A California Network of Black Churches Is Embracing Solar Energy, EV Charging

HAYWARD, Calif.—On a Sunday morning, the swirling timbre of a Hammond organ drifted into the lobby at Glad Tidings International Church of God in Christ. On the stage, a lively guest preacher, Ronzel Pretlow, roused the congregation in the Hayward, California, church, his raspy voice rising and falling as he sang and shouted, prompting his audience to stand. When the excitement waned, he shifted their attention to Glad Tidings’ founder, Bishop Jerry Macklin, seated in the pulpit.

“I think we owe our Bishop another round of applause for leading us into innovation and creativity,” the preacher said, eliciting a jingle from the organist. “I’m going back home to see if I’ve got room for some electric vehicle chargers,” he joked, knowing the profit that the chargers the church would soon have up and running could bring.

In September, Glad Tidings will complete its new Community Decarbonization Hub—a multipurpose campus featuring a 13,000-square-foot solar-powered building with battery storage and ten EV charging stations. The project, which started four years ago and has a $4.3 million price tag, won’t only cut the church’s energy usage and costs—it’s expected to generate around $500,000 annually. And in five to seven years, as more people charge their vehicles at the church, that amount is projected to double. 

Glad Tidings isn’t the only Black church in the Bay Area undergoing this kind of transformation. It’s one of four, thanks to a partnership with Green the Church, an Oakland-based environmental justice nonprofit founded by Reverend Ambrose Carroll, and Gemini Energy Solutions, a cleantech company founded by Stanford University graduate Anthony Kinslow. The hubs Carroll and Kinslow are helping to build won’t only bring clean energy infrastructure to these churches, but also turn them into year-round resilience hubs, ready to support residents when a disaster hits—be it a power outage, wildfire or heatwave.

As climate change progresses and brings more frequent extreme weather events, resilience hubs are becoming increasingly necessary—especially in Black and low-income communities, where legacies of redlining and other forms of racial discrimination have left residents particularly vulnerable. These communities are often the last to receive access to affordable, energy-efficient technology. Still, they persevere through brutal temperatures, hurricanes and other weather disasters, frequently earning praise from political leaders and news media for their resilience.

“Resiliency isn’t enough,” Kinslow said. “Resiliency implies maintaining where you’re at, but I would think most of us would agree that the current baseline isn’t where we want it to be. Communities need to be generating their own money to implement their own decarbonization projects.”

Black churches don’t just need money for decarbonization, but for their basic survival. Across the country, their congregations are shrinking due to aging populations and a larger generational shift away from religion, according to a Gallup study. Unable to rely on tithes and offerings, church leaders are under pressure to find new ways to maintain their buildings—their largest economic assets—and cut costs. Clean energy offers them a way to keep thriving.

Inside the Decarbonization Hub

Bishop Macklin began building his ministry in the late 1970s, when South Hayward was troubled by “drugs, crime, and rampant poverty,” according to the church’s website. Called a “visionary” by many in his circle, about 30 years ago, Bishop Macklin established the Glad Tidings Community Development Corporation (CDC), a separate entity from the church, to help area residents access essential resources, such as food, healthcare and affordable housing. Between the church and the CDC, they’ve acquired enough buildings to cover half a city block.

At the church’s north campus, directly across from the main sanctuary, the new resilience hub features a 5,000-square-foot gymnasium, an exercise room, a STEM lab, a youth lounge, a kitchen and classrooms. Powered by solar energy, the building can accommodate over 500 people in an emergency, providing them with electricity, as well as air conditioning and filtered air. The church will add six EV charging stations to a sliver of parking lot between the resilience hub and the main sanctuary, which will also be equipped with solar panels this fall.

According to Benita McLarin, who leads the Glad Tidings CDC, her team has spent the past six months training a 15-person Community Response Team on fire safety, CPR and mental health first aid. “Bishop Macklin is well respected and people look to him always for answers,” said McLarin, a former military commander and public health official. “He shouldn’t be the only person in our organization who is ready to provide them.”

At the south campus, where the church operates its Spanish-language ministry, four of the fastest EV chargers on the market are already installed under eight solar-paneled carports. McLarin, who drives an EV herself, expects this location to be their greatest revenue generator, as it’s located closest to Highway 880, a major thoroughfare that runs from Oakland to San Jose. Currently, there are few charging options in this part of Hayward, a common issue in many lower-income and Black and brown neighborhoods. These are the same neighborhoods where gig drivers, who often struggle with low wages, tend to live. Access to EVs and charging stations could help them save money in the long term and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

According to Kinslow, Glad Tidings will reinvest 80 percent of its profits back into the church and the larger South Hayward community. “We’re actually building more solar than the demand of the buildings, so we make a profit from that [by selling the excess electricity they generate through the public EV charging stations], and then we use that profit for programming,” Kinslow said.

For example, they may use the funding to provide free solar panels and batteries to income-qualifying households or help to finance electric vehicles for people in the neighborhood. “We see this clean energy hub as the starting point to decarbonizing the rest of the community,” he said. Kinslow’s company is also creating a “Neighborhood Decarbonization Index” that utilizes survey data and machine learning to assess greenhouse gas emissions and evaluate neighborhood decarbonization progress over time.

