It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity to power Chicago’s more than 400 municipal buildings every year. As of January 1, every single one of them — including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet — is running on renewable energy, thanks largely to Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm.The move is projected to cut the carbon footprint of the country’s third-largest city by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year — the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, according to the city. Local decarbonization efforts like Chicago’s are taking on increasing significance as President-elect Donald Trump promises to reduce federal support for climate action. With the outgoing Biden administration doubling down on an international pledge to get the U.S. to net-zero emissions by 2050, cities, states, and private-sector players across the country will have to pick up the slack.Chicago is one of several U.S. cities that are taking advantage of their bulk-buying power to spur new carbon-free 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 Angela Tovar, Chicago’s chief sustainability officer. “There’s opportunities everywhere.”Chicago’s switch to renewable energy has been almost a decade in the making. The goal of sourcing the city’s power purely from carbon-free sources was first established by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2017. His successor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, struck a 2022 deal with Constellation, an electricity supplier, to purchase the city’s energy from the developer Swift Current Energy beginning in 2025. Swift Current began construction on the 3,800-acre, 593-megawatt solar farm in central Illinois as part of the same five-year, $422 million agreement. Straddling two 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 purchase approximately half the installation’s total output, which will cover about 70 percent of its municipal buildings’ electricity needs. City officials plan to cover the remaining 30 percent through the purchase of renewable energy credits. “That’s really a feature and not a bug of our plan,” said Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer Jared Policicchio. He added that he hopes the city’s demand for 100 percent renewable energy will encourage additional clean energy development locally, albeit on a much smaller scale, which will create new sources of power that the city can then purchase directly, in lieu of credits. “Our goal over the next several years is that we reach a point where we’r
Gio. Gen 9th, 2025
