Although schools across the University have undertaken a large-scale effort to improve buildings’ energy efficiency, the University has also begun to utilize more renewable energy sources in order to reduce its impact on the environmnet.
In November 2009, Harvard became the largest single-institution buyer of wind power in New England when it announced that more than 10 percent of electricity used by its Cambridge and Allston campuses would come from a wind farm in Maine. Meanwhile, improvements to Harvard’s Blackstone Steam Plant, which generates electricity for the University, have made it 31 percent less GHG-intensive since 2006. Harvard’s two chilled water plants are now 19 percent less GHG-intensive than they were in 2006.
But the production of Harvard’s electricity is a source of emissions the University has less control over. The University generates only one third of the energy it consumes on-site and purchases the other two-thirds from third-party sources. And according to Henriksen, the New England electricity grid, from which Harvard purchases much of its electricity, has not been converting to renewable sources of energy as quickly as it projected it would in 2008, in part due to municipal budget cuts across the region.
Harvard’s inability to effect more change on this front has proved frustrating for some.
“The [Environmental Action Committee] would like to see more pressure from Harvard on the local community in getting the places it sources its electricity from to adopt more sustainable forms of electricity,” said Daniel Z. Wilson ’14, president of the EAC.
According to Wilson, Harvard will not reach its 30 percent goal without changing the sources from which it derives more than half of its electricity.
A GREEN INTELLECT
Even if Harvard does not make its 30 percent goal, professors said, the University can secure its preemininence in the green movement by focusing on its teaching and research.
“Harvard’s main mission is research and education, and by far the biggest impact we have on the climate problem is through the way we teach our students,” said environmental science professor Daniel P. Schrag, director of Harvard’s Center for the Environment.
According to Schrag, the center is hoping to collaborate with the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to offer a new secondary field in “energy and the environment.”
“Ultimately, as a climate scientist, what matters is not getting to 30 percent—it’s getting to zero,” Schrag said. “It’s Harvard’s commitment to scholarship and teaching that will lead the world to a zero carbon economy.”
—Staff writer Kevin J. Wu can be reached at kwu@college.harvard.edu.