Refugia Newsletter #88

Utility-scale battery growth, AI and energy demand, Pakistan's solar boom, Presbyterian refugia churches, and some Michigan winter beauty

Mar 08, 2025

Refugia News

March! The days lengthen here in Michigan, the ground thaws. I would take more joy in this if I weren’t so distracted by the maddening, disheartening daily news about the US federal government. Last weekend, husband Ron and I agreed we needed a trip out to Lake Michigan as balm for the soul. Something about drinking in a long horizon eases one’s perspective on things. The sun was bright, the lake utterly silent. I hope you can find a moment of balm here, too, through these photos of the ice mounds on the lake.

My sister-in-law Michelle and doggie Opus give a sense of scale.

I can’t get enough of this view—yes, from my mother-in-law’s lakeshore cottage, the one I write about in Refugia Faith.

I had a lovely visit by Zoom last week with a book group who had just finished reading Refugia Faith. Thanks to Jerry Haas for organizing a sweet conversation with some folk from Tucson, Arizona, and a few other places in the desert West. We were able to speak honestly about our worries and hopes and talk about refugia-style climate work in desert climates. It was good to be together—I think we all came away encouraged. I know I did.

Ron and I also had an inspiring visit with the people of Traverse City Presbyterian Church here in Michigan—but I’ll tell you more about that under Refugia Sightings below.

Next week, I will be speaking in person at Pepperdine University as part of their Seaver College W. David Baird Distinguished Lecture Series. (I shall try my best to be distinguished.) If you are in the Malibu, California area, I’d love to see you March 12 at 5 pm in Elkins Auditorium. I am very honored to be addressing Pepperdine’s undergraduates, faculty, and staff, and I hope to learn more about Pepperdine’s good climate and sustainability work. Alas, I will taking along a lot of grading to do on the plane rides.

Also next week, I commend to you an online event coming up on March 12 called “America in Search of a Soul,” featuring Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, Rev. Cameron Trimble, and Rev. Jim Antal. This is a Creation Justice Webinar sponsored by the UCC. The panelists will “unpack the threats and opportunities before us as people of faith” as we face the “crises of inequality and climate.”

Finally, a brief word about this newsletter: I note that (as of this writing) I have 969 subscribers. As Substack goes, that’s very modest, and that’s entirely OK with me! But wouldn’t it be cool to get over 1000? Many more people actually view the newsletter, so thank you, readers, for spreading the word!

Though someday I may open up Substack’s fee options, my promise to you is that the subscription fee will always be optional. I will always keep this newsletter free, as a service to you. Substack has been a great platform, and I heartily affirm Substack’s reader-driven business model. I do pay for a number of other writers’ newsletters and I gladly support their work. However, I write this newsletter in order to help people of faith address the climate crisis knowledgeably and productively, and I’m grateful that I am able to do so.

That said, if you would like to refer a friend to subscribe (for free), go ahead and click this button. There are tiny rewards available for you if your referred friends subscribe!

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This Week in Climate News

All right. Time to face the news. We’re going to talk about the clean energy transition today. The big question among the climaterati (I made up that word, thank you) is whether the transition will push forward in the US despite federal hostility. What I’m seeing suggests: yes.

That’s not to say there won’t be obstacles. The “climate” agenda of the Trump regime is obvious: do everything possible to give Big Oil free rein, including fast-tracking development permits, putting the brakes on clean energy, and rolling back every possible environmental protection law they can get away with. We citizens need to stay mad, and stay engaged. I know there are a thousand things to be mad about. Here’s one: pressure Congress to hold fast on keeping clean energy incentives in place.

In the pushing back department, we had one judicial victory this week. A U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of 23 states plus D.C. in their suit to unfreeze federal funds, “including climate and conservation work approved under the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Wyatt Myscow writes for Inside Climate News:

Judge John McConnell of the U.S. District Court of Rhode Island issued a preliminary injunction halting agencies from continuing their freeze of federal funds, writing in his decision that the executive branch does not have the power to dictate the ending of programs and funding approved by Congress.
McConnell’s ruling represented a major win for a group of 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued Trump over the freeze, as the case now moves forward. But it remains to be seen whether funds to local governments and businesses for climate work will begin to flow again.

We need to stay clear on this: it’s stupid and self-destructive for the US to pull back on the clean energy transition, as a House committee heard this week:

On Wednesday, utility, grid and energy systems experts told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that Trump administration policies aimed at freezing and repealing incentives for grid modernization and low-carbon energy sources will trip up efforts to meet America’s increasing energy demands.

Not only will pulling back on clean energy make meeting growing demand more difficult, it will also raise consumer energy costs, as reported by Katie Surma for Inside Climate News:

A recent study conducted by the economic consulting firm National Economic Research Associates on behalf of the Clean Energy Buyers Association found that repeal of the IRA tax credits would raise the average American’s electricity prices roughly 7 percent by 2026. For U.S. businesses, the firm forecasted a 10 percent increase.
Asim Z. Haque, senior vice president for governmental and member services of PJM Interconnection, which runs the mid-Atlantic regional grid, told lawmakers it needs both renewable energy sources and additional energy sources in order to keep up with demand.

