by Miriam Friesen

Is anyone else as curious as I am about what kind of impact those solar panels on the roof are having, how Hamline Church’s energy use has changed over time, and what our “new normal” is for how much of Hamline Church’s electricity comes from the sun vs. the grid? Or is it just me and my nerdy fascination with charts? Well, even if you’re not as into charts as I am, I hope you’ll accompany me on this glimpse into electricity and energy use at Hamline Church.

First, thanks are due to Diane Krueger who has faithfully entered Xcel energy bills in an online system over the past four years. The data below are from both the online energy tracking system and the solar dashboard that we have access to through our solar installer. We keep the Xcel data as part of our commitment to St. Paul’s “Race to Reduce” program and as a Climate Justice Congregation through MNIPL. Our Climate Justice Congregation action plan for this year includes carrying out an updated energy audit for the church and this historical data will help us better understand our energy use in the time since our previous energy audit.

Here it is folks: electricity at Hamline Church, 2016-2020. In the blue, we have the amount of electricity that we use. In the orange, starting in August 2018, we have electricity that the church’s panels generate from the sun.

Here’s a summary of that same data, year by year in 2017-2020:

After you’ve had a moment to peruse the charts, here are a few of my own (very amateur) observations about the data:

Solar Generation Offset about 1/3 to 1/2 of Electricity Use 2019-2020
The second chart makes it really clear that solar generation offset a very significant portion of our church’s electricity use in 2019 and 2020, the first two full years we had solar, which is exciting news. If you look closely at the first chart, in some summer months the church’s solar actually generated more electricity than we used. That means that almost all of our AC use in 2019-2020 was offset by solar! While we don’t get “paid back” by Xcel when the church’s solar panels generate more electricity than we use in a month, the church is enrolled in a program to receive incentive payments for solar generation — a future blog post will describe that program and the benefits the church has received under it so far.

Why Does Solar Generation Vary So Much?
Year to year, solar generation varies based on weather trends. Based on solar data from around the Twin Cities, 2020 was a better than average year for generating solar power.

Definitely our best months are the summer months, and it’s easy to understand why: Winter months can be hard for solar when there’s snow cover on the panels for days or weeks at a time. The sun can melt snow off of panels fairly quickly, but if we have a stretch of cloudy days along with snow cover, the panels just can’t generate much during that time.

We also had an issue a couple of times in the past year where the solar panel system actually was turned off unexpectedly! And it was unfortunately a while before someone realized it needed to be turned back on. One of those times was October 12 – November 4, 2019, and another shorter period occurred in late 2020. Hard to get use out of our solar panels when they’re not even on! How could this happen? Well, the on-off switch to the solar system is a temptingly big and red handle in the alley on the south side of the church. Anyone could have turned it to the off position when wandering through the alleyway. The church office has now placed a padlock on that handle, which we believe will prevent it from going into the Down/Off position, and Earthkeepers are checking periodically to verify that it’s in the Up/On position. If you see it in the Down/Off position – please report to the church office ASAP!

Significant Decrease of Electricity Use in 2019-20 vs. 2016-18
This chart shows a pretty decent drop-off of overall electricity use in the last two years compared to the previous two years. Hooray!! In the time covered by this chart, the church has carried out a number of building improvements that should have impacted energy use, both during and before the Capital Campaign. We hope that our energy audit later this year may give us more info about how building improvements may have impacted electricity use, and what additional improvements we can make to help reduce energy use overall.
At any rate, its great news that not only did the church begin offsetting a significant portion of its electricity use in late 2018, the church also has significantly reduced its overall electricity usage!

What happened in April 2019?
Who knows, perfectly mild weather, but no sunshine? Just kidding, we think we might have a typo in the data entry for electricity use in April 2019. The bill for that month is temporarily unavailable so we unfortunately haven’t been able to doublecheck that number.

Spike of Electricity Use in Late 2019
Despite an overall decrease in electricity use in 2019, we do see those numbers go back up on the October – December bills, which corresponds to the big push for construction wrap-up in September – November of that year. Those capital campaign construction projects involved a lot of electricity-drawing equipment.

