Mary Anne Hitt: Labor of Love--How My Small WV Town Launched a Game-Changing New Model to Go Solar

Photo of Than and Hazel by  Mary Anne Hitt at a ribbon cutting for the solar project of the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church

I met  Mary Anne when she was the Executive Director of Appalachian Voices and living in Blackburg. In 2008, she went on to direct the Sierra Club's national Beyond Coal campaign and lives in Shepherdstown, WV with her husband Than (a 10th generation West Virginian) and daughter Hazel, both environmental activists in their own right.

Mary Anne first posted this essay at the Sierra Club's blog and gave me permission to reprint it here.  Solar Holler's other projects in West Virginia are for the Bolivar-Harpers Ferry Public Library and the Lewisburg City Hall.

I first published this post at 5:26 pm on 8/29/14 and updated it at 3:22 on 8/30 to credit Mary Anne, after she got back to me and confirmed that she was the photographer.

*

This week, my small town in West Virginia cut the ribbon on a solar project that isn't just the largest crowd-funded solar project in the state, but also launches a new model making it possible for any WV community organization to go solar. On a perfect sunny day, 100 elementary school students and dozens of community members joined my husband, Than Hitt, and my daughter Hazel, who cut the ribbon for a 60-panel solar system at the historic Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church. It was an unforgettable day that crystalized all our hopes for the future of West Virginia, and exemplified the power of regular people to change the world.

The genius of this project was that the church went solar for just $1, thanks to over 100 community members who contributed - but they donated their water heaters, not their dollars. Maryland-based Mosaic Power pays homeowners $100 per year to have smart meters installed on their home water heaters that save energy and, in the aggregate, operate as a safe, efficient mini-power plant. These community members are each donating their $100 per year to the church solar project, collectively raising enough money to pay for the solar system. The financing model was developed by our brilliant friend Dan Conant and his company Solar Holler, and now that we have proof of concept in Shepherdstown, he's taking it statewide.

The church is going to generate nearly half of its electricity from the sun, reducing pollution, saving money, and living out the congregation's commitment to caring for the Earth. I'm a member of this remarkable church, where we've spent many a Sunday morning lamenting the destruction polluting energy development has wreaked on our state, from mountaintop removal mining to the coal chemical spill in Charleston earlier this year.

By going solar, we’re not only reducing our reliance on dirty energy, but we’ve demonstrated a model that other WV nonprofits are lining up to replicate. Making this project work was a labor of love three years in the making, dating all the way back to 2011 when my family was the first in our historic town to go solar, which helped get the community talking about how we could do more. Take it from me, when you go solar, it's like creating ripples in a pond - you may set into motion changes bigger than you ever imagined.

Now that we've figured out the details of this community-supported solar financing model, Solar Holler already has two more projects on deck in West Virginia communities, and those are sure to be followed by many more. And the project is being noticed around the country, with press coverage including... the Associated Press, and this great piece by Think Progress. I'm so proud of my husband, who led this project for the church, and so proud of our community.

At the ribbon cutting, our pastor Randall Tremba offered powerful remarks that have stayed with me, because he beautifully captured why the church undertook this groundbreaking project, and what it means for the community and the nation. I'd like to close the post with an excerpt from his remarks:

I am the pastor of SPC, which now stands for: Solar Presbyterian Church.
These solar panels symbolically and actually reconnect this church to an old and long Presbyterian tradition of respect, reverence and connectedness for and with Mother Earth - a reverence sadly forsaken several hundred years ago. We are happy to reconnect to Mother Earth. 

That old reverence is reflected in a poem composed by St. Francis in 13th century and addressed to Mother Earth, Sister Water, Brother Wind, and Sister Moon. But it begins this way. 

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,especially through my lord Brother Sun,who brings the day; you give light through him.He is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!Of you, Most High, Brother Sun bears your likeness.

This project will make a lot of Presbyterians, living and dead, very happy. Let me explain by taking you back through time a ways. 

The Fellowship Hall is attached to the Meeting House out front which was built in 1836 by a community of Presbyterians first organized on the banks of the Potomac in 1743, which was 33 years before there was a United States of America. 

These solar panels would make our 18th century founding Presbyterians very happy for, in case you didn’t know, most of them were Scots and the Scots like nothing more than saving a penny. Think Andrew Mellon. 

