MIT is co-leading an effort to enable the development of two new large-scale renewable energy projects in regions with carbon-intensive electrical grids: Big Elm Solar in Bell County, Texas, came online this year, and the Bowman Wind Project in Bowman County, North Dakota, is expected to be operational in 2026. Together, they will add a combined 408 megawatts (MW) of new renewable energy capacity to the power grid. This work is a critical part of MIT’s strategy to achieve its goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2026.The Consortium for Climate Solutions, which includes MIT and 10 other Massachusetts organizations, seeks to eliminate close to 1 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year — more than five times the annual direct emissions from MIT’s campus — by committing to purchase an estimated 1.3-million-megawatt hours of new solar and wind electricity generation annually.“MIT has mobilized on multiple fronts to expedite solutions to climate change,” says Glen Shor, executive vice president and treasurer. “Catalyzing these large-scale renewable projects is an important part of our comprehensive efforts to reduce carbon emissions from generating energy. We are pleased to work in partnership with other local enterprises and organizations to amplify the impact we could achieve individually.”The two new projects complement MIT’s existing 25-year power purchase agreement established with Summit Farms in 2016, which enabled the construction of a roughly 650-acre, 60 MW solar farm on farmland in North Carolina, leading to the early retirement of a coal-fired plant nearby. Its success has inspired other institutions to implement similar aggregation models.A collective approach to enable global impactMIT, Harvard University, and Mass General Brigham formed the consortium in 2020 to provide a structure to accelerate global emissions reductions through the development of large-scale renewable energy projects — accelerating and expanding the impact of each institution’s greenhouse gas reduction initiatives. As the project’s anchors, they collectively procured the largest volume of energy through the aggregation. The consortium engaged with PowerOptions, a nonprofit energy-buying consortium, which offered its members the opportunity to participate in the projects. The City of Cambridge, Beth Israel Lahey, Boston Children’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Tufts University, the Mass Convention Center Authority, the Museum of Fine Arts, and GBH later joined the consortium through PowerOptions. The consortium vetted over 125 potential projects against its rigorous project evaluation criteria. With faculty and MIT stakeholder input on a short list of the highest-ranking projects, it ultimately chose Bowman Wind and Big Elm Solar. Collectively, these two projects will achieve large greenhouse gas emissions reductions in two of the most carbon-intensive electrical grid regions in the United States and create clean energ
Lun. Dic 23rd, 2024