Republicans at the hearing want to meet demand with gas, unsurprisingly. But the market is not as interested in gas as in renewables.

We’re seeing this in many ways, including the ginormous surge in utility-scale battery storage in the US. Michael Thomas of Distilled came out with a piece this week summarizing his findings on the battery storage boom.

While solar continues to dominate clean energy headlines (and rightfully so), battery storage has quietly transformed from a niche technology into a mainstream grid resource. The numbers we uncovered in our analysis paint a picture of an industry hitting its stride at precisely the moment when the grid needs it most.
What makes the battery storage story particularly compelling is how quickly the technology has matured. Just five years ago, utility-scale batteries were still considered experimental by many grid operators and utilities. Today, they're being deployed at gigawatt scale and playing crucial roles in maintaining grid reliability during extreme weather events, reducing electricity costs, and enabling higher penetrations of renewable energy.

One of many nifty graphics in this report.

That’s nice for 2024, but what about now? What if policies and incentives in the IRA get clawed back by the Trump regime? Well, says Thomas:

[M]ost of these impacts will be felt after 2025. Much of the growth in energy storage has been driven by the 30-50% investment tax credit (ITC) incentive available for standalone and paired hybrid projects. Those are locked into the tax code for 2025.
Even with Trump in the White House and Republicans in charge of both branches of Congress, storage is on track for another record-breaking year in 2025. Developers expect to build 18.1 GW of new capacity – nearly double what was built in 2024. Of that total, 12.3 GW is already under construction or awaiting final commercial operation.

Thomas also has a nifty interactive tool on his Cleanview website. Here’s his map of current utility-scale battery storage projects in the US. You can hover in for more detail (if you click through). Thomas also has maps of solar farms and wind farms on this website.

Speaking of all that energy demand, if you’ve heard about how AI is going to create an energy demand surge, well, it’s true that AI will contribute to a demand surge, but no one quite knows how much (there a many estimates and many unknowns) and people are (of course) arguing over how to meet this surge. AI, in other words, is being used as an excuse for more fossil fuel burning.

However, this long piece by Sam Matey—technically, this piece ought to be a deep dive!—is very helpful for putting it all in perspective. Matey uses data from a whole slew of reliable sources to give an overview of the clean energy transition and AI’s role. The bottom line is that energy demand is surging for many reasons; AI isn’t even the biggest one.

Moreover, the world is not going to meet this increased demand largely with fossil fuels, but with solar. We are entering the Solar Age.

[W]hen you look at the real-world data, AI’s energy demand surge is relatively tiny compared to the ongoing and exponentially accelerating transformation of humanity’s energy system due to cheap clean electricity generation. This is one of the most important events of the 21st century — and may someday be seen as even more important than AI — but it’s received relatively little coverage due to its comparatively workaday and undramatic nature.
Solar power is now the cheapest electricity source in history, and it’s growing exponentially — kicking off what is already by far the fastest energy build-out in history. Here’s a chart from the recent The Economist special “Sun Machines” that shows just how much solar has massively outperformed essentially every everyone’s expectations.

There’s just no stopping the solar revolution because: economics. This is another reason why it’s just stupid for the US to balk on transition—we will be left behind. I recommend reading this whole article if you want to know more and enjoy even more data viz. (That was a lot of graphs and charts, wasn’t it?)

Deeper Dive

For deep dives today, three opportunities: a podcast episode, an interview, and some words to bolster your strength.

First, I highly recommend the Volts podcast episode on the grass roots solar revolution in Pakistan. Maybe you saw news stories last fall about ordinary people in Pakistan slapping up solar panels on their roofs because their grid electricity prices had skyrocketed. In this Volts episode, David Roberts interviews two fascinating Pakistani experts, who explain the background with Pakistan’s grid problems, how people are getting cheap Chinese solar panels, what they’re doing with them—and what this grass-roots approach could teach others. A good listen if you need something positive about regular people making huge things happen.

Image credit: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

Second, here’s a great interview with Rev. Ben Chavis, one of the founders of the environmental justice movement. Steve Curwood of public radio’s Living on Earth interviews Rev. Chavis, who offers the wisdom of long experience to urge us to persevere in the cause of justice. Curwood, at one point, asks Rev. Chavis if he thinks there is a “spirituality gap” in the environmental movement right now, and Chavis agrees that people of faith are not doing enough. His words to the Black church could apply to us all:

I call upon the Black church today to renew its front line position in civil rights; to renew its front line position in environmental rights or climate rights. I think some of our churches, I’ll speak for the Black churches, have become so prosperity oriented, the sense of commitment to social justice or the social gospel is not as strong as it once was, but I think that can be renewed and revitalized.

