Sometime in 2020, a whole lot of people began to care about air quality.

The pandemic brought about a renaissance for puzzles and sourdough, but it also made “HVAC” a colloquialism – suddenly the efficiency and quality of our air filtration systems became a serious concern to many who had never considered such a thing before.

Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland was one such group with these concerns. But what started as a need to address issues around indoor air quality and comfort ended with a radical 85 percent reduction in the temple’s carbon emissions, and becoming a critical role model in decarbonization for the entire community.

Richard Kaye is a member of TST’s board of trustees and an engineer by trade. In June 2021, when the project officially began, he was the trustee for building operations (he now serves as IT and technology trustee). It was in that capacity that he started looking into the temple’s HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air cooling) systems. It quickly became clear that the building did not support the necessary modern indoor air quality requirements, so, together with treasurer Jeff Maimon, he formed the HVAC Committee to take action.

“Once we started looking at things, we realized that a lot of equipment was at the end of life,” said Kaye.

Guided by a prior temple mandate that specified all new projects had to be viewed in the context of environmental improvement, the HVAC Committee reached out to a few consulting firms, deciding on one based out of Worcester called Building Evolution Corporation (BEC). Later, it hired a Waltham company called GreenerU as the contractor for the project.

“Our philosophy is: If you get a lot of these key things right – like building comfort and durability and all these other performance objectives – you also get the energy efficiency, in this case, electrification and decarbonization, along the way,” said Wesley Stanhope, founder and chief executive officer of BEC.

“It was clear that we had to go and look at something that was more than just equipment, really how the whole system would be laid out,” said Kaye. Guided by BEC, the committee started weighing the costs of heat pumps, also thinking about the incentives available for those making such a switch.

The main nongovernmental incentive-providers in Massachusetts are the sponsors of Mass Save, a collaborative of natural gas, electric utilities, and energy efficiency service providers that offer rebates for residences and businesses switching to energy-efficient methods, like heat pumps.

David Gibbons, a representative of National Grid – one of the sponsors of Mass Save – estimated that the sponsors have provided heat pump incentives to roughly 50 houses of worship annually for the last two years. That’s more than triple that estimate from the three years prior.

“Our job is to convert as close to 100 percent of the available market in any given year to heat pumps,” Gibbons said. “They are roughly 3-4 times more energy efficient than systems that use fossil fuels like natural gas or fuel oil and, as a result, produce significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. That’s good for your building, good for your congregants, and good for the environment.”

For Temple Shir Tikva, it was no easy process to make it all happen; costs aside, the team was operating during the pandemic’s peak materials shortages, and had to contend with community needs in the building like religious school and preschool hours, social hall events, and High Holiday services.

But by the start of the 2024, they had done it, switching almost all of the temple’s heating systems to electric heat pumps, and following up the project with a solar panel installation to offset the electrification costs. It cost nearly $2.2 million, end-to-end, for the temple’s 38,000 square foot building, but was buoyed by the incentives from Mass Save, which came out to just over $353,000.

Kaye noted that while an expensive, not-so-flashy project like this is not necessarily an easy sell, it wasn’t an issue at Temple Shir Tikva. “I think it was finding those things which were really important to everybody, from the staff to the community to the clergy,” he said. “I don’t think we had any real difficulty with buy-in on this. We had a town hall for the community because we had to take another mortgage out to fund this thing – it required not only a board vote but a community vote. It was overwhelmingly approved.”

On March 4, through an event hosted by the Jewish Climate Action Network-MA, Temple Shir Tikva will give a presentation on its process and findings, hoping to encourage others to do the same. “It’s a very big deal,” said Fred Davis, president of JCAN-MA.

He noted that there is something particularly special about decarbonization efforts taking place through a building like a synagogue, a pre-existing community where people might organize around faith and deed, and are likely guided by some shared ethical standard. It means that congregants and fellow houses of worship can see the action taking place, and hopefully consider taking that same action themselves.

In Massachusetts, the goal is to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Temple Shir Tikva just took a real step in achieving that goal. Says Kaye: “All around, it was a win.” Θ

To attend the free, March 4 Zoom event with JCAN and learn more about Temple Shir Tikvah’s decarbonization process, visit jewishclimate.org.