Colgate University
OP-6: Clean and Renewable Energy

All of Colgate's electricity is purchased from the university's local municipality and has the following generation mix:
Hydroelectricity = 88.9 percent
Nuclear = 11.1 percent
TOTAL = 100 percent

Wood chips = 8,433 tons = 97,485 MMBtus
Solar thermal (100 Broad Street) = 125 MMBtus
Geothermal Heat Exchange (Chapel House) = 931 MMBtus
TOTAL: 98,541 MMBtus

Colgate purchases all of its wood chips — about 8,000 tons per year — from Gutchess Lumber Co., Inc. in Vernon, N.Y., less than 20 miles away from campus. The wood chips are a byproduct of the mill’s operations and ultimately sourced from well-managed state and private forests. This includes Gutchess’ own 29,000-acre forest, which has been owned and sustainably managed by the company for more than a century. As long as there is no land-use change, the use of Gutchess’ wood chips in Colgate’s wood boiler is a clean and renewable source of thermal energy and a climate solution.

Sustainably managed working forests can be an important aspect of combating climate change. As young trees grow, they actively capture carbon from the atmosphere, but as they age, the amount of carbon they take in decreases. Harvesting those trees makes way for new growth that can continue the cycle of carbon sequestration. The harvested trees taken to Gutchess Lumber are then milled and used in a variety of furniture and building applications, storing the carbon held within the wood for generations. Colgate's use of wood chips is a small, local operation in a state where forest biomass and tree growth continue to increase year over year.

Colgate has chosen to purchase third-party certified RECs from organizations such as Greenlight Energy Group (https://www.gltenergy.com/) which is a best practice for institutions to mitigate its impacts associated with electricity consumption. This offset strategy ultimately helps to support renewable electricity generation while ensuring Colgate achieves carbon neutrality by 2019. Colgate purchased enough RECs to cover 100 percent of its electricity consumption even though the university's electricity is generated from emission-free sources (hydroelectric and nuclear).

Greenlight is an all-female-owned REC marketing company that has helped to provide sustainable energy purchases for a multitude of clients such as fortune 500 companies as well as college campuses.