Stanford University
OP-6: Clean and Renewable Energy

The following installations are included in this credit: Y2E2 #1, #2, & #3, Huang, Spilker, Knight, Synergy, Hoover, Res2, Jasper Ridge By the end of 2016, Stanford will procure 65% of its electricity from renewable sources, 78.5 MW of which will be owned by Stanford and 5.5 MW of which will be located on-site. This transition to renewable sources, along with the efficiencies gained from Stanford's new Central Energy Facility and the conversion from steam to hot water, will reduce Stanford’s greenhouse gas emissions by 68%. Please see the Renewable Energy Fact Sheet for additional information: https://sustainable.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Renewable%20Energy.pdf

By the end of 2016, Stanford will procure 65% of its electricity from renewable sources, 78.5 MW of which will be owned by Stanford and 73 MW of which will be located off-site. This transition to renewable sources, along with the efficiencies gained from the new CEF and the conversion from steam to hot water, will reduce Stanford’s greenhouse gas emissions by 68%. Please see the Renewable Energy Fact Sheet for additional information: https://sustainable.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Renewable%20Energy.pdf

The source breakdown above is derived from the 2014 power content labels for California utilities (2015 power content labels have not yet been released). The power content percentage for each utility by source has been applied to the energy purchased by Stanford from that utility for calendar year 2015 to derive the percentages above. The solar generated onsite was then included in the solar category, and electricity purchased from Stanford's cogeneration plant between January and March 2015 was added in the natural gas category. The “Other” sources of electricity are listed as “Other/unspecified” on the utility power content labels and represent market purchases for which the source is not tracked by the utilities. It is worth noting that the City of Palo Alto Utilities, which provided about 11% of Stanford’s electricity in 2015, purchases RECs for all of their electricity from unspecified sources, so all of it can be considered renewable. In April 2015, Stanford opened a grid-powered Central Energy Facility housing a high-voltage substation that distributes electricity to the campus. Also in April 2015, Stanford entered an agreement to build 78.5 MW of solar PV, 5.5 MW of which will be installed at 19 sites across Stanford’s campus. Combined with the renewable electricity Stanford already receives through the California grid, a total of 65% of Stanford’s electricity supply will be renewable by the end of 2016. For more details, please visit: http://sustainable.stanford.edu/sesi. Thus, in 2016 and onwards, Stanford will continue to move away from natural gas as a source of electricity and towards solar as the primary source.

The vast majority of campus building heating needs are met by hot water generated from Stanford's new Central Energy Facility, which uses heat recovery chillers to recover the waste heat from the chilled water that Stanford uses to cool its buildings to create hot water used for heating. Through this process, Stanford is able to meet 93% of its campus heating needs with waste heat from its chilled water system. The natural gas used for building heating goes towards backup hot water generators when the demand for building heating is so high that the need cannot be met with the hot water produced through heat recovery. Finally, natural gas also goes to some buildings directly on campus for building heating that do not receive energy from Stanford's Central Energy Facility. Due to the significant heat recovery and lower line losses of hot water compared to steam, the new energy system is approximately 70% more efficient that the previous combined heat and power process provided by cogeneration, which was employed at Stanford since 1987 until the launch of the new energy system in April 2015. For more details, please visit: http://sustainable.stanford.edu/sesi.