2020 Electricity Use Still High
…But – you may also be wondering why the electricity use remained just as high (actually, even a little higher) in 2020; after all, the construction wrapped up at the end of 2019 and the church was not really using the building after March 2020, right?

One reason for steady electricity use through 2020 is that the Learning Garden preschool in the basement continues to operate daily on weekdays throughout the year, and did continue to operate throughout 2020 despite the pandemic (much to the delight of our family – my son attends there daily!). That consistent week-long electricity use eclipses any savings we would have had from not using the sanctuary on Sundays.

Another activity that impacted electricity use was the window replacement project in the education wing. This involved a month and a half in fall 2020 when, at any given time, one classroom’s windows were entirely removed. Not only did this involve construction equipment with high electricity draw, but it also would have meant that the building wasn’t retaining temperature as it normally would. You can see a corresponding electricity spike in late 2020.

Finally, we all know that COVID-19 wreaked havoc on normal habits and priorities, which was also true for the church building use. I’ll protect my source here, but I heard it’s possible that the church office AC ran more in 2020 than usual, as office staff came and went at different hours than normal and maybe had more urgent things on their mind than non-pandemic routines like shutting off the AC at the end of the day. As much as I had hoped to see reduced electricity use when the church was using the building less during COVID-19, it makes sense in retrospect that it was not an ideal year for saving electricity.

My takeaway from this is that the way to get efficiency out of our building’s typical level of electricity use is to get as much actual use out of the building as possible. Another reason to look forward to the end of the pandemic and the return to in-person church activities!

I woke up this morning pondering my own mortality. (As far as I know, I am perfectly healthy). But this is the gift of the pandemic – putting life in its most simple and most stark terms. And so I ponder…

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd repeatedly told police officers, “I can’t breathe.” This is not the first time a black man has died in police custody after saying, “I can’t breathe.” In 2014, Eric Garner told police eleven times, “I can’t breathe,” before he died, face down on the sidewalk in New York City. Over the past decade, at least 70 people have died in custody after saying the same words — “I can’t breathe,” according to The New York Times (Three Words. 70 Cases. The Tragic History of I Can’t Breathe,” June 29, 2020). The majority of them were stopped for minor infractions, calls to 911 about suspicious behavior, or mental health concerns. More than half were black.

Police brutality is real. Systemic racism is real.

Lord, have mercy
Christ, have mercy
Lord, have mercy

As a climate activist, I am sometimes asked to help people connect the dots between racism and climate change. I talk about air pollution, heat waves, rising sea levels, and vector borne illnesses like malaria and dengue fever and the disproportionate impact of each of these on people of color, poor people, and people in foreign countries. I talk about our extractive industries such as mining, logging, and fossil fuels, and the sacrifice zones associated with these industries. And by sacrifice zones, I mean places here and overseas where industries are forcing people to move off their land or exposing them to toxins or increased levels of crime and corruption. And in some cases, killing people because of their non-violent resistance to the extraction.

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, sums it up when he says, “too many people have been too comfortable for too long with other people’s desperation and other people’s death.”

Lord, have mercy
Christ, have mercy
Lord, have mercy

People are being killed by racism and by climate change. Our systems are violent. It could not be simpler or more clear. I have come to believe there is no difference between racial justice and climate justice. Racial justice is climate justice. And climate justice is racial justice. Once you see it – really see it – it cannot be unseen.

Stark realities.

And we are the people of God. Called to be salt and light. Called to heal a broken world. Hear these words from the Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr, president of the Hip Hop Caucus: “Probably the most important thing is to believe that we were made for this moment. We were put on this planet at this time to fight this battle. That’s the most amazing gift we’ve been given by the Almighty: We are so needed.”

On August 15, after the 10th Anniversary SPROUT Garden commemoration during the worship service, coffee hour was a “garden to table” collaboration between the second-Sunday hospitality team, Hamline Kids, the SPROUT Garden team, and the Hamline Church Earthkeepers. The Hamline Kids assembled caprese salad bites (with some assistance/guidance from the Earthkeepers) using locally made cheese, basil from an Earthkeeper’s home garden, and tomatoes harvested from the SPROUT Garden that morning. The trays of local bites were the centerpiece of the coffee-hour spread, connecting the dots between the kids’ Sunday school efforts, the bounty of the SPROUT Garden, and the church’s hospitality ministry.

