A photograph of St. Peter's Episcopal Church, a stone Gothic Revival style church with stained glass in Salem, Massachusetts.
Image Credit: Fletcher on Wikimedia Commons

A centuries-old church in Salem, Massachusetts got a rude awakening in December 2022, when the local utility visited to change its gas meter. It turns out the old meter at  St. Peter’s–San Pedro Church had been malfunctioning in the church’s favor for years. Once the new one was installed, costs skyrocketed. “It went from $100 a month to $3,000 a month overnight,” said Reverend Nathan Ives, who has led the congregation since 2018. “Too much longer of this, and we’ll not be able to heat the place in the wintertime.”

The incident provided a surge of motivation to launch what has become an ambitious community renewable energy network project. Called the Heaven and Earth Project, a nod to its use of both solar and geothermal energy, the planned network will serve around two dozen commercial, residential, and municipal buildings across much of downtown Salem. St. Peter’s–San Pedro Episcopal Church will anchor the new network and serve as a climate resilience hub with uninterruptible green energy, making it a refuge where community members can shelter during climate emergencies.

“If we’re going to green this space to fight climate change, and if we’re going to green this space to lower our costs, then we’re going to need to do something pretty radical,” Ives said.

The church has been serving locals in the historic coastal town of Salem for almost three centuries. It was founded in 1733, and today, its Spanish and English bilingual congregation gathers in a granite masonry Gothic Revival building dating to the early nineteenth century. Churchgoers still file into the original wooden box pews each Sunday as the sun peaks through large arched stained-glass windows. The square bell tower that rises above the building’s entrance is home to the oldest church bell in the nation.

“It’s really beautiful to have that innovation rising from the people, like the community around the church in Salem.”

The building’s age and historical significance make it an unexpected choice to anchor a cutting-edge renewables project. The building is part of the Salem Common Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. That means the Heaven and Earth project comes with the added challenges of not only retrofitting an old building to make it more energy-efficient, but also doing so in a way that preserves the building’s historic character.

That has not deterred Ives, the congregation, or project partners, including representatives of a geothermal energy company, an engineering firm, several Massachusetts nonprofits, and the City of Salem. The city is one of several across the state aiming to zero out greenhouse gas emissions from buildings by 2050.

State lawmakers have also been supportive. “The administration has the intention of Massachusetts being a center of clean energy innovation,” explained Zeynab Magavi, executive director at HEET, a Boston-based nonprofit that helps transition gas utilities to geothermal. “It’s really beautiful to have that innovation rising from the people, like the community around the church in Salem.”

St. Peter’s–San Pedro Church is one of many churches and other sacred spaces nationwide responding to the threat of climate change with concrete action and recognizing their unique capacity to serve as refuges in the event of climate disasters. For example, New Orleans’s community lighthouse program similarly intends to install solar and battery storage in dozens of places of worship in the coming years to provide reliable energy and ensure that every resident lives within a fifteen-minute walk of a resilience hub.

Ives said collaboration has been vital to moving the Heaven and Earth Project forward. “We’re not doing this in isolation and saying, ‘The church in your neighborhood is going to be green, isn’t that grand?’” he said. “We’re saying, ‘The church in your neighborhood is going to be green, and we want you all to be green with us, and let’s get off of gas together.’”

Though the shocking increase in heating costs helped ignite the Heaven and Earth Project, Ives had never harbored any illusions about the threat of climate change and the need for the church to adapt. His congregation includes many low-income residents from a predominantly Latino neighborhood called El Punto, or the Point. Low-income communities and communities of color are more vulnerable to the threats of climate change and less likely to be able to keep up with rising energy costs. Even before its own gas costs multiplied, the church had been supporting members of the congregation who were struggling to pay their winter heating bills.

Now, Ives said, that community has also been thrust into a deepening political crisis as the second Trump administration ramps up attacks on immigrant communities. That has made the goal of greening the church feel even more urgent.

“We serve a community that is beleaguered right now,” Ives said. “We’re doing everything we can to protect them, and part of that is being around, and being available, and being on this curb where we’ve been for almost three hundred years—that means we have got to take action to make sure we can still stay here and operate.”

The solar portion of the Heaven and Earth Project calls for retrofitting St. Peter’s–San Pedro Episcopal Church with solar panels and batteries—expected to be fitted to the roof of the Parish Hall, abutting the main church building.

Meanwhile, the geothermal part of the project entails a series of pipes built beneath Salem’s streets that will connect the church to more than twenty other buildings. Among them are public housing blocks, condos, commercial space, and Salem’s City Hall. The Salem Witch Museum and several buildings belonging to the Peabody Essex Museum, a nonprofit, are also on the list.

“One of the things that I think is most special about this technology is that it actually does bring people together and that together, we actually are better, like our bills go down and we’re safer and healthier. You have to network the people to network the buildings.”

The plan is for the roughly mile-and-a-quarter long pipe network to circulate water mixed with antifreeze and connect to hundreds of boreholes drilled beneath the historic Salem Common park. The 500 feet deep boreholes tap into the subsurface thermal energy where temperatures remain a steady 56 degrees year-round. Once built, the system will harness that thermal energy for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Plans also call for installing a ground source heat pump in each networked building to provide additional heating or cooling.

The Heaven and Earth Project’s upfront costs are high, estimated at tens of millions. HEET’s Magavi likens it to “buying 50 years of fuel up front.” But the fact that it is a community-wide project helps bring down the cost for everyone. Once the network is up and running, the community expects to rake in long-term cost savings.

“Everything we do here is about shared power. We’re trying to live that and breathe that as we go along.”

St. Peter’s–San Pedro Church has received over $850,000 in grant funding to help move the project forward. That includes a recent $349,000 grant from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and a $50,000 grant from HEET. The latter grant funded early planning and community education efforts. By December 2024, the project had completed a feasibility study and held discussions with 20 neighbors who own 24 buildings that could become part of the network. Discussions with residents are ongoing and are often held at the church in both Spanish and English.

“One of the things that I think is most special about this technology is that it actually does bring people together and that together, we actually are better, like our bills go down and we’re safer and healthier,” said Magavi. “You have to network the people to network the buildings.”

For now, the Heaven and Earth Project team continues to fundraise and discuss outstanding questions with residents about how the community energy network will be launched and governed. One open question is whether St. Peter’s–San Pedro Church should leap ahead of other buildings in the project’s footprint to serve as a pilot, or whether the entire neighborhood should be developed along the same timeline.

Ives said he expects that decision to be finalized later this year. Either way, he said St. Peter’s–San Pedro Church will be running on green energy within two years. Ives emphasizes that every step on the path toward that goal will be taken in consultation with the congregation and the wider community, so nothing is set in stone. “Everything we do here is about shared power,” he said. “We’re trying to live that and breathe that as we go along.”