Solar panels in place at First United Methodist Church in Charlottesville

Unless you’re a bird or a drone or just very tall, you may not have noticed there are now solar panels on top of the First United Methodist Church in downtown Charlottesville.

The system is a 61.56 kilowatt photovoltaic system installed by Tiger Solar. That company got its start as Altenergy in 2005.

“That’s 152 405 watt solar panels,” said Jeff Hegeman, director of sales for Tiger Solar. “Each one of those panels has its own little micro-inverter which converts the sunshine into electricity which is powering some of these lights in this building right now.”

The congregation at First United Methodist Church got a presentation on the system at Sunday services on January 26, 2025.

Hegeman said the system will power about a third of the church’s energy use each year and that will save a quarter of a million dollars over the next quarter of a century.

The Charlottesville Board of Architectural Review initially denied a certificate of appropriateness for the installation due to a technical concern about the original building materials being damaged by the weight of the solar panels. Council overruled the BAR in March 2023 as reported by the Cavalier Daily.

In April 2024, the BAR approved an updated application that allowed for portions of the existing slate roof to be replaced with standing-seam metal to accommodate the solar panels, rather than the asphalt shingles originally proposed.

The panels were installed last summer and you can read about that in Emily Hemphill’s story in the Charlottesville Daily Progress. You’ll learn that the church took advantage of financing options that were made available by the Inflation Reduction Act.

“This has been over a two and a half year project to get to this point and so there were a lot of steps,” said Pastor Alex Joyner. “We learned a whole lot. Hopefully it’s something that’s going to be a blessing to other historical buildings, other churches that might be interested in having this kind of system on their facilities too.”

Before you go: This post was originally published in the February 26, 2025 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement, a newsletter powered by Substack since July 2020. The idea is to get as many stories out as possible each day, and then some of the material ends up here. Sometimes stories are posted here first. All of this is an experiment powered by Town Crier Productions, currently a one-person company that seeks to be as prolific as possible.