For the third year in a row, the Ivy League has won the crown as the
overall champion conference in the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency's
2008-2009 College and University Green Power Challenge.
The Ivy League's cumulative annual purchase of more than
225 million kilowatt-hours of green power has the equivalent
environmental impact of
avoiding the carbon dioxide emissions of nearly 30,000 vehicles.
Throughout the 2008-09 academic year, EPA's Green Power
Partnership tracked green power purchasing of colleges and universities
in various collegiate athletic conferences. To participate in the
challenge and be listed, a college or university must be in a
conference
with an aggregate green power purchase of at least 10 million
kilowatt-hours. All purchasers must be EPA Green Power Partners in good
standing. These conferences and their schools buy green power to reduce
the environmental impacts associated with their conventional
electricity
use.
This year's challenge included 44 institutions
representing
22 different conferences. Added together, the participating colleges
and
universities bought more than 1 billion kilowatt-hours of green
power--the equivalent environmental impact of avoiding the carbon
dioxide emissions of more than 136,000 vehicles.
The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia was singled
out by the EPA as the largest purchaser of green power. In 2008, Penn
increased its renewable energy certificate purchase to more than 192
million kilowatt-hours. The EPA says that Penn became the nation's
largest nongovernmental purchaser of wind power in 2003 when it decided
to double its wind power purchase to 40 million kilowatt-hours
annually.
The university is paying for its wind power purchases with savings
achieved through aggressive energy conservation. In recent years, the
university has reduced its peak electric demand by 18 percent, the EPA
says. Penn's long-term commitment to wind power will help make possible
the construction of a new 12-turbine, 20-MW Pennsylvania wind farm.
Runner-up in the challenge to Penn among individual
schools
was New York University, which bought 132 million kilowatt-hours of
green power. NYU purchases wind renewable energy certificates equal to
100 percent of its electricity use, the EPA says. NYU's purchases also
helped the University Athletic Association take second place among
athletic conferences, with 162.5 million kilowatt-hours of green power
purchases. Other conferences that placed high in the challenge were the
Big Ten (133.6 million kilowatt-hours), led by Pennsylvania State
University (83.6 million kilowatt-hours); the Pac-10 (81.6 million
kilowatt-hours), led by Oregon State University (66.7 million
kilowatt-hours); and the Association of Division III Independents,
whose
entire total of 57 million kilowatt-hours came from the University of
California, Santa Cruz.
The EPA ranks collegiate athletic conferences by the total
amount of green power bought by their member schools. To be eligible,
each school in the conference has to qualify as an EPA Green Power
partner and each conference has to collectively purchase at least 10
million kilowatt-hours of green power.
EPA's Green Power Partnership encourages organizations to
buy green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated
with traditional fossil fuel-based electricity use.
Read
more about the EPA College and University Green Power
Challenge.