Why does it matter to add SPROUT Garden produce to hospitality hour? For one, replacing part of our diet with locally grown food decreases the carbon footprint of our consumption. Eating locally means our food doesn’t require extra energy and resources for transportation, refrigeration, and packaging. In this season of the year, we can easily increase how much of what we eat is grown right outside our door, and we should!

Beyond carbon footprint, eating any food we grow with our own hands also helps us better appreciate the other foods we are eating. We understand the work that went into food, the weather and soil conditions that made it possible to grow, and the distance food travels to reach us. Of course we would struggle at this point to source our entire coffee hour from the food grown in 55104. But incorporating some of the sustainably grown food from our on-site garden reminds us that the sugar, flour, coffee, and other hospitality-hour ingredients are also grown by someone, somewhere, at a price.

Eating the food produced by the SPROUT Garden ministry also helps us remember that in God’s creation, everything is connected to everything else, as the Earthkeepers emphasized in a Children’s Story earlier this summer. When we take this concrete step of connecting the food we grow in the SPROUT Garden and the food we eat as.a community on Sunday morning, we participate in a type of communion between the ministries of Hamline Church. We grow as a church when we grow—and eat—food together. Happy Anniversary to the SPROUT Garden!

Four Hamline Church members participated in EarthKeepers training April 25-28, 2019. Congratulations to Nancy Victorin-Vangerud, Trudy Dunham, Miriam Friesen, Diane Krueger and Shirley Wright!

See also: Minnesota Earthkeepers Double in Number; Discern Next Steps”

Four Hamline Church members participated in Minnesota Annual Conference’s EarthKeepers training April 25-28, 2019. Congratulations to Nancy Victorin-Vangerud, Trudy Dunham, Miriam Friesen, Diane Krueger and Shirley Wright!

See also: Minnesota Earthkeepers Double in Number; Discern Next Steps

This Fall every couple of weeks, green team members and supporters will be sharing some personal stories and insights on what embracing values of sustainability means to them in their own lives and as members of the Hamline Church community.  We invite you to learn and become inspired to take further action in your own life or as a member of our community.

by Valentine Cadieux

Valentine Cadieux

As the days grow darker this advent season, I find they also make me more sensitive to the dual pressures of the holidays:  the extreme consumerism along with the space and time we need to meaningfully process its effects. So as a visiting scholar on this blog, my Christmas gift to you all is an argument from a sustainability perspective about how and why to build the time for refuge in this season, and in all seasons.

American trash production doubles in the month around Christmas.  This is not only what is left over after the gatherings and gifting, but the idea of “trash” can also include all things and people we wish could be magically spirited away because we don’t need or want them anymore, or they present difficulties we would just rather not contend with.  After last year’s election and the increasingly extreme political, economic and cultural dynamics that began to emerge then, Hamline University students and faculty returned to a January term, and I could feel the despair pouring off the students and my colleagues.

Sustainability is not only accounting well for where our things come from, and where they go, but it is also a set of relationships and practices that help us understand what in our lives and culture are worth sustaining, along with how that might be possible, especially in the face of what daunts us. Clued in to the impending despair last year by many people’s desperate visits to the sustainability office – not a place we had adequately understood to have a pastoral mission – I spent the J-term learning how to build refuges.  What does it mean to meet the other face to face, especially when it may be with others whose experience we find daunting – whose perspective we might prefer to just trash, send away, where we don’t have to experience it.  How does one keep an open heart during such times?

This is the heart of sustainability:  to meet each other well, to build refuges for and with each other to find what we need, for the emotions we have trouble acknowledging, to create space we can learn to live vulnerably and wholeheartedly.  I don’t know about you, but in my line of work, when I let myself be vulnerable – to all of the connections and implications that my privileged life, built on a sustained history of colonial and extractive oppression, inherently entails – I feel so vulnerable that my heart isn’t big enough for the amount of breaking it needs to do. But this seems like the crux of building a refuge:  you have to do it with others.  At the same time, it can become the death knell of colonial whiteness that contributes to so many of the problems sustainability work is trying to fix: our individual compulsion to fix things, often badly.

