Harvard, MIT, Mass General Brigham partner on major solar, wind projects
As local organizations aim to meet climate goals, a collection of nonprofit, private and governmental organizations have invested in the creation of two clean energy projects that will together generate enough electricity to power an estimated 130,000 annually.
The support for those projects — a solar project in Texas and a wind farm in North Dakota — is being led by Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mass General Brigham alongside PowerOptions, a nonprofit that links together smaller institutions and organizations that might otherwise not have the electricity needs to be eligible to support a project of this size.
The effort was announced Nov. 20. The partnership between Harvard, MIT and MGB — jointly, they refer to the grouping as the Consortium for Climate Solutions — was first established in 2020. Dennis Villanueva, director of utilities, energy strategy and procurement at MGB, said this sort of deal has been in the works since the Consortium first banded together.
“Finally seeing these efforts come to fruition within the last weeks has been completely exciting,” he said. “It will help us meet our collective goals of addressing emissions reductions of global greenhouse gases.”
Organizers of the project said the investment into these projects, as well as the way the groups have joined together to provide support, marks an important step forward toward meeting climate goals.
“We need a lot of innovative solutions in order to meet the climate goals of the Commonwealth and of the globe,” said Heather Takle, president and CEO of PowerOptions. “This is one of those that is going to continue to progress our industry forward.”
At the heart of the effort — and what makes it innovative and exciting to Takle — is how the different partners were brought together, which is referred to as aggregation.
Generally, with large-scale clean energy projects, developers don’t want to work with institutions and organizations that don’t meet certain thresholds regarding how much electricity they use.
By bringing together an aggregation of Harvard, MIT and MGB, as well as the next level of aggregation through PowerOptions — which represents 500 nonprofits and public entities like Beth Israel Lahey Health, the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, GBH, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the cities of Boston and Cambridge — the deal was able to connect organizations that otherwise would not have been able to participate.
Takle said she thinks this consortium represents a first-in-the-nation approach to aggregation at this scale, which will help the organizations move toward meeting carbon neutrality goals.
“The aggregation approach is novel, and it’s needed in order to get to the kind of scale of impact these institutions need to have in terms of their carbon emissions reduction,” she said.
Although they are spearheaded by local organizations, that doesn’t mean that more electricity generated by wind and solar is coming directly to Massachusetts.
Under the deal, the institutions that have signed onto the Consortium are not directly receiving the clean energy generated by the solar and wind farms in the western United States that they have invested in. Instead, through what is called a “virtual power purchasing agreement,” a deal where the members of the Consortium pay for the electricity as well as the value put on it is coming from a renewable energy source.
The electricity generated will then be sold to communities around each of the projects.
The Consortium is then left with the renewable energy certificates — what John Rogers, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the “renewable energyness” — that come from clean energy generation.
Already, a paper trail exists in the energy grid to understand who produced what and where it’s going as the electrons mix and mingle. Renewable energy certificates, or RECs, add another element to the mix, documenting what of that energy was produced using clean energy sources, rather than fossil fuels.
“They are paying extra because this isn’t just electrons from a coal plant or gas plant,” Rogers said. “There’s a recognition in those transactions that electricity from a wind farm or solar farm is different.”
That sort of documentation can help organizations looking to meet net-zero emissions goals — meaning that they balance whatever fossil fuel emissions they produce with equivalent amounts of clean energy — even if they don’t immediately shift what energy sources they’re producing or using.
That kind of distance can mean reduced impact on a local scale — investing in projects halfway across the country functionally brings fewer clean energy benefits to the local environment of any of the organizations investing the money — but for these projects the fact that the Consortium got involved before construction and may have made the projects possible in the first place as well as the novel model of the aggregation make the distance less concerning, Rogers said.
Villanueva said that ideally MGB would be able to focus on neutralizing all of its immediate impact to the environment and the grid, but making that shift is hard to do right away. Deals like this virtual power purchasing agreement can get around some of the logistical challenges that exist in New England, while still attempting to make a dent in an issue that has impacts across the world.
“The importance of local investment is, of course, we want our dollars to incentivize our economy; we want to clean up our own grid, so on, so forth,” Villanueva said. “But also, we need to keep in mind that the effect of emissions is global and there’s an urgency to reduce that as fast as we can. [Virtual power purchasing agreements] allow for that to happen at a faster pace than would happen just by hitting the state goals.”
