Friday, November 10, 2006

Green Christian

Sounds like an inexperienced believer, but this is more on environment, etc. There's an (anonymous) letter in the Church Times today about the lack of incentives for Churches, halls and vicarages to be more environmentally minded, and bemoaning the lack of vision.

It's a fair point. When I was a vicar in Coventry, the vicarage was built on to the Church, with an East-West aligned pitched roof. It would have been ideal for solar heating or photovoltaic panels. The 1960s built church would have been nicely finished off with a wind turbine on top as well. (We didn't have any significant architectural or aesthetic reasons why that would have been a problem.)

For all the time church was unoccupied, the turbine would probably have generated more electricity than was consumed on-site. The panels on the vicarage would certainly have made a huge difference to the gas bill for heat and water. A carbon-neutral policy was almost within our grasp.

Maybe we need a bit more courage and commitment on this. There must be lots of Church-owned locations that could house small scale wind turbines, and many churches that could accommodate solar panels of one kind or another on bits of roof that aren't part of the main view of the church from the ground. Wouldn't it be great if in 3 or 4 years, the church could claim to be saving 1000s of tons of CO2, and paying less for its regular bills.

Someone ought to start a charity or fund to tackle this. Any offers?

1 comment:

Andrew said...

Sounds like you need to persuade the people in Estates to use the chapel as a Green energy showcase! Why not a turbine on the top of Willie Tom tower?!