Energy and Easy Money for Churches

Energy and Easy Money for Churches

BSK partner Faith Baptist Church in Georgetown, Kentucky, worked with BSK Board of Trustee member Dr. Don Colliver to assess and adjust their approach to energy, saving the church thousands of dollars per year. We asked pastor William Reilly to share their story.

We are all familiar with the easy money schemes Facebook friends from high school try to push on us. This article isn’t one of those, but it does involve easy money. Faith Baptist Church in Georgetown, Kentucky is average in a lot of ways. This moderate Baptist church is an aging congregation in an aging building with a stable, yet tight, budget. Yet, over the last two years Faith Baptist has accomplished an annual utility usage reduction of 25%, translating to $8,384 and 20.4 metric tons of CO2 emissions savings. To be clear, Faith has no special assets that allowed us to achieve such great results. If our normal church can add that much money back into our budget, your church can too. No schemes, just good stewardship of the resources God has given us.

Our process of responsible energy stewardship started as we returned from COVID. Suddenly, we were reminded how expensive gas and electric bills were when the building was in use. Our church would much rather spend money on missions and ministry than electricity, so a special committee was formed to see if anything could be done to reduce our utility costs. I must confess that our church does have one unique asset that helped us: Don. Dr. Don Colliver is a world-renowned expert and University of Kentucky engineering professor on energy efficient building design, operation, and decarbonization (dcolliver@uky.edu). He also happens to be a member of a sister church and was happy to help our congregation explore energy efficiency. With his immense expertise, Don was able to quickly guide our committee’s work and lead us to getting the results we did. Don used three phases to organize our work: reduce usage, improve efficiency, and look for alternative energy sources. Just in case your church doesn’t have a Don, here’s an overview of what he taught us.

Reduce Usage

To know that we are reducing usage we need to know what our usage actually is, so one of the first things we did was start tracking our utility usage using a free Energy Star sponsored website called Portfolio Manager (portfoliomanager.energystar.gov). Next, we began encouraging behavior change. Terry Lester, a retired pastor, led a Bible study teaching the theological convictions of environmental stewardship. We began sharing information and goals with our congregation. We deputized our congregants to turn off lights and readjust thermostats after they left a room. Don explained that the question isn’t if we turned off the light, but if we ever needed the light on in the first place, so we also began evaluating how we used our facility. Instead of meeting in our large fellowship hall with lots of light and air, committees began meeting in our smaller library that required less energy to use. Staff got in the habit of relying on the ample light from windows and leaving fluorescent overhead lights off during sunny days. We considered adjustments to office hours and office locations to minimize unnecessary energy usage. This step was the most difficult because it involved a lot of up-front data gathering and perspective shifting, but was crucial to our success.

Efficiency Improvements

Reduction is crucial, but it would be impossible for an organization to completely reduce their energy usage. Next, we asked if the energy we had to use was being used most efficiently. We started by conducting an energy audit to identify potential places for efficiency upgrades. Don led ours, but there are several resources online and through power companies on energy audits. We found that although we had programmable thermostats, most of them weren’t actually set. If you don’t have programmable thermostats, get some. Our biggest savings came from adjusting our thermostats to eliminate heating and cooling empty rooms. We also observed building usage and noticed lights were regularly left on in certain areas. Similar to our thermostats, we installed inexpensive motion sensor light switches in key areas and stopped spending money illuminating empty rooms. This phase also involved switching lights to LEDs, repairing window seals and replacing a few windows, actually replacing HVAC filters, insulating exterior wall outlet holes, and a few other boring, low-cost things that contributed to wasted energy. In all, we spent less than $1,000, and have seen over $8,000 in savings. That’s a pretty great investment. As part of this phase, we plan to upgrade our windows and HVAC units to high efficiency as they naturally need replacing, but have not begun making those improvements yet. Just as with the first phase, it has been crucial to communicate with the congregation throughout this process to maintain behavior change. The committee has hosted classes to show people what we are learning and regularly shares our successes in business meetings and communications.

Alternative Energy Sources

While maintaining the good work we’ve done in phase one and two, this is where we currently find ourselves. Using energy efficiently is the cheapest thing to do and should be done first. The last step is more visible and visibly demonstrates the church is attempting to be a good steward of God’s Earth – using renewable and alternative energy sources. Renewable energy sources such as solar photoelectric panels provide off-grid, clean energy or alternative energy sources such as geothermal heat pumps greatly reduce the energy used in heating and cooling a building. Alternative energy sources will dramatically decrease utility bills and carbon emissions, but they are often expensive. We are currently trying to secure funding to install full coverage solar panels. Incentives from the Infrastructure Act help, but it’s still a large, out-of-budget expense for us. I am confident that without making so much good progress through reduction and efficiency, we would have lost our motivation long ago. Some churches might never make it to alternative energy sources, and that’s okay. What we have discovered is that, with very little expense, most churches can see dramatic decreases in utility usage. Hopefully our results can inspire your congregation to engage in energy stewardship. Adding $4,000 annually back to the budget might be the easiest fundraiser you ever do.

Rev. William Reilly is pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Georgetown, Kentucky (familyoffaith.net).