Heaven Smiles On The Faithful, After All

This item brings good cheer.

The wonderful churches and cathedrals of the UK are a marvel, a gift from a rich history to our modern day.

Problem is, they're wicked expensive to maintain. Heating to even a minimal level of comfort is daunting. Those Evensongs in February are accompanied by organists in gloves, choristers emitting clouds of vapor, heard by worshippers bundled up to the hilt.

Each and every one of those buildings is also in need of structural work, constantly. They were designed and built with dead-reckoning and chalk lines, impressive pieces of engineering, but time and gravity overcome all human genius, eventually.

Sooo...

From Geoffrey Lean at the Telegraph:

Struggling churches and other religious buildings could get heavenly assistance in meeting the bills – from the sun. New figures produced by British Gas show that they could raise a total of £34 million a year by installing solar panels – quite a help, considering that a quarter of Britain’s 44 dioceses are in the red. Some £29 million of this would come from the government’s new ‘feed in tariffs’ which pay for generating renewable electricity, and the other £5 million in savings from not having to buy power from utilities.

Mosques and most churches are particularly well placed to exploit the power of the sun as – since they face East, to Mecca and Jerusalem respectively – they have large south-facing roofs, ideally suited to trapping the maximum amount of solar energy. In the process, British Gas adds, they could boost attempts to combat climate change by saving up to 42,000 tons of carbon a year, equivalent to what is emitted by more than 600 transatlantic flights. And, presumably, this could provide just the right way to meet all those appeals to raise money to repair the church roof.

It strikes OS that the path to energy independence from the bad people with oil, like the Saudis and Iranians won't actually be a straight line, or one top-down solution, but rather hundreds upon hundreds of small solutions, all walking in the same direction. Sort of like how a properly functioning marketplace works.

OS met an engineer this week who lives in an even smaller town than his own. He designs and builds equipment that makes solar panel installation much easier to achieve, and quietly makes a good living at it.

There are solutions out there. They just don't involve hijacking the entirety of the economy to work.