On April 8, Bob Maffia, Vice President for Facilities and Campus Operations at Stevens, sent an email to students and faculty with the subject “Stevens To Source 100% of its Electricity from Renewable Source.” The switch is planned for October 1. This move comes amid a broader push from Stevens to embrace sustainability among campus operations, in part to achieve rankings in online lists.
The press release mentions that Stevens electricity will be sourced entirely from local “wind, hydropower or solar energy.” Currently, wind produces less than 0.1% of the state’s electricity, raising serious questions about whether the power is indeed locally sourced. Hydropower in New Jersey is even scarcer; in fact, it is virtually non-existent. New Jersey gets about 4% of its electricity from solar panels, but these only work during the day. If Stevens claims it receives entirely “local” renewable power, where, then, is it getting electricity at night? This is not a trivial question.
There are basically two options: Either Stevens will receive power from non-local sources, making their claim of local power false, or they will source power in part from natural gas available on the grid, making their claim to 100% clean energy false. Doesn’t that make 100% local renewable energy impossible? Yes, it does.
Buying non-local power would mean that instead of supporting local jobs and GDP, Stevens is sending money out-of-state to greenwash its campus operations. If, on the other hand, it uses only local sources, then at night or in times of renewable scarcity, it receives electricity from the same grid as everyone else, powered mostly by natural gas with, fortunately, a good amount of clean nuclear power mixed in.
Actually, Stevens will always receive power from the same grid as everyone else. When it signs a contract for renewable power, new power lines aren’t built to campus. And on the electrical grid, which is shared between all connected power plants, the sources of electricity are not differentiable.
This is key to understanding what it means to buy 100% renewable energy. It does not mean that the physical power is being routed directly to Stevens. It means that Stevens makes payments to a renewable energy “retailer” from an accounting point of view, but the energy it physically receives is the same as everyone else. This is known as buying Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECs. They are a zero-sum game. If one company buys RECs, the electricity they receive doesn’t actually come from a different source, but legally they get to claim it does. That means someone else, who gets their electricity from the same grid, is, in accounting books, forced to use “dirty” energy, even though their emissions haven’t increased. This is why RECs are greenwashing: they don’t actually change a company’s consumption patterns, but the companies get to make a claim about being “sustainable.”
But in the press release, Stevens said it had moved away from a model of purchasing RECs and is now opting for the purchase of physical power. Let’s unpack that. It isn’t obvious what this means since, as we already know, the physical power lines going to Stevens won’t change. While the provided details are purposefully vague, this new program is, most likely, RECs with stricter time accounting.
Companies can brag about RECs whether or not there is actually enough renewable power on the grid in that current moment to supply them with electricity. The company that Stevens currently buys RECs from, Green-e, has a full 21-month window in which electricity produced by renewable sources can be bought through RECs. With the option of stricter time accounting, Stevens will likely pay an extra fee to ensure that their new energy retailer, ENGIE North America, has enough contracts with various renewable power plants scattered around the country to “cover” Stevens’ demand for electricity at all times.
We actually know how much renewable power ENGIE North America has to offer. The company says on its website that it has 3,313 GWh of renewable assets, which we’ll assume are available over the course of a year. The press release stated that Stevens uses as much electricity in one year as 6,984 homes use in three years. Using the average NJ home, this works out to an electric consumption of 188 GWh per year for Stevens. This means only 17 companies like Stevens could buy enough normal RECs from ENGIE North America to cover all their electricity needs. The number of companies that could buy glorified time-accounted RECs is even lower.
This is a fundamentally non-scalable option that works only if an elite few customers choose to participate. The reason is that there is a limited amount of renewable power available at any one time, particularly when restricted to local sources. And because of their weather-dependency, there are guaranteed to be moments, days, and weeks of insufficient renewable electricity generation. What little supply there is, Stevens will be able to legally claim that it is going to the university. If more companies chose this elite option, it would stop working because the retailer wouldn’t be able to promise enough renewable electricity to cover the real-time demand of the companies. (Theoretically, they already can’t.)
This brings us to a broader issue, an even more problematic one, regarding Stevens’ decision to buy into a greenwashing scheme for “100% renewable power.” The energy retailer that Stevens chose to work with, ENGIE North America, is the U.S.-Canada branch of the third largest energy company in the world, and its main business is fossil fuels. I mentioned earlier that, in cases where local renewables aren’t available, Stevens will send money out of New Jersey. In fact, it will send money out of New Jersey anyway. ENGIE North America is not a New Jersey company.
Do you know who is a New Jersey company? Public Service Enterprise Group, or PSEG. Everybody who pays electric bills in Hoboken knows PSEG, or their subsidiary PSE&G. You might have been unaware until right now that PSEG is pursuing one of the boldest clean energy plans in the country. Earlier this year, they announced they will be selling all of their fossil fuel plants, transitioning entirely to nuclear power and, once it gets built, off-shore wind. Neither of these power sources emits carbon or pollutants into the atmosphere. Why would Stevens decide to support a behemoth multinational fossil fuel company over a local clean energy provider?
It gets worse. Not only is ENGIE North America a non-local company with a polluting track record—it is actively campaigning against New Jersey’s local clean energy: its nuclear power plants. These plants, which provide over 90% of the state’s clean energy year-round as well as thousands of jobs to New Jersey residents, are struggling to remain profitable amid cheap natural gas.
Natural gas companies are aware of this fact and have launched campaigns to cripple and close those plants, which would substantially expand their market in New Jersey. ENGIE North America participates in these campaigns as a member of a group called “NJ Ratepayers United,” a fossil fuel-backed lobbyist that is currently working to undermine New Jersey’s most reliable source of clean energy by locking nuclear plants into unfairly regulated markets with natural gas. The group pretends to represent local interests, when in reality it fights against them with the backing of fossil fuel interests, including notoriously corrupt Koch Industries’ lobbying arm, “Americans for Prosperity.”
They are, plainly, an enemy of clean power in New Jersey. The best that Stevens can do to support clean energy in New Jersey is to buy real, local, clean power from PSEG. This is already the status quo in Hoboken, which is serviced by PSE&G by default. That means if you pay for electricity in Hoboken, you are already doing more than Stevens to support local clean energy!
If able, Stevens should cancel its negotiations with ENGIE North America—negotiations that will do nothing to change Stevens’ actual carbon footprint while empowering those lobbying against local jobs and clean energy. Come October 1, we’ll see if Stevens understands basic energy retail, or if it would rather continue to greenwash for online list rankings.
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