To the editors:

On April 23, The Crimson Staff wrote an editorial piece entitled “Quincy Gets Winded” which praised Quincy House for their recent Wind Project, and yet contained many misconceptions about both the Wind Project and renewable energy.

The Crimson Staff stated that the project leaders’ “motives are questionable” because the project stood to potentially win a Challenge Team prize of $250. This suggestion is an insult to everyone involved. The project was initiated by a resident tutor who wanted to raise awareness about how the University can participate in the marketplace for renewable energy. The project did, in fact, win the Green Cup Challenge on Wednesday along with a $250 award. As stated Thursday on the project’s website and in an e-mail to the Quincy open list, the $250 will be used to establish a House Green Fund for future environmental projects in Quincy.

In another misconception, The Crimson disparaged the Quincy House Wind Project as simply “throwing money at renewable energy” and characterized Tradeable Renewable Energy Certificates (TRCs) as “subsidies.” To answer these claims, let us consider the analogy to Fair Trade certificates. Fair Trade certifies coffee brands as having been produced with living wages for the farmers and environmentally-friendly practices for the land. If a person decides to buy Fair Trade coffee instead of generic coffee, they get coffee that tastes the same, but the purchase comes with the “attribute” that the coffee beans were farmed in a conscientious way. One could hardly be so callous as to describe this choice as “throwing money at poor coffee farmers” or to characterize Fair Trade certification as a “subsidy”. Similarly, when we purchase TRCs, we get the same electricity, but now it comes with the attribute of having been produced in an environmentally-conscientious way.

Quincy succeeded in purchasing TRCs amounting to a little more than two percent of its annual electricity usage, at a one-time cost of $399. This comes out to a premium of one cent per kilowatt-hour on top of the retail rate of electricity of roughly five to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. This simple calculation yields some huge insight—if the University were to supply all its electricity using renewable energy, it would have to either purchase TRCs or invest in a wind farm of its own. Quincy’s Wind Project combines both TRCs and wind energy, giving a nudge to the University in just the right direction.

DAVID M. THOMPSON

April 25, 2004

The writer is a resident tutor in Quincy House.