Hans Christian von Baeyer
In our garden in Charles City my wife Barbara and I grow tomatoes, melons, carrots, blueberries, peaches, radishes… a bountiful harvest of colors and flavors. But our most reliable crop is electrons. Liberated from their shiny blue silicon solar panels by the power of the sun, a current of electrons streams into our little house by the garden, running the heat, the A/C, the hot water, the lights, the well, the range – everything – night and day, rain or shine, all year round, for free. Sure, we paid for the installation about a decade ago, but the system had paid for itself by erasing our Dominion Power bill for seven years, so for the last three years our electrons have been as free as our tomatoes and blueberries. And sure, we don’t harvest electrons at night or in the rain, but when the sun is out we produce more than we can use ourselves (like our tomatoes), so we sell the excess power to Dominion and buy it back at the same price when we need it, automatically. It’s called net metering.
The technology is really sweet. No moving parts, no noise, no maintenance, no bookkeeping, no pollution, no cost. Those electrons keep popping out, cheerfully ready to go to work for us.
Now our congregation proposes to follow suit: WUU plans to grow its own crop of electrons, right on our roof. Of course, the system is bigger than mine, but the idea is the same. In fact, things have gotten much better in the intervening decade. The price of solar installations has dropped dramatically, as they became both simpler and more efficient. I read recently that the cost of producing electricity by converting sunlight is now half of what it is by burning coal. Such a comparison was an eagerly hoped-for goal in 2008; now it’s a fact. Because the WUU system is much larger than mine, and its consumption of electricity more uneven through the week, the payback time for WUU is a little longer than it was for me: ten years rather than seven. But after that, the installation remains under warranty for another fifteen years, so WUU’s return on investment is, in crude approximation, 150%. A good deal!
But an electron garden is more than a good deal. It is a challenge and an unexpected opportunity. The challenge is one we face along with all our fellow citizens: How do we prepare to live in the environmental mess we have created, and left for our children and grandchildren to clean up? What can we do to lessen the catastrophic consequences of our political foolishness? Realizing that it’s too late to reverse the progress of climate change, are there any sensible steps that lead at least in the right direction?
The opportunity offered by solar electricity is not only economic and socially responsible – it’s also a profoundly moral issue: Solar presents an unusual chance to do the right thing. Most of us agree on what an ideal world would look like, with much less use of plastic, much less dependence on fossil fuels, much more efficient houses and cars, and so on. However, we also realize that our personal gestures in support of this vision are so tiny that they are bound to be too little, too late. But solar is different. In many places around the world it has already been shown to be effective, and now it has arrived on our doorsteps. It’s here, now, and it works. Together we can make a meaningful contribution to the greening of America. So as a religious community we should embrace the Golden Rule, seize the opportunity to do what we wish everybody did, do something good for our children and grandchildren, and plant our very own garden of electrons.
As a Green Sanctuary I think we can do no less.