On her fingers, Chicago’s Chief Sustainability Officer Angela Tovar counted the city buildings that will soon source all of their power from renewable energy: O’Hare International Airport, Midway International Airport, City Hall.Chicago’s real estate portfolio is massive. It includes 98 fire stations, 81 library locations, 25 police stations and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet — in all, more than 400 municipal buildings.It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours per year to keep the wheels turning in the third-largest city in the country. Beginning Jan. 1, every single one of them will come solely from clean, renewable energy, mostly sourced from Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm. The move is projected to cut the Windy City’s carbon footprint by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year — equal to taking 62,000 cars off the road, the city said.Chicago is among several cities across the country that are not only shaking up their energy mix but also taking advantage of their bulk-buying power to spur new clean energy development.“It’s a plan that gets the city to take action on climate and also leverages our buying power to generate new opportunities for Chicagoans and the state,” said Tovar. “There’s opportunities everywhere, not to mention vast amounts of land.”Angela Tovar, chief sustainability officer for the City of Chicago’s Department of Environment, visited the Double Black Diamond Solar Field site near Waverly, Ill., in November 2024.Patrick L. Pyszka/City of Chicago
The city — and much of Illinois — already has one of the cleanest energy mixes in the country, with over 50% of the state’s electricity coming from nuclear power. But while nuclear energy is considered “clean,” carbon-free energy, it is not considered renewable.Chicago’s move toward renewable energy has been years in the making. The goal of sourcing the city’s energy purely from renewable sources was established by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2017. In 2022, Mayor Lori Lightfoot struck a deal with electricity supplier Constellation for the city to purchase renewable energy from developer Swift Current Energy, beginning in 2025.Swift Current began building the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling Sangamon and Morgan counties in central Illinois, the Double Black Diamond Solar project is now the largest solar installation east of the Mississippi River. It can produce enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes, according to Swift Current’s vice president of origination, Caroline Mann.Chicago alone has agreed to buy about half the installation’s total output, enough to cover about 70% of its municipal electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the rest by buying renewable energy credits.“That’s really a feature and not a bug of our plan,” said deputy chief sustainability officer Jared Po
Gio. Dic 26th, 2024