Scots love saving a penny and these panels will save us many of those.
As much as frugality, the Scots also love technological inventions. Think Alexander Graham Bell. 

As much as inventions, the Scots also love the natural world and work to keep it whole and holy. Think John Muir, son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. Love of nature is in SPC's DNA....As happy as this project makes Presbyterians, I hope it makes our civic community just as happy and proud. For this project could not have happened without ecumenical and communal support. 

On behalf of SPC, I thank Than Hitt and Dan Conant along with their blue-ribbon committee who successfully guided this project through thick and thin, over humps and bumps, on sunny days and cloudy days, and around twists and turns more than once. But I also thank the citizens of this community. For it takes many hands to make light work and work light.

*

Graphic from Solar Hollow via Public News Service.

Paul Corbit Brown: Rapt in Red, White and Blue - The Enthrallment of Appalachia

Image from the Facebook page for Mari-lynn Evans and Jordan Freeman's Blood on the Mountain. (I've asked for an attribution.)  Photographer Paul Corbit Brown wrote the following essay on August 7, in response to an August 4 story by Marcus Constantino in the Charleston Daily Mail, "Dirt airstrip in Logan tailor made for training Guardsmen for war." Alpha Natural Resources   has "reclaimed" a mountaintop removal site in Logan County WV by letting the Air National Guard use it as a  a 3500 foot  "unimproved, or unpaved runway" when pilots could earn their landing certifications. Alpha acquired Don Blackenship's Massey Energy in 2011 following the Upper Big Branch  mine disaster in Montcoal.

*

Wrapping it in red, white and blue doesn’t change its color-coal will always be black. Likewise, Patriotism isn’t simply an idea wrapped in red, white and blue. Patriotism, is not sacrificing a poor segment of our citizenry for the comfort and ease of the rest of the country. Patriotism is not the construction of a military complex on an MTR site. More than 500 mountains have been leveled by mining. Are we really to believe the only suitable location for an airstrip is the one that strips us of our history, our culture and our contributions to humanity in order to profit a handful of individuals?

Our heritage is not so much what we did, but how we did it. It wasn’t that we were coal miners as much as we were hard workers. It wouldn’t have mattered what the industry was, all that really mattered was that we were loving and we took care of our own, that we were compassionate and always lent a helping hand, that we were resilient, that we were, and still are, survivors.

The workers who mined these mountains all those years ago could have just as readily been ranchers or sawyers or stone masons. The job title was merely a byproduct of our environment. Most folks mined coal simply because they needed a job. I have met countless folks who feel the same today, “Give me another job and I’ll crawl straight out of that black hole and never look back,” they say. I know many who have done so.

It’s disingenuous to question our integrity, given our true character and heritage, if we now understand that mining is killing us far more than it supposedly helps us. There is no altruism in "giving" us mining jobs. We don’t accept them because we have a need to live in the past, we simply want to live.

The coal industry doesn’t exist as a mechanism to make jobs, it exists to create a profit. It makes this profit largely by externalizing its costs. The primary cost being the detriments to the health of the workers as well as those who live in the communities where coal is mined, processed, and/or burned. The secondary cost being the toll put on the environment which amounts to robbing subsequent generations.

When the true history of West Virginia is finally written, it's pages will be printed in blood. It will be the blood of the men and women who took up arms and laid down their lives at the battle of Blair Mountain. It will be the blood of the many lives that were carelessly taken by the lawless and money-grubbing attitudes of coal operators like Don Blankenship. It will be the blood of the children born with birth defects as a result the toxins in our water. It will be the blood of the 4000 people who die early deaths every year as a result of the poisons the extraction industries pump into our communities. That same blood is already upon the hands of the politicians who uphold these processes and who continue to ignore our pleas for help. Make no mistake, the day has already arrived in West Virginia, there is no clean water to wash that blood from their filthy hands.


True patriotism, as it concerns our nation’s need for energy, would be for each and every citizen to roll up their sleeves and dramatically conserve energy while working to create energy sources and economies with liberty and justice for all. That’s the way a nation at war becomes victorious. And we are at war. It is not a war on coal, nor is it a war on terrorism. We are at war with ourselves and our horribly skewed sense of what it means to be a great People and we are at war with a terribly flawed idea of what freedom really is. We do not own freedom through the enslavement of others. We do not bask in freedom by surrendering to fear and giving up the personal liberties that our forebears paid for in blood- blood that is ironically symbolized by the red stripes on the American flag. We have confused the toll of funeral bells for the ringing of freedom. We do not let freedom ring for all with the knell of funeral bells for Appalachia, her people, her waters or her air. In Appalachia, Patriotism and Profit couldn’t be any more diametrically opposed. Appallingly, the two are very often misconstrued as one-and-the-same, and as the Truth.

