Churches in the energy crisis: One heating costs 180 euros

An the evening Hagen Günter has been doing a tour of the buildings of his parish in Alt-Laatzen in the Hanover region for some time. The pastor searches for radiators that haven’t been turned down low enough. “Our employees already call me the energy policeman.”

The 48-year-old theologian sometimes reaches his limits with his pious zeal for energy. During the rehearsal for the nativity play, the temperature in the church room was only 6 degrees Celsius. “Then the parents went on strike,” says Günter. However, he has good reasons for being frugal. “In our house, one heating session costs 180 euros. And those were the old prices.”

The Immanuel Church is one of the many church buildings that were built in the post-war period, especially in the large metropolitan areas. Quite a few of them are about to be de-designated or even demolished due to the loss of members. This scenario does not threaten in Alt-Laatzen. The brick building with the pointed-gable tower dates from the late 1950s and was designed by the Hanoverian architect Peter Hübotter.

The outside of the church is as unspectacular as the atmosphere inside is impressive. A warm, thin light falls through the filigree glass windows into the sacred building, which, with its wooden ceiling construction, looks like a huge crib barn.

Up to 480 people can be accommodated here. At Christmas, the parish council decided against welcoming visitors with blankets and hot tea. The Immanuel Church continued to be heated for the services, even if it cost a lot of money.

Monument protection prevents solar systems

Werner Lemke, the building director of the Hanoverian state church, knows many communities with significantly worse conditions. “I was just in the cathedral in Schwerin, there were three degrees,” reports the architect. “Our wooden churches in the Harz Mountains cool down even more.”

Heating very old church rooms makes little sense for a number of reasons. “Even before the energy crisis, large walls cost many hundreds of euros,” reports Lemke. And in his opinion, such buildings can hardly be insulated. “Medieval churches aren’t actually built to be heated, and people used to be able to cope with that.” But back then, people were used to the cold from working in the fields.

As early as 2019, nine regional churches in northern Germany started a project for thirty such buildings with the support of the Federal Ministry of Economics, in which alternatives to insulation are being tested. One aspect is “heating close to the body”, i.e. the installation of seat or underfloor heating. In addition, there is a change in energy sources to geothermal energy or pellets. “It works, the data so far indicates thirty percent less energy consumption and seventy percent less CO₂emissions,” explains Lemke. Pastor Günter and the building director agree that the war in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis will greatly accelerate change. “Necessity is the mother of invention. That is an innovation driver.”

In Alt-Laatzen, the community started to rethink early on. In 2006, a solar system was installed on the roof of the Immanuel Church for 115,000 euros at the time, which generates around 20,000 kilowatt hours a year and is also economically viable.

However, the installation was only possible because the building is not a listed building. The monument protection authorities have so far prevented solar systems on church roofs. Now the policy is changing. In several countries, including Lower Saxony, renewable energies have now been given legal priority. The prerequisite is that the intervention is reversible and only slightly interferes with the substance of the monument. “It’s really getting going now,” predicts Lemke, because church roofs usually have a favorable east-west orientation and little disturbing dormers.