Catholic organizations own up to 100,000 buildings in the U.S., as well as land, and Catholic Energies is helping them go solar. “The market is enormous,” said the program’s leader.

Dan Misleh got the idea for Catholic Energies after Pope Francis called on Catholics to take up a “commitment to the environment” in his 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si.

Misleh had been speaking to Catholic groups on climate, as executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant, and people would often tell him they couldn’t persuade their pastor, or their Catholic school principal, to talk about climate issues.

Figuring that “one thing that seems to motivate everybody is saving money,” Misleh launched the Catholic Energies program, and began talking about how a Catholic school could save $6,000 a year with an LED lighting retrofit.

Misleh teamed up with Dan Last, now a solar developer with Mission Energy, and the two ultimately persuaded four parishes in Ohio to adopt LED lighting. Yet reaching that agreement “took an enormous amount of work,” he said.

Over time, Misleh heard that “a lot of Catholic institutions wanted to look at solar.”

Now, with Catholic Energies having completed its first solar installation just 13 months ago, the program expects to reach 22 installations by the end of this year, with 11 in Virginia and the others across several states. The program can provide its services anywhere in the country.

The nonprofit Catholic Climate Covenant, which runs the Catholic Energies program, does not advertise the offering, beyond mentions in its newsletter to 30,000 people, and through social media. The solar leads are generated through word of mouth.

The program’s largest project to date is a 2 MW solar installation in Washington, D.C. (image below) on a property where nuns in the Catholic order Missionaries of Charity—“Mother Theresa’s nuns,” said Misleh—provide hospice care.

To help with the facility’s finances, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington had been considering selling some of the land, but “when we started talking to them about solar,” says Misleh, they decided to install a solar facility, “because D.C. is just a great solar market.” The project has reduced Catholic Charities’ energy costs, and is helping offset the cost of a new roof and windows for the hospice building.

When stories of this and other early projects “hit the airwaves,” said Misleh, “people started calling and it was off to the races.” The program recently announced solar installations on seven churches and schools in Virginia’s Diocese of Richmond, totaling 1.3 MW. Those solar projects, like most of Catholic Energies’ projects, will be financed through power purchase agreements.