Kentucky Interfaith Power and Light (KIPL) is making an impact on our state. We want our work to be a beacon of hope in your world, and so plan to feeding you quarterly with ever rising totals on three measures: negawatts, cleangreenwatts, and energy savings.
What’s a negawatt, you ask? Energy that doesn’t have to be generated because the need for it has been negated through investments in energy efficiency. These investments can not only significantly reduce our religious partners’ demand for energy, but also really cut their energy bills.
We’ll also track our impact in new deployments of cleangreenwatts. This is energy production that does not emit any CO2 into the atmosphere; electricity generated by sun, wind, and geothermal powered systems.
Energy savings. Money not spent on energy bills can instead support the community building and social justice work faith communities are doing around our Commonwealth.
How do we know Kentucky Interfaith Power and Light and its supporters can rely on these metrics? Because we’re already making it happen. This summer we worked with the Louisville Climate Action Network (LCAN) on several proof-of-concept projects. Together we collaborated with 8 religiously grounded partners to implement 8 energy efficiency projects. These efforts removed almost 44 tons of carbon from the atmosphere and meant $5600 could be directed to the partners’ missions rather than the fossil fuel powered utilities.
Our approach is to help faith-based organizations overcome the two biggest barriers to energy efficiency efforts for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) of any stripe. Those two barriers are a) the lack of human resources dedicated to focusing on efficiency goals and b) the lack of focused capital which can demonstrate the long-term cost savings energy efficiency projects pay back to those who undertake them.
This summer’s project design was specifically crafted to allow KIPL and its partners to provide the human capital needed to shepherd the projects start to finish. We also used some our own grant money as the “focused capital” needed to support congregations in getting started in their energy efficiency investments. The project targeted the biggest bang for the energy efficiency buck, relamping. We are confident the cost savings these initial projects garner for participants will whet the appetite of potential clients to the extent that they will bite, i.e. choose to continue to work with us on additional efforts to undertake more cost cutting energy efficiency and supply side generation projects.
So, stay tuned for life and future affirming updates regarding how much CO2 our work is banishing from the planet’s atmosphere. It’ll be so much more fun watching these numbers tick up with like-minded folk who are tired enough of fearing for the future of our lonely, beautiful blue planet that we’ve decided to do something concrete about it together! Don’t hesitate to donate here to this vital work if the Spirit, or your spirit, so moves you. And much peace and joy to you as we get busy lighting candles, one by one, so neither we nor our descendants have to spend any more time cursing our propensity to mire ourselves in a self-imposed dark.
Elisa