Ivy League Takes Top Spot in Green Power Purchasing
The U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has crowned the Ivy League as the overall champion conference of EPA's College & University Green Power Challenge for 2006-2007. The Ivy League beat out 15 other collegiate athletic conferences, and New York University won individual school honors for purchasing more green power - 118 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) - than any other school in the competition.
By CleanLink Editorial Staff
The U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has crowned the Ivy League as the overall champion conference of EPA's College & University Green Power Challenge for 2006-2007. The Ivy League beat out 15 other collegiate athletic conferences, and New York University won individual school honors for purchasing more green power - 118 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) - than any other school in the competition.
Since April 2006, EPA's Green Power Partnership has ranked conferences by the quantity of green power purchased by their respective colleges and universities. These conferences must have schools that qualify as partners and make a collective green power purchase of at least 10 million kWh conference-wide to be eligible for the challenge. The 33 schools and 16 conferences taking part in this year's challenge are buying more than 750 million kWh of green power. EPA estimates that this amount of green power is equal to the electricity needed to power more than 60,000 average American homes each year.
Leading the Ivy League was the University of Pennsylvania, followed by Harvard and Yale. The collective total purchase of these three schools ranked the Ivy League first among all conferences, with a total of more than 140 million kWh of green power purchased.
Green power is produced from eligible renewable resources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass, and low-impact hydro. Green power is considered cleaner than conventional sources of electricity, has a superior environmental profile to conventional power, and does not contribute additional carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere.
Buying green power has proven to be an excellent strategy for colleges and universities nationwide to reduce the environmental impact of their purchased electricity, while allowing them to tie environmental action to the educational mission of the school.
EPA's Green Power Partnership encourages organizations to buy green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with fossil fuel-based electricity use. The partnership comprises of a diverse set of organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, small and medium businesses, government institutions, as well as colleges and universities.
For the 16 school champions and their conferences, as well as information on EPA's College & University Green Power Challenge, visit
www.epa.gov/greenpower/partners/hi_ed_challenge.htm
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