Wrightstown Quaker Meeting Goes Green!

Wrightstown Quaker Meeting Goes Green!

Wrightstown Friends Meeting, 535 Durham Road, Newtown, was co-founded in 1722 and recently celebrated its 300th anniversary. Now it’s going green, according to Meeting Clerk (head) Jeff Cogshall.

Cogshall said, “Wrightstown Friends Meeting, like many faith communities, has been looking at how we can put our testimony of stewardship for the earth into action. It was clear that the first steps would be to reduce our use of fossil fuels by replacing our oil burning furnaces with energy efficient heat pumps and creating our own clean electricity to help power them with solar panels. The roadblock was cost.

The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 was a game-changer for us. The legislation contains provisions which, for the first time, enable nonprofits like ours - and yours - to receive a "direct pay" subsidy for clean energy production and energy efficiency upgrades like switching to heat pumps. In our case, we installed photovoltaic solar panels and a geothermal heat pump, both of which qualify for the maximum subsidy: 30%! This will allow us to decommission an oil-burning boiler and to save energy costs in the process.

This initiative has produced additional benefits. Since heat pumps can both heat and cool, we gained a more comfortably cool social hall and nursery school for the hot weather than we’ve ever had before. Additionally, we anticipate substantial savings on future energy bills.

Visitors to our Meetinghouse and Nursery School can now see the tangible results of our commitment on the roofs of our social hall and nursery school buildings.

Going green will be an ongoing process for us. But the 30% direct pay from the Inflation Reduction Act got the ball rolling by reducing the cost enough that we could raise the rest of the funds from donations and a grant.

We are immensely grateful for this legislation, which has significantly advanced our community's green initiatives. Wrightstown Friends Meeting is proud to stand as a testament to the positive impacts of supportive environmental policies. We wanted to publicly express thanks for what a positive difference this legislation is making for our Quaker Meeting.

Wrightstown Friends Meeting meets for worship at 10am every First Day (Sunday). Jeff Cogshall describes Wrightstown Friends Nursery School “as a small school with a big heart. Our hands-on approach emphasizes cooperative working and playing together and has been going strong for over 40 years”