THE Vicar and churchwardens of St Peter Mancroft (SPM), a Grade I listed medieval constructing founded in 1075 and a landmark within the centre of Norwich, have been granted a college to put in clamp-fixed arrays of solar panels on the roof of the south aisle.
The faculty also includes permission to put in six storage batteries in the previous organ-blower room, and two external heat-pump evaporator units, and allows for associated cabling and wiring alterations within the predominant church electrical-distribution boards.
In common with many churches, SPM has reviewed, on a seamless basis, how it might reduce the carbon footprint to net zero by 2030 in step with the Church of England’s goal. The church considers it to be not only an issue of cost-effectiveness, but principally a wider moral issue in avoiding, or at the least mitigating, catastrophic climate change.
In 2020, the PCC had considered the problem of solar panels when renovating the lead roof, but had rejected the thought due to the church’s energy output and the probably limited advantages of solar panels without storage batteries. The use and availability of solar panels, combined with storage batteries, nevertheless, had increased prior to now three years, and it was now considered that that might provide significant benefits for the church.
The petitioners reasoned that the church was well lit by natural daylight, and the electrical output can be mostly for lighting, which might be stored, in order that the viability of solar panels was greater now than they’d concluded in 2020. They also stated that the storage would enable higher power demands (kettles, organ, etc.) with no need to attract power from the grid.
The law that applied to the proposals within the petition for the college is colloquially often known as the Duffield test. It required the Consistory Court to ask itself, first, whether the proposals, if implemented, would lead to harm to the importance of the church as a constructing of special architectural or historical interest. If the reply to that query was yes, then it was mandatory to ask how serious the harm can be, and to evaluate how clear and convincing the justification was for the proposals.
The Chancellor, the Worshipful David Etherington KC, said that, in reaching his decision, he recognised that, to achieve the goal of net zero by 2030, “painful decisions” would should be made. In the context of modifications to listed buildings, it would “seem like a battle between attempts to reduce, halt, or reverse climate change on the one hand, and the correct conserving of listed buildings on the opposite”.
But that was a “fallacy”, the Chancellor said, since the unchecked effects of worldwide warming were more likely to result in “catastrophic climate change inside a shorter timeframe than we realise”, and had the “potential to cause untold damage to listed buildings”, and “should it result in economic collapse as well, then the cash won’t be there to guard and maintain them”.
The Chancellor said that his decision had been made easier by the “detailed, skilled, and balanced way” wherein the Vicar, Canon Edward Carter, and the churchwardens had presented their petition for a college.
Turning to the primary query within the Duffield test: the proposals would, if implemented, lead to harm to the church as a constructing of special architectural or historical interest. The harm identified was to the visual appreciation of the church, which, in turn, damaged architectural and historical significance.
But, the Chancellor concluded, the extent of injury to the architectural and historical significance of the church was “low to very low”, and the justification for the proposals was clear and convincing. The petitioners had done all that they reasonably could to cut back the church’s carbon footprint already, and the proposal was to understand further energy-saving.
One concern that courts sometimes had, when changes were proposed resulting from technological advances, was how everlasting the technology being introduced can be. “We live in an age of extremely rapid technological development,” the Chancellor said, in order that these solar panels “would doubtless be improved upon and even turn out to be redundant in favour of much more inventive techniques to capture solar energy over their lifetime”.
The undeniable fact that they were wholly reversible without causing damage to the material of the church was, within the Chancellor’s judgment, “a solution to that exact concern”.
