New England colleges form solar buying partnership

A coalition of New England colleges has formed to purchase electricity from a solar farm in Farmington, Maine. The New England College Renewable Partnership describes itself as the first collaborative purchase of solar electricity in New England higher education.

The New England College Renewable Partnership includes Amherst, Bowdoin, Hampshire, Smith and Williams Colleges. According to an announcement by Amherst, Mount Holyoke and UMass Amherst had also participated in earlier discussions about the project, but later abandoned the project, while Bowdoin joined the group. 

The partnership is collaborating to purchase power from a 25-megawatt solar array under development by a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources. Its predicted annual output is about 46,000 megawatt-hours, under a 20-year contract.

Each of the participating colleges describes environmental, financial, and educational benefits from the project. For example, the power purchase agreement reportedly requires that all involved colleges and their student bodies be allowed access to the project site and its data. Initial power deliveries are expected in late 2019. The colleges also cite other benefits from the project, including advancement of their sustainability and climate action initiatives.

Interest in cooperative or collaborative procurement of energy products or projects is rising. By collaborating as purchasers of solar energy, the colleges may have achieved some advantages over their options if going alone. The New England College Renewable Partnership cites its model as providing "market access that would not have been available to individual institutions, offering a scalable model that other colleges and universities can follow."Amherst's announcement explained that while each school has small energy demands, by "increasing the number of schools in the partnership, the group was able to raise the total demand for renewable energy."

Will other institutions follow this model of collaborative procurement of renewable energy?

Stanford declines to divest fossil fuels

Should university endowments be invested in fossil fuel companies?  Or should they divest such holdings? Universities across the U.S. are considering these questions.  In the latest development, Stanford University's Board of Trustees has released a statement on climate change, describing the university's initiatives to battle climate change, but declining to divest Stanford's roughly $22 billion endowment from the fossil fuel industry.

In the April 25 statement, the Board describes climate change as "among the most serious challenges of our time."  The statement lists various elements of Stanford's strategic approach to combating climate change, including a $500 million transformative campus energy system, commitments to invest in solar, other renewable energy, wastewater recovery, green transportation, and energy efficiency in campus buildings.  The statement also announces the creation of a new climate task force to be composed of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff, to solicit ideas for further action.

Much of the statement is structured as a response to a proposal by student organization Fossil Free Stanford that the university divest its endowment from the fossil fuel industry.  The trustees cite the university's Statement on Investment Responsibility as outlining a specific set of criteria by which the trustees may evaluate whether a company is inflicting social injury in a manner that warrants consideration of divestment.  The statement notes the establishment of an Advisory Panel on Investment Responsibility and Licensing, which studied the issues and made a recommendation to the Board’s Special Committee on Investment Responsibility, which in turn made a recommendation to the trustees.

According to the statement, the advisory panel "recommended divestment of companies whose primary business is oil sands extraction, a method that studies have found requires more water, and releases more carbon into the atmosphere, than other forms of fossil fuel extraction."  It cites Stanford Management Company as saying that the Stanford endowment has no direct exposure to companies whose primary business is oil sands extraction, so the trustees had no action to take on this point.

On the broader fossil fuel industry, the panel "concluded that it could not evaluate whether the social injury caused by the fossil fuel industry outweighs the social benefit it provides, and therefore did not recommend divestment."  The trustees agreed that the criteria were not met, and declined to divest.

That said, the statement expressed the trustees' belief "that the global community must develop effective alternatives to fossil fuels at sufficient scale, so that fossil fuels will not continue to be extracted and used at the present rate... the long-term solution is for all of us to reduce our consumption of fossil fuel resources and develop effective alternatives."

But despite investment and progress in research, including by Stanford, the trustees note that "at the present moment oil and gas remain integral components of the global economy, essential to the daily lives of billions of people in both developed and emerging economies."  The statement also notes the efforts of some oil and gas companies to explore alternatives.  The statement notes that "the trustees do not believe that a credible case can be made for divesting from the fossil fuel industry until there are competitive and readily available alternatives."

The statement also notes that the university's investment program does take climate change into consideration when evaluating the economic attractiveness of various investments.  In the trustees' words, "Prudent investors acknowledge that the world is beginning a transition away from carbon-based energy sources and that pricing for fossil fuels will reflect this transition."  The statement also notes the efforts of the endowment managers to "identify and support industry best practices that, in addition to positively impacting investment results, may pay significant environmental dividends."

This is not the first time Stanford has considered divesting from fossil fuels.  In 2014, after pressure from Fossil Free Stanford, the trustees announced a decision that Stanford would not make direct investments in coal mining companies, in recognition of "the availability of alternate energy sources with lower greenhouse gas emissions than coal."

Distributed generation is growing

Customer-sited generation is growing in the U.S.  A look at some of the distributed generation projects that came online in September 2014 shows that universities and institutions are developing projects powered by natural gas, solar photovoltaics, and oil, thanks to policies such as remote net metering and support for microgrid development.

At the University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz Cogeneration Associates has brought online a new 4.4 megawatt natural gas-fired cogeneration plant. The power generated is used on-site at the UC Santa Cruz campus.   Meanwhile the new unit will generate more than twice as much useful heat as the existing cogeneration unit, with a capacity of 1,391 tons (16,693 kBtu/h) of heating.

At the University of California at Riverside, Solar Star California XXIX LLC’s 3 megawatt UC Riverside Solar project is now online.  All of the power generated is used on-site at the UC Riverside campus, with the project's peak load representing about 30% of the campus's base load.  The University partnered with SunPower Corporation to install the 10.92-acre solar farm on campus open space.

Farther east, Cornell University’s 2 MW Snyder Road Solar Farm project came online. The power generated is used on-site at the Cornell University campus.  Cornell’s first solar photovoltaic project includes a 2MW tilt rack-mounted array on eleven acres of Cornell property in the Town of Lansing.  The Snyder Road Solar Farm is expected to produce 2.5 million kilowatt-hours annually, covering about 1 percent of Cornell’s total electricity use, and is expected to reduce the university’s annual greenhouse emissions by 625 metric tons per year.

Santa Fe Community College’s 1.5 MW Santa Fe Community College Solar project in Santa Fe County, New Mexico is online. The project is sited on 5.4 acres on campus, and consists of 4,620 SunPower 327-Watt photovoltaic modules mounted on fixed racking.  The power generated is used on-site at the Santa Fe Community College campus, generating approximately 43% of the college’s electricity demands, and saving the college more than $200,000 annually.  

Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative’s 10 MW oil-fired Matlack Road Microgrid project in New London County, CT is online.  CMEEC supplies power and related electric services to municipal utilities and other wholesale customers that, in turn, provide electricity to roughly 70,000 residential, commercial/industrial and small business customers across the state.  The $9 million Matlack Road Microgrid project serves as emergency backup power for the Backus Hospital campus and adjacent critical facilities including schools, emergency shelters, fire station, supermarket / pharmacy, public water supply, gas station and a shopping center in the event of a sustained power outage.

Businesses and institutions choose distributed generation for a variety of reasons, but most hope for reduced costs and improved reliability compared to traditional utility service.  Will distributed generation continue to grow in the U.S.?  How will utilities -- and policymakers -- adapt as customers continue to adopt consumer-sited generation?