Members of the Consortium said that the two sites were chosen very intentionally, with factors like what the increased clean energy might mean for those local grids and other impacts for the local communities factoring into a decision between over 100 potential projects vetted.
In both grids, increased clean energy could have a greater impact on greenhouse gas emissions than in New England. According to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in the broader energy region that includes North Dakota — called a North American Reliability Corporation region — carbon dioxide emissions used to produce the same amount of electricity were nearly twice as high as in the New England region. In Texas (most of the state constitutes its own region) carbon dioxide emissions were about one-and-a-half times as high as in New England.
The same trend holds true for other air pollutants like sulfur dioxide. In Texas, emissions of that gas were over four times as high as in New England. In the North Dakota region, they were over seven times as high.
“Bringing these projects online in these jurisdictions does mean potentially a lot greater impact from the renewable energy,” Rogers said.
Both projects also include plans for community benefits beyond cleaner energy as part of the work. For example, at the Texas project, development will include taking steps toward waterfowl conservation and connecting economically disadvantaged communities to outdoor recreation opportunities.
And the groups are also tackling efforts to increase clean energy generation locally, something Rogers said makes a difference for him when he considers this type of far-off investment.
“If this were the only thing they were doing, I might look a little more askance at that, but this is part of the portfolios that these organizations are doing in recognizing that there are local impacts and there are global impacts,” he said.
For example, Mass General Brigham, in addition to serving as an anchor institution for the Consortium, also has worked to install solar panels on its own buildings to pull in renewable energy directly, as well as to invest in a wind farm in New Hampshire that also adds clean energy directly to the local grid.
“Mass General Brigham fully supports the Commonwealth’s goals to transition the local grid to be powered by green energy sources,” Villanueva said. “MGB has and will continue to invest in local renewable energy projects.”
The choice of projects is also a matter of scale. In New England, the restrictions around siting and permitting can limit what sorts of projects are possible and how big they can be. Legislation signed by Gov. Maura Healey last month looks to make the review process for permits faster and simpler, while still maintaining community engagement and looking to minimize impact on ecosystems. But even with those legislative adjustments — which both Takle and Rogers said make them hopeful for what might be possible in Massachusetts in years to come — questions still remain.
Takle said she expects the new legislation to help streamline processes like rooftop solar and other easier projects, which she called “low-hanging fruit,” but said that to reach the state’s clean energy goals there will have to be bigger conversations about other pieces around land use.
“Some of those [small] projects take four years to get through the siting-permitting process, so that’s what I’m hopeful this will solve, just what we have the easy opportunity to do,” Takle said. “I think there’s still a question mark about the harder stuff in terms of land use, once we get through the low hanging fruit, which we have a lot of still.”
The location of the projects — and the increased scale it can allow for — can also make for faster and bigger approaches to meeting climate goals locally.
“Most of our members have goals to be net zero by 2050 or sooner,” Takle said. “That’s why this was critical, because there’s only so many ways to do that and it’s tough to make giant, big plugs out of those goals at the size and scale that they need.”
For Harvard University, taking part in forming the Consortium for Climate Solutions came out of a looming set of climate goals announced by the university’s then-President Drew Faust in 2018.
Through that work, the university set a goal of being carbon-free — operating without the use of fossil fuels — by 2050. As an interim goal, by 2026, Faust announced a benchmark of running the university as carbon-neutral — meaning that any fossil fuel use they have is offset by things like the renewable energy certificates from projects like the ones in Texas and North Dakota and other similar measures.
Across the region, colleges and universities have taken varying approaches to setting goals around reducing or eliminating carbon emissions, with varying levels of ambition. Like Harvard, MIT has the same timeline to be carbon-neutral by 2026 and to eliminate direct emissions by 2050.
For MGB, as of 2022, 80% of electricity used was coming from renewable sources. The health care organization has a goal to reach carbon-neutrality by 2025.
Villanueva said that in addition to working towards reaching net-zero goals, he hopes the partnership and aggregation set-up can serve as a model for others to continue expanding the impact of renewable energy.
“We have a bunch of lessons learned from this involvement in these last projects that we would love to share,” he said. “Hopefully that will happen in the future, in which we can help cities — like the city of Boston, Cambridge, and other cities that have their own aggressive goals — lower carbon emissions.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.