Paul Corbit Brown
President/Chair
Keeper of The Mountains Foundation

Photo by Bob Wojcieszak for the Daily Mail.

Blacksburg and Roanoke Skipped by Governor McAlliff's Energy Plan Listening Tour

Illustration by Temple City, CA

*

The Virginia Energy Plan

The quadrennial Virginia Energy plan, last published in 2010,  provides a  "comprehensive strategy for the energy industry"  including using sustainable practices for Virginia, such as conservation, efficiency, solar, wind and geothermal.

Originally to have been due July 1, it will now be due October 1, as a result of H.B. 796 passed by the Virginia General Assembly March 7, 2014.

McAuliffe created the  Virginia Energy Council  to gather public and businesses advice

June 4, 2014, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe established the Virginia Energy Council to receive, review and evaluate "input offered by Virginia’s residents and businesses"  on the 2014 Virginia Energy Plan being compiled by the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy (MME).  The Council will monitor implementation and review the October, 1, 2017  interim update, "providing strategic guidance to ensure successful achievement of Plan goals.  I've requested a coy of the 2013 update and will post it if I receive a copy.

The Council started  listening June 12

June 12, the Council, chaired by Maurice Jones (bio), Virginia's Secretary of Commerce and Trade,  held its first listening session in conjunctions with MME in Fredericksburg. The next session will be tonight in Annandale, Tuesday, June 17 at  6 pm at Northern Virginia Community College, 8333 Little River Turnpike.  Appalachian Voices sent out a memo at 10:26 am today advising folks to arrive at least 30 minutes to sign up and reserve a three minute slot on the speakers list.

There is no listening session scheduled for Blacksburg or Roanoke but you can file comments

Folks can request events by writing Jones's office at commerce.trade@governor.virginia.gov. You CAN file comments on line or by snail mail:

Attn: Virginia Energy Plan
Department of Mines, Minerals & Energy
Washington Building 8^th Floor
1100 Bank Street
Richmond, VA 23219

The four remaining sessions

Here's a schedule, if you have friends elsewhere who can attend:

• South Boston: Thursday, June 19, 6 pm, Southern Virginia Higher Education Center, 820 Bruce Street;
• Abingdon: Tuesday, June 24, 6 pm, Virginia Highlands Community College, 100 VHCC Drive, Building ISC;
• Norfolk: Thursday, June 26, 6 pm, Old Dominion University, Bluestone Avenue and 49th Street; and 
• Harrisonburg: Tuesday, July 1, 6 pm, James Madison University, 127 West Bruce Street.

Other duties of the Council

The .Governor has charged the Council with:

• Developing strategies to make Virginia a national leader in energy efficiency and ensure that the cost of energy for Virginia consumers remains highly competitive;
• Developing strategies to increase the diversity of energy used to power Virginia, while ensuring a commitment to the most efficient use of existing energy sources;
• Developing strategies to increase Virginia’s renewable energy economy and grow the entire energy industry in Virginia by retaining, expanding, and attracting businesses in the energy sector;
• Developing strategies to increase the international export of Virginia’s coal;
• Identifying opportunities to expand Virginia’s needed energy infrastructure and to increase the reliability of the Commonwealth’s existing energy infrastructure;
• Reviewing an analysis of any regulations proposed or promulgated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel-fired electric generating units under § 111(d) of the Clean Air Act, 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d);
• Providing expertise and advice on other policy strategies deemed appropriate during the drafting of the Plan to grow the energy industry in the Commonwealth; and,
• Monitoring the implementation of the Plan, providing strategic guidance to ensure successful achievement of Plan goals, and reviewing the interim update of the Plan required to be presented by October 1, 2017.

For more information on the Council

Contact Rachel Thomas, the Governor's Traveling Press Secretary:
(804) 225-4262
 Rachel.Thomas@governor.virginia.gov

For more information on the listening sessions

Contact Tarah Kesterson, the DMME's Public Relations Manager:
(276) 523-8146
 tarah.kesterson@dmme.virginia.gov