement practical climate solutions, solar being one of those, and advocacy on climate change, environmental justice and community resilience,” Horton said.