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Technicians with Sunpath Solar install solar panels at the Asbury Memorial Church in Savannah on Sept. 11, 2025.
Credit: Justin Taylor/The Current GA/CatchLight Local/Report for America
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Solar on a Savannah church highlights losses from federal cutbacks
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Mary Landers, The Current
On the roof of Asbury Memorial Church’s education building in Savannah, 122 solar panels will soon be facing south to capture the sun’s energy, lower the church’s electric bill and decrease its contribution to global warming.
Technicians from Sunpath Solar installed about half of those panels last week. The rooftop array is one of the last ones authorized under a statewide pilot program that began in 2023 and was so successful that the pilot’s sponsor — Georgia Bright — was awarded $156 million in federal funds made available through the Inflation Reduction Act.
But just days after Georgia Bright launched its effort to offer solar leases to 5,000 Georgia households the Trump administration last month clawed back the promised funding.
Georgia Bright’s backers say it’s exactly the wrong time to pull back on solar.
“Everybody is paying higher electricity rates and bills than we ever had before, in a moment where solar energy is generating the cheapest electricity we’ve ever generated in human history,” said Seth Gunning, the founder and owner of Sunpath Solar, an Atlanta-based company that installed the array on Asbury’s roof. “Those two facts existing at the same time is just wild to me.”
Asbury’s array offers a glimpse of what individuals, faith groups, nonprofits and communities stood to gain from the project and what they’re losing with its premature closure.
How Georgia Bright works
Georgia Bright’s model leases rooftop solar arrays to allow homeowners to benefit from solar when they can’t afford the high upfront costs of installation. Its parent organization, Capital Good Fund, uses grants and bulk purchase discounts to reduce costs. As part of the pilot project, churches and other nonprofits were able to participate through a financial mechanism called Solar Energy Procurement Agreements that operates similarly to a lease.
Some churches, including Asbury, got involved with Georgia Bright through Georgia Interfaith Power & Light, a nonprofit that works with over 300 faith communities in the state.
“We help them organize with ‘Green Teams’ and implement practical climate solutions,” said Beth Remmes, GIPL’s coastal outreach and climate resiliency coordinator.
Georgia Bright will own and maintain Asbury’s system and sell electricity from the 76 kilowatt array to the church, saving the congregation money from the first day of operation.
“Asbury has not and will not pay anything out-of-pocket to have the system installed, nor will it ever incur out-of-pocket expenses to maintain or repair the system,” Gunning said. “They will pay an average of $685/month in the first year for the energy that the solar panels produce ($8,200/year), meaning the church ends up with a net energy savings of about $10,000 in year one.”
Over the 25-year agreement and assuming an 3% annual escalation in utility rate increases the church is expected to see $330,000 in net savings, Gunning said.
Green Team decision
Asbury Memorial, known for its unusual clown logo, broke away from the United Methodist Church in 2020 over LGBTQ rights and is now independent and nondenominational. With about 350 congregants, a $775,000 annual budget, and no endowment, the solar panels represent meaningful savings.
“Our costs are going up just like everybody else’s, you know,” said Randy Canady, Asbury’s administrator. “But (with rising costs) congregants often will cut back on some of their giving.”
Canady tries to pinch pennies in the 1921 brick Gothic Revival style church and the adjacent education building, built in 1956.
“We do everything we can to not run air conditioning just because it is, you know, it’s an older building,” he said. He often doesn’t run the AC at all on the third floor of education building where his office is located.
But with a monthly Georgia Power bill of about $5,000 and summers getting hotter, solar looked like the way forward. The church’s “Green Team,” of congregants devoted to addressing environmental issues analyzed their options.
“We presented this as a good investment,” said Green Team chair David Alley. “You know, the energy bills of any building this size are just increasing astronomically, with no sign of decreasing or at least leveling off. So this was a economic decision for that reason, as well as a statement to other faith communities that this can be done.”
It’s also caring for what the team sees as God’s creation.
“By doing solar panels, we’re reducing our carbon footprint, not polluting as much, or not letting Georgia Power pollute as much,” Alley said.
The future of Solar for All
The Georgia Bright program was poised to begin choosing 800 low and middle income families in Georgia for its leasing program when the Trump administration pulled its funding. The $156 million program was the Georgia recipient of the federal Solar for All funds that totaled $7 billion nationwide.
As anyone who pays a power bill knows, electricity prices have soared.
“We’re all of us are experiencing these really rapid increases in electricity rates,” Gunning said. Where we used to hear complaints about $200 or $300 power bills, now it’s $500, $600, $700, $1,000 power bills in the middle of the summer.”
Georgia Power bills rose about $43 a month since late 2022 for the average residential customer using about 1,000 kilowatt-hours a month, according to the utility. Sweltering temperatures this summer pushed bills even higher.
The higher utility bills take an especially big bite out of the budgets of the low-income residents Georgia Bright was designed to assist.
Cancelling Solar for All will slow but won’t stop solar, predicts the Solar Energy Industry Association, a trade association for the industry. Nearly 18 gigawatts of solar was deployed to the grid in the US in the first six months of this year, accounting for 82% of all new power added to the grid in this period. With Solar for All defunded, along with other policy decisions targeting solar, the U.S. could lose at least 44 GW of solar deployment by 2030, an 18% decline over previous projections, according to SEIA and Wood Mackenzie.
“Solar and storage are the backbone of America’s energy future, delivering the majority of new power to the grid at the lowest cost to families and businesses,” SEIA president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper said in a prepared statement. “Instead of unleashing this American economic engine, the Trump administration is deliberately stifling investment, which is raising energy costs for families and businesses, and jeopardizing the reliability of our electric grid. But no matter what policies this administration releases, the solar and storage industry will continue to grow, because the market is demanding what we’re delivering: reliable, affordable, American-made energy.”
Advocates haven’t given up on getting Georgia Bright’s federal funding reinstated, though no lawsuit has been filed yet.
“Solar for All is worth fighting for and we’re committed to standing beside it,” said Jennifer Whitfield, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “Small businesses and communities across the country had the rug ripped out from under them when the administration decided to illegally attempt to cancel this program. We’re fully prepared to do what it takes to get this program up and running again.”
In the meantime, Georgia Bright leaders are pivoting. They point to the pilot projects like Asbury as proof of what solar can achieve even without federal assistance.
“While nothing can truly replace Solar for All, this exciting project with Asbury Memorial demonstrates the strength and adaptability of the community-focused BRIGHT model,” said Georgia Bright director Alicia Brown. “Even without federal grant support, our privately capitalized program is helping Asbury go solar with no upfront capital cost and with significant day one energy savings of nearly 20%.”
GIPL’s Remmes echoes that resolve.
“We have been working with congregations on solar before the IRA, and we’re committed to continuing to do that work,” she said. That could be with a solar loan fund or capital campaigns at churches or looking for private funders.
For its part, Georgia Bright is looking to salvage all the federal resources it can. Its new initiative, called Safe Harbor as a Service, seeks to preserve access to expiring commercial solar tax credits for several additional years by applying federal “safe harboring” rules.
“(I)f we can purchase equipment equal to at least 5% of a project’s cost by the end of this year, we can lock in tax credit eligibility for that project through 2029 …,” Brown wrote on her LinkedIn account.
Residential credits don’t qualify for safe harboring but the commercial credit can be used by a nonprofit to serve residential customers, which is what Georgia Bright intends to do.
Contact information for Georgia Bright is available here.
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with The Current.
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