Harvard University Doubles Down on Emissions Reductions

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Harvard University has taken two major steps toward reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, making significant investments in renewables and energy efficiency as it seeks to eliminate its use of fossil fuels by 2050. 

The investments come as the university’s earlier emissions reductions of 30 percent since 2006 have been partially reversed as Harvard bounced back from the Covid pandemic while expanding its campus in the Allston neighborhood of Boston.

As emission reduction efforts move forward, relatively easy measures like swapping out inefficient lighting and adding solar panels on rooftops will give way to more costly fixes such as replacing gas-fired boilers with electric heating systems.

To help fund ongoing emissions reductions, Harvard increased the size of its Green Revolving Fund—money the university spends on campus decarbonization efforts—from $12 million to $37 million. That makes it the largest such sustainability endowment in the nation.

Also in recent weeks, the university announced a novel renewable energy partnership with Mass General Brigham, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and eight other Boston-area institutions to help build and run a solar farm in Texas and a wind farm in North Dakota.

The group, known as the Consortium for Climate Solutions, agreed to purchase a total of 1.3 million megawatt hours of clean energy per year from the two facilities. That’s equal to the electricity consumption of 130,000 homes and should avoid the release of 920,000 metric tons of climate-harming carbon dioxide into the air each year.

“We’re incredibly excited to announce the consortium, offset our electricity use and really add to the capacity for new renewables in this country,” said Sean Caron, Harvard’s vice president for campus services.  

“But we’re also excited to allocate capital here locally,” Caron added. “The more opportunities we have that we’re taking advantage of across a host of different categories, the more likelihood of success we’ll have in meeting this urgent need.”

Harvard’s green fund has helped pay for more than 250 sustainability projects at the university since its inception in the late 1990s. Projects have ranged from the relatively small, like installing high-efficiency dishwashers in dining halls, to bigger purchases like switching from gas- or diesel-powered vehicles to electric.

“It’s had a lot of impact to drive innovation, for instance when technology was new and upfront costs were high,” said Heather Henriksen, Harvard’s chief sustainability officer. “It enabled us to do these projects more quickly.” 

Harvard was one of the first universities to have a revolving fund for clean energy projects on its campus and, with the increased money it has allocated, its fund is once again the largest, said Mark Orlowski, executive director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a environmental nonprofit based in Boston.

The main benefit of a dedicated sustainability fund is its permanence, Orlowski added.

“If you use a normal budget line item for this, versus a revolving fund, one of the big downsides to that is that if there’s a budget shortfall next year, all of a sudden you could zero out that line in your budget, and there could be literally no funding to do more work next year,” he said. “Whereas with a revolving fund, the money is specifically set aside in a separate account dedicated to this.”

As prior projects pay for themselves in energy savings, money from such funds is redeployed into new projects. Since 2002, Harvard’s revolving fund has provided $43 million in funding and saved $110 million, according to the university.

The vast majority—98 percent—of the university’s emissions come from its buildings, the oldest of which dates to 1720. Each presents its own decarbonization challenges.

Eliminating emissions requires curbing direct emissions, namely carbon dioxide from gas-fired boilers, and indirect emissions, which primarily come in the form of CO2 released from power plants that burn fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Harvard’s power purchase agreement as part of the Consortium for Climate Solutions will effectively zero out about half of Harvard’s remaining emissions, Henriksen said. The electricity from the solar farm in Texas and the wind farm in North Dakota won’t flow directly to Harvard’s campus, but those large renewable energy projects will offset fossil fuel power elsewhere, allowing Harvard and other project partners to each claim a portion of the emissions reductions.

“Without this group of buyers, agreeing to pay for 15-plus years for these projects, they would not be developed,” Henriksen said.

The university will now seek to harness its Green Revolving Fund to curb its direct emissions. Approximately two-thirds of Harvard’s 650 buildings are connected to one of two district heating systems, one in Cambridge and one across the Charles River in Boston, both of which are powered by natural gas.

Harvard’s Allston District Energy Facility in Boston was considered cutting-edge when it first came online in 2019. The facility uses gas boilers to produce hot water for heating, and electricity to chill cold water for cooling buildings.

The facility was built with an understanding that the gas boilers would likely have to be replaced with an electric heating alternative at some point.

One alternative would be geothermal heating and cooling. Harvard was an early leader in small-scale geothermal systems that require far less energy than conventional heating and cooling systems.

In recent years, other universities, including Princeton, have developed campus-wide geothermal heating and cooling. A first-in-the-nation neighborhood-scale geothermal system was recently completed in Framingham, Massachusetts, by gas utility company Eversource. The city of Cambridge recently drilled 190 geothermal wells a mile from Harvard’s campus, which provide heating and cooling for an elementary school, middle school and public library without the use of fossil fuels.

Harvard continues to deploy geothermal systems on a smaller scale, but Caron said the university doesn’t have plans for a campus-wide project. Part of the reason, he said, is because Harvard lacks the physical space for geothermal wells offered by a large, open campus like that of Princeton.