In December 2020, we began buying clean energy from the South Dakota wind farm that the University helped get off the ground, fulfilling a key goal of our Climate Action Plan (CAP) and earning recognition from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

BU has committed to buying 205 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually for 15 years from wind farm developer, builder, and operator ENGIE North America. By reselling that clean power to Midwest consumers and helping decarbonize that region’s power grid, the University earns legal credits, called renewable energy certificates (RECs), against its own carbon emissions in Boston.

“We will receive the RECs from the project and retire them so they can’t be used by a fossil fuel–based power plant to emit more greenhouse gases,” says Dennis Carlberg, associate vice president for Boston University Sustainability. “RECs are the currency of renewable energy. They are the market mechanism used to drive the development of renewable energy projects in the United States.”

BU’s power purchase agreement is the largest by any of the colleges and universities in EPA’s Green Power Partnership and resulted in a 2021 Green Power Leadership Award.

The 205 million kilowatt-hours BU buys equals the amount of electricity the University used in 2016, which in turn was responsible for more than half of its carbon dioxide emissions. The University has already cut its carbon emissions by 40% since 2006, and the CAP calls for spending $141 million over a decade on capital projects to achieve further reductions.

“The development of this wind farm, and our purchase of wind energy from it, is a major milestone in our journey to reduce Boston University’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2040,” says President Robert A. Brown. “Our Climate Action Plan is ambitious, and this purchase of renewable energy moves us closer to realizing those goals.”