The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church has ambitious plans to build 18 resilience hubs–and eventually up to 482. Churches will be offered a menu of options, with the highest level of resilience including solar, storage, bidirectional electric vehicles (EV) and energy efficiency. But the solar and EV tax credit phaseout by the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” law is expected to undermine the church’s efforts.
In this interview with Clean Energy Today, James Gaymon, director of operations for social justice at the Sixth District African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Georgia, described the numerous hurricane-sparked outages these communities face in Georgia and his plans to develop resilience hubs. Five resilience hubs are expected to move forward, but the rest are in question because of the phaseout of the ITC, he said recently.
Listen to the podcast interview:
Bidirectional charging could help out the churches and the communities around them, he noted.
For example, bidirectional EVs could provide electricity for a festival during an outage, help electrify a church or travel to areas with critical services to provide electricity.
Hurricanes hit Georgia once or twice a year, and after Hurricane Helene, an outage lasted 18 days for some communities.
While funding is a challenge, the organizations that have helped out with this effort include Georgia Interfaith Power & Light, RMI and Georgia Bright.
Listen to the Clean Energy Today episode on Apple Podcasts here.