Partners in Energy and Faith

Kinslow completed his Ph.D. at Stanford and spent most of his student years thinking about how to bring renewable energy to communities of color. Inspired by Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” in high school, he wanted to make a difference. He launched Gemini Energy Solutions while he was still in graduate school, with the goal of democratizing clean energy. In 2020, he met Bishop Macklin at an event organized by Carroll’s nonprofit, Green the Church (GTC), and was later introduced to McLarin. A year later, they began crafting a plan to bring the community decarbonization hub to fruition. 

Gemini Energy Solutions handles project management and community engagement, while Green the Church  rallies clergy and collaborates with their internal “green team.” Rev. Carroll founded GTC fifteen years ago and has built relationships with faith leaders across the country. The organization currently has contracts with more than 15 churches, representing various denominations, to develop Community Decarbonization Hubs. In addition to Glad Tidings, GTC and Gemini are working to build these hubs at three other Bay Area churches: Twenty-Third Avenue Church in Oakland, The Way Christian Center in Berkeley and University AME Zion in Palo Alto. Glad Tidings is the furthest along, and the lessons learned there are shaping the work Kinslow and Carroll are doing at the other churches.

According to Kinslow, Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s (PG&E) delays in connecting the solar panels, battery, master meter and EV chargers to the power grid set the project back by about six months. Now, their construction partner, Imperial Electric Service in Fresno, has a designated interconnection representative at PG&E to accelerate future projects.

Gemini’s project team also realized they needed a contractor to explain the impacts of construction, like loss of parking, “which is a big thing for churches,” Kinslow said.

But perhaps the biggest challenge was the two years it took to find financing.

“We started this project based on faith,” said Carroll, noting this was before the Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested billions in clean energy. But banks struggled to grasp the concept of a Black community generating income rather than an outside company profiting from it, Carroll said. Eventually, he and Kinslow formed a joint entity, Green the Church Renewable Energy Development (GTC R.E.D.), which secured a $3 million revolving loan from the Kresge Foundation to bring clean energy to churches across the country.

More support came from Green Power Ventures, a Black-led investment management firm focused on climate resilience in low- to moderate-income areas, and Freedmen Green Bank & Trust, a Black-led nonprofit and charitable trust devoted to climate resilience and clean energy. And while the churches aren’t putting money into the community decarbonization hubs, Kinslow said, they are investing a lot of “sweat equity.”

Building on Bay Area Legacies

The Bay Area’s Black churches have long been a force for social change. In East Palo Alto, congregants organized community watch programs during times of racial unrest. St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland is the birthplace of the Black Panthers’ first free breakfast program, which served undernourished children before school. At the 107-year-old University AME Zion (UAMEZ) church in Palo Alto, they see their forthcoming community decarbonization hub as a continuation of this legacy—and their own commitment to justice. 

“When we started talking [about the hub] as a community, it wasn’t like, ‘Why should we do this?’” said UAMEZ Pastor Kaloma Smith. ”It was like, ‘This makes sense for the betterment of our world.’” 

Born in Jamaica and raised in New York, Smith arrived at UAMEZ in 2013 to find common challenges facing Black churches, including declining membership. That drop-off is partly from residents leaving Palo Alto—and the state of California—due to rising costs of living, Smith said. The community decarbonization hub is part of his long-term effort to “revitalize” the church and “be more effective, particularly for Gen Z and young families,” for whom he says environmental issues are a top concern.

Working with Kinslow on the hub marks a full-circle moment: he joined the UAMEZ congregation while still a student at Stanford, and approached Pastor Smith with a proposal to replace the sanctuary’s fluorescent lights. “We didn’t really have the money at the time,” said Smith. “But we saw there was phenomenal intersectionality between creating a benefit for the church, the environment and the community.”

Besides installing solar panels and making energy-efficient upgrades, UAMEZ will add 12 to 16 EV charging stations, including eight fast chargers, to its parking lot. Construction of the UAMEZ hub is expected to take only six months, including its connection to the power grid. In the event of an earthquake, Smith envisions UAMEZ as the go-to place for “all the things” residents of midtown Palo Alto might require.

“Black churches have always been resilience hubs,” said Carroll, who added that they have often provided tangible support during times of crisis. But they have the potential to do more, he said, by turning their parking lots into “revenue-generating microgrids” that meet their neighborhoods’ rapidly changing energy and climate needs.

Back in the pulpit at Glad Tidings, pink and purple lights illuminate the stage, casting a glow on Pretlow, the guest preacher, and an attentive congregation. “Prosperity is coming to your house,” he proclaimed, as the bassist plucked his strings. “Favor is getting ready to find your address!” His words seemed fitting for the era Glad Tidings is entering—as if that blessing had already come to pass.

This story was supported by the Climate Equity Reporting Project at Berkeley Journalism. Additional reporting was provided by Twilight Greenaway, Akshika Jinendri Kandage, and James Mawien Manyuol.