Collaborative Solar Facility Powers 5 Leading New England Colleges

• Released in 2018, the New England College Renewable Partnership is a first-of-its-kind partnership amongst five liberal arts organizations: Amherst, Bowdoin, Hampshire, Smith and Williams.
• Each of the colleges is acquiring zero-carbon electricity from the Farmington facility to minimize carbon exhausts from campus power use.

An ingenious collaborative energy project has started supplying electrical energy to five New England colleges-- and also to 10s of countless pupils, team and professors-- as a new solar energy facility has gone on the internet in Farmington, Maine, United States.

Introduced in 2018, the New England College Renewable Partnership is a first-of-its-kind partnership among 5 leading New England liberal arts institutions: Amherst, Bowdoin, Hampshire, Smith and also Williams.

Over the past three years, the colleges have acquired with a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources, a leading clean energy business, to build a utility-scale solar power facility that each year will create enough power to power about 17,000 New England residences. Affordable Energy Services acted as an adviser on the project.

Each of the colleges is acquiring zero-carbon power from the Farmington facility to decrease carbon emissions from campus electrical energy usage.

The New England College Renewable Partnership is important both of what it does, as well as for what it represents. On an useful level:

• The Farmington facility is creating new solar electrical energy in New England-- not a very easy success, provided the area's location and terrain.
• The partnership aids each institution manage prices by "locking in" the price of electricity for the next twenty years.
• The new solar energy created by the facility will have a considerable effect on sustainability, relocating each of the 5 campuses closer to their environment action goals.

The Farmington project has currently had a substantial economic effect, too: the project created about 500 short-lived building jobs; it will certainly create tax obligation profits of almost $17 million over its 30-year life expectancy; it has actually generated capital investment of about $150 million.

At a critical degree, the New England College Renewable Partnership-- the very first such partnership amongst New England colleges-- is consistent with cooperations taking place in the corporate round. The colleges working together around the Farmington effort hope that their partnership will motivate other establishments to interact on similar projects, allowing them to take advantage of common efficiencies and also economies of scale.

" Bowdoin celebrates this essential turning point with our companion colleges from Massachusetts," claimed Bowdoin College President Clayton Rose. "We're proud to be part of a project that stands as a crucial instance of how collective activities at establishments like ours can make a significant difference in minimizing greenhouse gas exhausts. It's a particularly exciting time for Bowdoin, as our involvement in this solar project is part of a larger initiative to source 100% of Bowdoin's electrical power purchases from Maine-based renewable resource."

" Collaborations like these are unusual, but hold fantastic guarantee for advancement in college," claimed Smith College President Kathleen McCartney. "This cutting-edge partnership shows Smith's strong commitment to management and also activity pertaining to environmental sustainability, as well as moves us substantially closer to reaching our objective of ending up being carbon neutral by 2030. Given the disastrous impacts that environment modification is having throughout the world, I am proud that Smith is working together with peer colleges to relocate us towards services."