07 April 2009
Town in Pennsylvania Catches Wind of Clean Energy Future
But “we’re not fascists” about renewables, Swarthmore councilwoman says
Washington — A liberal branch of the Society of Friends opened Swarthmore College during the U.S. Civil War on a tract of woods outside Philadelphia, where it promised “healthful country living as well as intellectual and moral training” for Quaker students. Today, the tree-lined borough in which the college sits is not quite country living — downtown Philadelphia is 11 miles (17.7 kilometers) away — but Swarthmore remains a place that attracts people with strong commitments to worthy causes.
Nearly 500 households in the town of 6,100 residents voluntarily pay an extra $7.62 on their electricity bills monthly to buy clean energy generated from wind turbines in mountainous western Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has honored Swarthmore as a Green Power Community — the only one in the East.
Fourteen percent of Swarthmore’s electricity comes from renewable sources, thanks in part to efforts of utilities PECO and Community Energy to encourage customers to buy wind-energy credits. A regional clean-energy competition launched by SmartPower, a nonprofit marketing firm, also has contributed to the high use of alternative energy.
All electricity on the grid is mixed together, so when Swarthmore buys wind credits, also known as green tags or renewable energy certificates, it isn’t getting the exact electrons that wind turbines generated. But the credits cover real megawatt-hour blocs of electricity generated from renewable sources and offset the same amount of electricity generated from fossil-fuel sources.
The EPA extends the honorific of Green Power Community to places where local government, businesses and residents come together to meet targets for consumption of clean, renewable energy, as Swarthmore did.
“Swarthmore’s numbers are outstanding,” said Grace Tian, marketing program manager for PECO Wind. Since 2006, when the borough council committed to getting 20 percent of its electricity from clean sources, one-third of all households have signed up for wind credits. Some 800 U.S. utilities offer customers the option of buying clean energy; PECO has the fifth highest number of participating customers.
STUDENTS PUSH IT FURTHER
The 4.4-square-kilometer borough gets a big boost in these efforts from Swarthmore College. Prodded by a student environmental group called Earthlust, the college now purchases wind credits for 40 percent of its electricity.
The college is no longer Quaker, but still is committed to producing graduates with “a deep sense of ethical and social concern,” and environmentally conscious students and faculty alike say that today that means doing something about global warming.
The college created a Sustainability Planning Committee to spearhead its push toward carbon neutrality. Its laundry list of recommendations includes buying wind credits to offset 100 percent of electricity use and installing electricity, water and heat meters in all buildings. The college also is looking for ways to wean the heating plant from heavy diesel fuel.
Swarthmore’s campus boasts not only an arboretum but also three buildings with green roofs — plants atop a gravel bed that filter and reduce stormwater runoff. One of those structures, the Science Center, won an energy and environmental certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. Rainwater also is captured in underground cisterns for lawns, gardens and playing fields. Still, the college earned only a B- on a “College Sustainability Report Card” from the nonprofit Sustainable Endowments Institute.
Student activist Zein Nakhoda thinks that middling grade was on the mark. “I wouldn’t say we are a ‘green’ campus,” said the 20-year-old freshman from Dallas. “People really don’t understand the urgency.”
But others defend Swarthmore’s efforts. “The college is green not in a showy way, but in a thousand little ways,” said Carr Everbach, an engineering professor who co-chairs the sustainability panel. “Most students wash their clothes in cold water, not hot. They use desk lamps instead of overhead lights, and there are virtually no incandescent bulbs on campus.”
Coffee cups are composted. The college set wider default margins on campus computers to decrease the amount of paper printed. The Swarthmore College Bulletin newspaper redesigned its layout to reduce waste at the printers.
Sustainability, argues Everbach, is “not about sacrifice. It’s watching and paying attention. It’s lots of little things.”
For its part, the borough, seeking to live up to the EPA Green Power designation, recently approved discounts up to 50 percent in building-permit fees for using recycled lumber and extra insulation and installing energy-saving appliances and other features in new buildings.
“We’re not fascists about forcing people to be green, but we try to promote it,” said borough council member Melissa Lewicki.
Soon a one-kilowatt photovoltaic solar panel will be installed atop Borough Hall, courtesy of SmartPower. Geoff Semenuk, the college’s associate director of alumni relations and former borough council member, said that is the most visible spot in town. “The best thing,” he said, “is that kids will look up and say, ‘What’s that?’ and the parents will say, ‘I don’t know. Let’s find out.’”
