U.S. Energy Secretary to Visit Louisiana, Celebrate Together Louisiana’s Newest Community Lighthouse Thursday

LAPLACE, La., Nov. 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm will join hundreds of members of Together Louisiana, the state’s largest grassroots organization, on Thursday, November 16 to celebrate the completion of a Community Lighthouse that will serve residents during disasters. It is located in St. John the Baptist Parish, the most vulnerable county to climate change in the U.S., according to the 2023 Climate Vulnerability Index.

The new Community Lighthouse at New Wine Christian Fellowship in LaPlace, Louisiana is the seventh – and largest – to come online in a network of solar+storage resilience hubs that will span the entire state.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a $250 million federal investment in Louisiana that will support a major expansion of Together Louisiana’s Community Lighthouses. 

The event will begin at 10 a.m. with a tour for Secretary Granholm and press followed by a press conference and ribbon cutting. The event will continue at 11 a.m. as part of the DOE Energy Justice to the People Roadshow – River Parishes until 5:30 p.m.

An initiative of Together Louisiana, the Community Lighthouse project aims to provide commercial-scale solar power and back-up battery capacity to congregations and community institutions throughout the state. During extended power outages, the lighthouses will immediately assess need and aid area residents. They will provide cooling and heating stations, charging stations, food distribution, oxygen exchange, light medical equipment, and other critical services.

Beyond their role in neighborhood-level disaster response, the lighthouses represent a significant investment in clean, renewable energy that will significantly reduce energy costs, as well as workforce development that includes project labor agreements to hire local workers at living wages for all stages of the process.

About Together Louisiana
Together Louisiana is a statewide network of more than 250 religious congregations and civic organizations across Louisiana, representing more than 200,000 people. It is one of the largest grassroots organizations in the history of Louisiana. The mission of Together Louisiana is to give faith and community-based organizations an opportunity to develop the leadership capacity of their members and affect change on a larger scale than they could alone. Together Louisiana is currently working on issues that include tax fairness, access to healthcare, flood recovery, access to healthy food, workforce development, criminal justice reform and improving infrastructure and transportation.

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SOURCE Together Louisiana