This fall I heard a remarkable talk by Desirée Williams-Rajee, on the occasion of accepting one of the first decadal awards from the U of M’s Institute on the Environment, where she delivered her speech while weeping through almost the whole thing.  Learning to talk through crying is something I talk with my students about. Particularly in fields like academics, where women struggle to be taken seriously, the idea of speaking in public with emotion is anathema to most of the things we’ve been trained to do to be able to pass as academic, and this fear is real and valid.  Right now though we need those people who are willing and able to lead with wholehearted experience more than ever, who don’t excise the emotion or water down what needs to be said and what we need to hear. The institutions we build to teach communities and students how to live toward futures we want need to model practices that are “body-ful”, that are refuges for our embodied experience and emotion along with our thinking. Hamline Church’s vision to be a Sanctuary for the City is about creating these refuges of sustainability for our spirits as well.  In this act of creating refuge, we might learn sustenance such that there is no trash at the end of it of things or people.  I invite you to reflect on how you can create with others a refuge during this holiday season.

This Fall every couple of weeks, green team members and supporters will be sharing some personal stories and insights on what embracing values of sustainability means to them in their own lives and as members of the Hamline Church community.  We invite you to learn and become inspired to take further action in your own life or as a member of our community.

by Barbara Deming

Barbara Deming

I’ve been walking to church from the start. My family lived next to, or a few blocks away from the church when I was growing up, and I remember speed walking with my mom as we were inevitably late leaving the house. Slow kicking home through the leaves with my sisters and brother. Picking up some friends to walk home with for lunch afterward. When I returned to church as an adult in Saint Paul I walked to Hamline and Church of the Good Shepherd, which lacked a parking lot, and then Hamline again, once pulling kids on a plastic toboggan after 12 inches of snow had fallen. The habit dies hard.

Now I mostly bike or walk alone, as other family members are out of town or not church-going. During those 15 – 45 minutes I am where I want to be: outdoors, moving my body to get somewhere else I want to be, listening to podcasts (I’m not completely unplugged!) or occasionally singing when no one is around. Sometimes I see another walker, usually connected to a dog, but mostly I’m alone out there on Sunday mornings. The rugged individualist in me is fed and I am able to show up at church ready to join in.

Sometimes I hop on the light rail or bus if it gets me there faster, thanks to the miracle of our shared community commitment to helping each other move around.

After six days of speeding around on four wheels to get to work, school and everywhere else, being on foot or bike puts me in a different place mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. Maybe it’s a check-in with my privilege, reminding me of who I am when alone on two feet. Sure, I’m still burning the energy from good food and wearing the warm boots I am so lucky to own, but walking is a small pin-prick of a reminder of what’s underneath the busy schedule, house full of stuff and hefty ego.

I invite any of you who are able to join me (in body or in spirit) in the slow church movement on Sunday mornings!

Did you know?  According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, our personal vehicles are a major cause of global warming. Collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all US emissions, emitting around 24 pounds of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases for every gallon of gas. About five pounds comes from the extraction, production, and delivery of the fuel, while the great bulk of heat-trapping emissions—more than 19 pounds per gallon—comes right out of a car’s tailpipe.  Consider what you are not putting into the atmosphere when you choose to walk or bike!

This Fall every couple of weeks, green team members and supporters will be sharing some personal stories and insights on what embracing values of sustainability means to them in their own lives and as members of the Hamline Church community.  We invite you to learn and become inspired to take further action in your own life or as a member of our community.

Mary Kay Olson

It has been both exciting and a true pleasure to support the further development of Hamline’s Green Team this past year.  From the beginning, there has been sustained interest from our team members as well as from leadership and the congregation.  Add to this so much support from outside Hamline Church with our new partnership with the US Green Building Council and the resources they have procured on our behalf has been amazing.  From the initial MN Annual Conference grant to experts provided for our January launch to a local engineering firm that has volunteered to create an energy model of our church to aid in potential future HVAC decisions, we are grateful recipients of this support.

Our green team began its efforts this Spring with a roll out of expanded recycling that now also includes organics.  All the paper towel waste as well as new compostable plates, utensils and cups for our weekly hospitality and other events at the church will be recycled.

