NYU buys more wind power credit

NYU bought 132 million kilowatt-hours of wind power last month, almost 12 percent more wind power than the university's landmark purchase last year that simultaneously made NYU the city's largest customer of wind power and launched its campaign for greater environmental awareness.

According to Cecil Scheib, NYU's director of energy and sustainability, the purchase is a renewal and expansion of last fall's purchase of 118 million kilowatt-hours of wind power. That purchase put the university above every other university in the nation for green energy purchasing and earned NYU a Green Power Leadership Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"We expect to maintain our status as the No. 1 university purchaser," Scheib said. "We have an ongoing commitment in trying to do well by the environment and what that takes is something we reconsider each year."

Jeremy Friedman, a Gallatin alumnus and the project administrator for NYU's Sustainability Task Force, is extremely pleased with the progress NYU has made in the past year.

"Here I was, a student at the university who had been advocating these things for three years and encouraging the school to make some small changes," Friedman said. "When the university made the announcement, I was pretty astonished and thrilled. It was a watershed moment. The amount of success we've had this past year is even greater."

The university buys the wind power in the form of renewable energy credits from FPL Energy, Scheib said.

All of the RECs are certified by a third party called Green-e, the nation's leading independent certification and verification program for renewable energy.

The energy purchase is meant to offset 100 percent of NYU's anticipated energy use for the 2008 fiscal year and is funded by the budget for NYU's Facilities and Construction Management organization.

The wind energy does not power the university itself, Scheib said. Instead, ConEdison owns the power grid that brings electricity to NYU and the school pays them for the "transportation and delivery" of their purchased electricity on an ongoing basis. The electricity itself is purchased from a third-party seller, which this year is a Washington, D.C.-area based company called Pepco Energy Services.

"By funding the RECs, we are encouraging a large amount of energy to be produced that omits no carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases and doesn't have the negative effects associated with other energy sources like coal mining, oil drilling and refining or nuclear power," Scheib said. "It's clean and green energy that we are supporting the development of."

Wind power particularly meets NYU's demand for the development of environmentally friendly energy sources.

" 'Renewable' is a quality of energy I'm committed to for the environmental benefits," Friedman said. "There are other features I am concerned about, such as how clean it is ­- wind is very clean and the harmful environmental impacts are very small. Wind has been developed not only as one of the cleanest energy sources, but also one of the most viable. For these reasons, wind is one of the best bets. We would be open to another energy source that has those benefits. The key isn't that it's wind - the key is that we're reducing environmental harm."

The purchase of wind power RECs is among NYU's ongoing initiatives in environmental sustainability and reducing energy consumption, but there is more to come.

"One of our big goals is to reduce campus-wide consumption of energy," Friedman said. "There's purchasing, but the second piece to the puzzle is generation. The third piece is conservation."

Generation involves the upgrade of NYU's cogeneration plant on Mercer Street between West Third and Fourth Streets. The plant will quadruple the number of buildings powered by the current facility, which is outdated; the plant is scheduled for completion in the fall of 2009.

Conservation, meanwhile, is being addressed in small ways for now, like installing more efficient fluorescent lighting, Friedman said.

"By conserving energy and reducing the amount we use, it reduces the amount we need to produce," he said.

Zachary Keach is a staff writer. E-mail him at news@nyunews.com.