The goal: to ensure that old buildings are converted to run on fossil fuels and new ones do not run on them or are built from materials made from burning those fuels. The idea is to address so-called “embodied carbon” – the emissions associated with the materials used to construct a building.
“There are some real costs” to certain aspects of what Harvard does, said Sean Caron, vice president for campus services at the university. “So how do we ensure that the university is walking the talk and really prioritizing some of these important investments to secure the future of our community?”
The work is consistent with Harvard's goal of being fossil fuel-free on campus by 2050.
In another innovative move, Harvard, MIT and Mass General Brigham are leading a new Climate Solutions Consortium – a renewable energy collaboration of higher education, health care, cultural institutions, and state and local governments joining together to purchase clean energy.
“The science tells us that we need to triple the amount of renewable energy on the electric grid by 2030, and that’s not happening fast enough,” said Joe Higgins, MIT’s vice president for campus services and administration.
About four years ago, he and his colleagues began working on how to address this problem. “It really came down to the fact that we need new models… and how can we come together to do that with much greater impact and much faster?”
The consortium also includes several nonprofit organizations such as the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Museum of Fine Arts, GBH and the cities of Boston and Cambridge, all brought together by energy consulting group PowerOptions. The effort is based on the idea that by joining forces, companies can pool their resources and support larger renewable projects.
In this case, it means teaming up to buy power from a recently constructed solar farm in Bell County, Texas, and a wind farm in Bowman County, North Dakota that will be completed in 2026.
In total, the projects will deliver more than 1.3 megawatt-hours of clean energy per year, which means about a quarter-million gasoline cars will be taken off the road each year, according to the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator.
In both cases – with Harvard's green revolving fund and with the new consortium – the idea is to make a difference locally and to inspire similar actions elsewhere.
The consortium reviewed 125 potential projects before ultimately choosing the projects in North Dakota and Texas. “We wanted large projects that would reduce the most carbon emissions possible for the investments made and automatically put us among the dirtiest local, regional grids in the United States,” Higgins said.
Harvard was among the first universities to launch a green revolving fund in 2002. In 2011, Harvard and several leading universities joined forces in the so-called Billion Dollar Green Challenge to promote the idea.
Other universities followed suit, attracted Interest-free loans from foundations to finance campus projects for energy efficiency and carbon-reducing upgrades, said Mark Orlowski, executive director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a Boston-based nonprofit that pioneered the concept. These credits lead to both long-term energy savings and progress towards internal climate goals.
Harvard's revolving fund has provided $43 million in funding since 2002 and saved an estimated $110 million in energy costs. It played a key role in helping the university meet its original 2016 climate target, which reduced net emissions by 30 percent compared to the 2006 baseline.
There are now more than 100 such revolving funds across the country, Orlowski said.
At Harvard, The goal is for some of the innovations used on campus to spread beyond the funding model, said Heather Henriksen, Harvard's chief sustainability officer. The new David Rubinstein Treehouse Conference Center, under construction, uses a new, climate-smart concrete form made from recycled glass that reduces the building's carbon content.
The hope is that by using innovative materials on a high-profile project, Harvard can help create a marketplace for them. “We are truly trying to scale a healthier, more sustainable supply chain – using our campus and capital projects as a test bed to put multidisciplinary research and ideas into practice and produce results that can be scaled beyond Harvard,” Henriksen said .
The same goes for financing wind turbines 2,000 miles away in North Dakota. This idea of purchasing renewable energy outside of Massachusetts to meet campus sustainability goals was pioneered by MIT in 2016 when it invested in a solar farm in North Carolina.
Larger power purchases in North Dakota and Texas represent the next stage of development.
The Consortium for Climate Solutions is already looking to grow even larger in its next projects and expand its membership to achieve this. “We’re still knocking on doors and people are still opening them,” Higgins said. “Of course these are good projects for everyone.”
Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com. Follow her @shankman.