Now for some words to bolster your strength. I continue to find Robert Reich’s Substack helpful, especially his end-of-the-week Ten Reasons for Modest Optimism posts. This essay by Rebecca Solnit provides bracing truth-telling. As so many others instruct us, she urges that we have to stay alert, stay in this, and build coalitions:

Many who formerly supported the administration or ignored politics are reeling from the impacts to themselves, to people they know, to services they depend up, and we have a choice about whether to recruit or revile them. In a sense the breadth of the attack is offering the possibility of the broadest coalitions this nation has seen. If we build them.

Finally, this piece by Timothy Snyder, though not for the faint-hearted, conveys the state of things in the starkest of terms. Snyder, a Yale history professor, is the author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Here’s what he writes on his Substack this week about the Trump-Vance-Musk regime:

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

Snyder offers a number of strategies going forward. For regular people like you and me, here’s what he says:

As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.

Thanks to Kathleen Dickson of Third Act Faith for sharing this essay, which Snyder posted on Facebook as well as on his Substack.

Refugia Sightings

Today’s sightings feature Presbyterian churches who are doing beautiful refugia work.

First, I want to honor Black Mountain Presbyterian Church in western North Carolina. They have stepped up magnificently to help their community during and after Hurricane Helene last September. This great article by Layton Williams Berkes of the Presbyterian News Service tells the whole story and is well worth reading. The church got involved immediately when the hurricane hit:

Since all the emergency personnel were operating nearby, the church became the best hope for getting any cell service. Once church staff and members were able to leave their homes, they came to the church and began offering cold water from their melting ice machine, then grilled frozen hot dogs on the church’s propane-powered grills. Others eventually brought food from their own thawing freezers.
“We would allow people from the community to come in — some people we didn’t even know — but they showed up and they wanted to help … some of the people that I don’t have the same views as politically, socially,” Robinson said. “It just took an opening of our heart to allow these people to come in. And it’s transformed their life as well.”

Their work has continued over the five months since, evolving as needed. The church’s mission statement is simple: “Has everyone been fed?” That mission propelled them into round-the-clock labor at first, created numerous community partnerships, and continues to drive their remarkable service.

Now on to my new friends at Traverse City Presbyterian Church in northern Michigan. Ron and I visited them late last month to learn their story.

A mere five years ago, one adult education presentation on climate change sparked this congregation’s determination to address the climate crisis faithfully, as a community. Since that time, they have become a certified Earth Care Congregation under the PC-USA, transforming every aspect of their church life, from their HVAC system to their Vacation Bible School curriculum.

Solar panels are going up on the roof as soon as northern Michigan weather allows.

During our visit, Ron and I met a group of leaders who have been all-in on the church’s climate work since the beginning of their journey. During our convivial lunch after worship, these delightful people slowly revealed all the combined talents they bring to the work: a passion for native plants, long experience in organizing, skills with spreadsheets and facilities matters, and more. But this group also marveled that, even though they describe their congregation as “purple” politically, the whole congregation participates in the work with interest and enthusiasm. There was such joy among them!

The church’s biggest, most demanding project has been a three-fold “Bright Ideas” campaign, which included replacing all lightbulbs with LED, installing solar, and installing heat pumps. The committee originally presented these three ideas so the congregation could choose among them, but the response was: let’s do them all! To get it done, the church combined IRA tax credits, a grant from the local utility, and fundraising among the congregation.

Leadership buy-in and great communication are key components of a campaign like this, and this church excels in both. You really do have to watch this incredible video they made to inspire the congregation—it’s funny, persuasive, and clear-messaged. Note the strategic use of young people to make the case convincingly!

The facilities projects are only part of the picture, though. The church’s grounds are packed with native plantings now, including a prayer garden, a pocket forest, and a healing garden designed with the help of indigenous neighbors.

Pastors Jordan and Julia provide great support. Pastor Jordan told us that he and Julia “provide the why behind the what” through preaching, education, and participation. Since the initial spark, Jordan added, interest and participation in their climate-related work has “snowballed so that the average church member knows that it matters to God and to us.”

This fall, you will hear my beautiful interview with Linda Racine, Co-Coordinator for Michigan’s Citizen Climate Lobby, who is one of several key leaders in the church’s earth care work. Meanwhile, here is one of my favorite little stories that Linda told us. One Advent season, Pastor Jordan proposed, “Let’s have the Creation Care Team light the Advent Candles.” Linda replied: “Well, who is the creation care team? It’s the whole church!”

That’s the dream.

Arts Corner

I’ll leave you today with a few glimpses of an exhibit now at my university’s Center Art Gallery. My colleague Otto Selles, besides being a French professor, is also a poet and photographer. His new photography exhibition is called “Roselle Park: Reclaimed Beauty.” Otto took the photos during and since the pandemic quarantine, as he walks in a park near his house that was once a meat processing facility. The land was reclaimed in 2002 as a wetlands park, and has now become a refugia space for Otto and the community.

I know not everyone finds scruffy Michigan wetlands beautiful, but I do. Hope you enjoy these. Apologies to Otto for my amateurish photos of his photos. You can find out more about Otto’s work and purchase prints at his website.