As we begin our “Sanctuary for the City and Beyond” capital campaign this Fall, many of the proposed projects have a “green” element to them.  First and foremost, the greenest building is the one already built, so keeping up our historic structure is in itself an act of sustainability.  The We are considering major building “envelope” work (tuckpointing, possibly window replacement) which will protect our Sanctuary’s interior beauty for years to come.

Our first approved project initiated by our green team is new solar panels on the education wing roof!  We hope to offset about half our current electricity consumption with this 34kW array that will be producing renewable power by Spring 2018.  Thanks to a Made in Minnesota State Solar Incentive program, the panels will pay for themselves in about 10 years.

Our sustainable sites team has been busy envisioning campus outdoor space changes that embrace the spirit of our HCI process of being a “Sanctuary for the City”.  The scope of work will depend upon the amount of campaign funds raised.  On the north lawn, a new patio for the bread oven is envisioned.  Heading to the south side, imagine if you will next to the SPROUT garden a natural play area and outdoor Sunday School for our children instead of dumpsters and dirt.  If you walk along the east side of the church, you will be among a meandering new sidewalk with new landscaping, trees, and sitting areas which will be doubling as a solution to our basement water infiltration problem.  Roof water runoff will be captured in a new rain garden to the north, and piped to a storage tank to the south to water our SPROUT garden.  With this one project, we will be both beautifying our campus and saving money!  We will also be helping our community by keeping storm water on our property in situ instead of sending it out through the storm sewers, lowering the demand on our city’s water treatment infrastructure.

As we hope you can see, so much of what we are contemplating is being “green”.  For those of you who already recycle, bike or walk instead of drive, use energy efficient lighting in your homes, and who have brought that spirit and practice to our Hamline Church community, we invite you to consider these improvements as an expansion of your “green” values and will join us in supporting the campaign with your time, talent, and treasure.

If you would like to join Hamline Church’s green team, contact Diane Krueger at dkkrueger@comcast.net.

This Fall every couple of weeks, green team members and supporters will be sharing some personal stories and insights on what embracing values of sustainability means to them in their own lives and as members of the Hamline Church community.  We invite you to learn and become inspired to take further action in your own life or as a member of our community.

Craig Bowron with his wife Stephanie and their children Isak, Caleb and Julia.

My name is Craig Bowron, and I’m a member of Hamline Church’s Green Team. It’s a very select group:  we only admit church members who are biologically dependent on the Earth for their existence. If you breathe in oxygen every five or six seconds, then you’re in. We evaluate non-breathers on a case-by-case basis.

Two main interests brought me to the Green Team: avoiding unnecessary waste, and solar power.

For myself, I believe waste is the sincerest form of ingratitude to the earth; it is the opposite of reverence. Since a sense of gratitude has been proven to be a key indicator in happiness, eliminating waste is a key to happiness. Take an aluminum can for instance. Aluminum is made from a raw ore called bauxite; refining bauxite into aluminum is very energy intensive. Why would we collectively dig a hole to mine bauxite, spend all the resources required to make it into an aluminum can, and then dig another hole (landfill) to throw it into? We don’t have too many aluminum cans around Hamline Church, but an audit shows that we’re wasting a lot of energy. I’d rather put my money in the offering plate than throw it out a leaky window.

Solar power: it’s already the dominant form of energy on this planet. The gas you use to drive to church is old sunshine—sunlight that hit the Earth 300 million years ago and was captured by an array of microscopic photosynthetic organisms that eventually became buried under the seas. Percolating under intense heat and pressure, these microorganisms were slowly distilled into oil and gas.

Putting solar panels on the education wing of Hamline Church is not only a good investment, it sends a message that we are a forward-thinking congregation that recognizes both the science of climate change and the injustice of its consequences. I anticipate that Hurricane Harvey, Irma, and now Maria will prove, yet again, that when disaster strikes, the rich lose a little, and the poor lose a lot—maybe everything. And Jesus has called us to help the poor. We can shine a light by capturing the light.

Hamline Church will begin producing solar energy beginning in late Spring 2018.  We expect it will be enough energy to offset about half our current electricity consumption.

If you missed the first Green Team blog post by Natalie Freund click here.