To Help Care for the Earth, an Indiana Seminary Turned to Geothermal Energy and Efficiency | Article

The Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary is an Anabaptist Christian seminary located outside Elkhart, Indiana, at the state's northern edge. As part of the two master's degrees it offers, the seminary teaches its students a model of environmental consciousness. These students then become faith leaders in Mennonite churches nationwide, and some continue to pursue sustainable learning.

To help their students along this path, the seminary has implemented a series of energy efficiency and clean energy initiatives on its campus over the last two decades, which are tied to its larger philosophical goal of "creation care"—taking care of the Earth. These projects have included a new library building outfitted with a ground-source heat pump that generates heat and electricity from renewable energy sources, two solar arrays, and energy efficiency measures in other campus buildings.

Credit: Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary

Founded in 1958, the seminary has grown to meet the Mennonite community's needs and offer improved theological services with a view to sustainability. A series of new buildings were added to the main building and dormitories in the 1980s. As part of this growth, the seminary wanted to construct a new library to house their extensive book collection, which was previously stored in the main building's basement.

The seminary worked with an architectural firm to design a new library in 2004 to create a larger, more welcoming space where students could better access books for their classes. Bookshelves took up most of the small basement room in the former library space, and seating was scarce for the 120 full-time students that the seminary had in the early 2000s. It was not exactly an inviting place for quiet theological study. Instead, it was a dark, dirty, damp room without any natural light and where water would seep in during heavy rain.

The New Library Goes Green

In 2003, committees were formed to discuss the new library's design. Around that time, Eileen Saner, who is now retired but was at that time the seminary library director, visited the Goshen College Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center, located 30 miles from the seminary. Goshen College, a sister Mennonite institution, was building a LEED Platinum Certified building for its educational nature sanctuary. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a program developed and operated by the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED is a set of features that can be incorporated into buildings in five categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, material and resources, and indoor environmental design. Points are awarded based on how well a building meets the criteria for each category. There are four levels of LEED certification: Certified, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.

Saner took the idea of a LEED-certified green library to the seminary's board of directors. The board, the executive director, and other executive team members approved the new design when they heard the compelling case study from their sister institution. For the board, building a green library aligned well with the Mennonite Church values of caring for creation.

Donations from large funders and capital campaigns helped pay for the new library. The green features also helped, because the savings accrued by the installed energy efficiency measures, including the ground-source geothermal system, led to significant savings.

“To build a new library for the seminary, it had to be a high-performance building integrating sustainable materials and resources, energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, and measures that improve indoor air quality,” Saner said. “Representatives from the client and pre-selected designers and contractors come together to exchange ideas and information that allows for truly integrated solutions. Using an integrated design process can generate more significant energy savings by improving all systems as a whole rather than taking a piecemeal approach.”

Building a new green library fit in with the seminary's growing consciousness of the climate crisis. “When selecting an architectural firm to build the library, we wanted to model what Merry Lea had already done with their LEED Platinum building,” Janeen Bertsche Johnson, director of Campus Ministries, said. “We wanted to be a model for other Mennonite schools and colleges on sustainable and clean energy practices that tackle the climate crisis.”

Credit: Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary

Completed in 2007, the new library encompasses 31,500 square feet and boasts a ground-source (or geothermal) heat pump system to provide heating and cooling to the building without using natural gas, resulting in fewer carbon emissions. From the beginning, the board was against including fossil-powered equipment in an efficiently-designed building. Geothermal heat pumps are up to 600 percent more efficient than fossil-powered boilers and can adequately heat spaces even on the coldest of winter nights. Geothermal heat pumps are expensive to install, particularly for larger commercial buildings such as libraries, but they pay for themselves in reduced energy costs and operating expenses.

The seminary’s geothermal system is spread across four acres and includes 63 wells in a closed-loop structure. Pipes buried six feet deep cycle water around for heating and cooling purposes. Water in the pipes stays at temperatures between 55 and 58 degrees, and four ground-source heat pumps bring the water temperature to average room temperature in the winter. The system is reversed during the summer months.

Other energy efficiency features in the library include large, triple-pane windows that maximize natural light, rain gardens to retain runoff, occupancy sensors on electric lights, dual-flush toilets, and waterless urinals in the bathrooms. All these design elements and the geothermal heat pumps help lower energy bills, decrease operating costs, and reduce carbon emissions for the seminary.

With the installed energy efficiency measures and geothermal heat pumps, the library achieved LEED Gold status, the second-highest level in green building certification, and became the first LEED-certified theological library in North America.

The seminary also looked beyond just the buildings when thinking about the environmental impact of its campus. To protect the geothermal loops from damage from ground compaction and to conserve the landscape's natural features, the seminary planted six acres of tall grass prairie next to the library. In total, the campus has 20 acres of prairie grasses. Retaining native grasses has allowed for more than 50 different species of flora and fauna to call the area home. Combined with fewer and more sustainable mowing practices, the prairie grasses have improved drainage for the seminary during heavy rain. This innovative approach benefits the regional ecosystem and wildlife and reduces the need to burn fossil fuels while mowing or weeding.

New Projects Abound

After completing the library, the seminary pursued additional energy efficiency and clean energy upgrades for other campus buildings to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. Thanks to these efforts, the seminary's annual energy consumption decreased by about two-thirds from 2013 to 2022.

The project started in earnest in 2014, when the seminary worked with an energy auditor team to perform an ASHRAE Level 2 energy audit of its facilities to determine the most appropriate energy practices that would reduce energy consumption and decrease maintenance costs. This type of energy audit is recommended for commercial buildings wishing to perform energy efficiency retrofits. It includes a walk-through of the facilities and an energy and financial analysis by a professional energy auditor.

Credit: Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary

The audit also included a utility bill analysis using the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager software. Switching to more efficient lighting, installing occupancy sensors throughout the main buildings, and replacing older heating, cooling, and ventilation (HVAC) systems with new ones were among the suggested improvements in the report. In total, the recommended work would cost $42,500 and help the seminary save as much as $8,750 annually in energy costs.

The seminary implemented all the recommendations in the report. One major project involved replacing two cast iron boilers from the 1950s with two more fuel-efficient boilers. The smaller new boilers are 50 percent more efficient, saving the seminary more than $5,000 a year on fuel and reducing its carbon emissions. The cost to replace these boilers was $37,000, and the typical labor cost to replace these types of units is about $2,500 per ton (the seminary's boilers weighed about 2 tons each). By having the seminary's facility engineer team install these boilers, the seminary saved more than $1,000 per ton on each boiler. Additionally, the seminary was able to tap into $1,000 per ton in rebates available from its electric utility—Indiana Michigan Power—which allowed it to save even more.

Using a gift from a major donor, the seminary also installed two solar arrays on its campus. In 2017, a 50-kilowatt (kW) solar installation was completed on top of a retention system. The ground-mounted system yields $14,000 in savings annually. In 2020, an 80-kW rooftop solar system was commissioned on the south building, which produces $31,000 in annual energy savings. Both solar systems have generated $82,000 in savings since installation and have offset more than 320 tons of carbon emissions. Financing for the solar systems also came from a $10,000 Community Energy Security Planning Grant Program offered by the Indiana Office of Energy Development.

“Making these changes has helped us make our theology of creation care more concrete,” Bertsche Johnson said. “It has also given us opportunities to educate our students, employees, guests, and community about options they might pursue.”

Author: Miguel Yañez-Barnuevo