“We are driving off a cliff and need radical change,” said Chris Schweitzer, the head of the New Haven Climate Movement, a grassroots climate justice organization. “Yale has two massive power plants, each running off natural gas, that each produce 100,000 tons of greenhouse gasses.”
Criticisms of Yale’s environmental policies have often focused on its endowment. Groups such as the Endowment Justice Coalition have urged Yale to divest the endowment from fossil fuels. However, Yale’s energy production itself has largely been ignored. At the center of campus, the two monolithic stacks of the Central Power Plant stand hidden in plain sight, powering the main campus with gas. Although weaning Yale off its fossil fuel dependency might be difficult, activists like Schweitzer are advocating that the university make this shift soon.
Schweitzer is a New Haven resident who has long been an activist. His focus on climate change began in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 hurricane, brought untold devastation to Nicaragua. Since 1984, Schweitzer had worked on a sister project to build ties between New Haven and Leon, a small town in Nicaragua. The project has worked to improve life in Leon by promoting sustainable development, investing in education, and seeking to eradicate poverty.
Hurricane Mitch undid the sister project’s work in a matter of days.
The hurricane on average brought 50 inches of rain, an unprecedented level that led to widespread flooding, mudslides, and landslides. As the land slid away, communities often followed. An estimated 3,800 people were killed by the disaster across the country. Schweitzer witnessed this destruction on a trip to Leon shortly after the disaster.
“All the people in those communities lost their land, lost their houses, lost their cows, lost everything, and so they just start all over again,” he said. “What that means for the mothers and the children who had to go through that trauma, and extra poverty and hunger and impact on their educations, is pretty significant.”
The hurricanes that Schweitzer witnessed in Leon are made far more destructive by climate change. Estimates from the University of Wisconsin suggest that anthropogenic climate change causes hurricanes to be 25% stronger on average than base levels. This is accompanied by a 5-10% increase in wind speeds.
When hurricanes or large storms hit Yale, their effects are normally mere inconveniences. In September 2021, Hurricane Ida flooded Marsh Hall, shut down several dining halls, and moved classes onto Zoom. Yale bounced back from all these disruptions in a matter of days. This resilience is something that Nicaragua’s physical and economic infrastructure precludes.
“If you’re impoverished and have just enough money for basic food for the year, and then the storm comes along and takes whatever you have, it’s not, ‘Let me pull up to my church or live with my uncle at the beach and hang out.’ You’re displaced,” Schweitzer said. Many Nicaraguans, who only made marginally enough money to afford food and shelter, were, in Schweitzer’s words, “screwed.”
Witnessing the destruction of entire communities in Nicaragua brought into focus for Schweitzer the threat that climate change poses to humanity. Although wealthy countries like the United States and rich institutions such as Yale often drive climate change, its impacts tend to fall on the poorest across the globe. While decarbonization is a nice goal with distant consequences for Yale, it is a necessity for much of the developing world.
“We can see climate change undermining everything we’re doing to try to reduce poverty in Nicaragua,” said Schweitzer. “We just see this as an existential threat for many, many people on Earth.”
In his role as the head of the New Haven Climate Movement, Schweitzer has tried to combat this existential threat. He has pushed for bike lanes, robust climate education, and electrification in New Haven. “We know it’s a climate emergency, and we need urgent action. We’re not waiting until 2030 or 2050,” Schweitzer said. “We need people to make really serious cuts in greenhouse gasses. Now.”
As part of his push to electrify New Haven, Schweitzer has focused extensively on Yale. Schweitzer emphasized that, for all Yale’s wealth, it still heavily relies on and invests in fossil fuels. “I think the fact that they know they know about it and they have the resources to really do something makes it worse,” he said.
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The chimneys of Yale’s 15-megawatt Central Power Plant poke out over the New Haven skyline across the road from Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges. The plant provides electricity to most of Yale’s main campus, while 20-megawatt Sterling Power Plant largely powers the Yale School of Medicine.
Yale’s plants are very thermally efficient, operating at 79% thermal efficiency compared to an average of 49.9% efficiency for general, non-cogenerative power plants. This means that they produce less greenhouse gasses than a comparable gas-fired power plant. Nevertheless, their use of gas poses significant problems.
The plants produce significantly greater emissions than equivalent renewable energy sources. Yale’s energy production releases 175,000 megatons of carbon dioxide per year. If Yale were to rely entirely on renewables, carbon dioxide emissions from campus activities could fall to nearly zero. This shift could halt Yale’s contribution to the growth of extreme weather events such as Hurricane Mitch.
Some of Yale’s peer schools have already made the transition to renewable power sources. More than 40 American colleges and universities now produce their energy entirely from renewables. Stanford University has transitioned to 100% renewable energy production, with the imminent goal of the campus becoming carbon-neutral.
While Yale does have ten renewable wind-powered turbines atop the Becton Center, the importance of these turbines is limited. Yale installed the turbines mostly as an educational experiment. As per Yale’s sustainability reports, each wind-powered turbine only produces one-thousandth of the power of a single steam-based turbine from the Central Power Plant. This amounts to only about one percent of the Becton Center’s energy production.
Andy Bromage, a representative from the Yale Office of Sustainability, emphasized the importance of a solar plant that exists on West Campus. “The West Campus Solar Array, which began operating in 2015, is a 1.34-megawatt installation that generates one-fifth of West Campus’ energy demand,” Bromage said. However, the amount of energy produced by the West Campus Solar Array is relatively insignificant on a campus-wide scale –– it amounts to less than a tenth of the energy produced by either of Yale’s major fossil fuels plants.
The only building on the Yale campus that is exultantly green is Kroon Hall, the building for the School of Environment. Completed in 2009 at a cost of $33.5 million dollars, Kroon Hall employed state-of-the-art climate measures throughout its construction.
Kroon Hall is designed to be powered entirely by renewable energy. It uses a mixture of geothermal and solar technology. It also employs a spate of measures to improve energy efficiency. These include thick concrete walls to insulate the building from variations in temperature and an innovative heat energy recovery system. The building is intended to consume 67% less energy than a building of comparable size.
Although Kroon Hall represents the potential of Yale’s environmental prowess, the building is still an anomaly. “Kroon Hall is the one building that they’ve done anything close to being passive or not creating more needs for fossil fuels,” Schweitzer said. In contrast, he added, “the School of Management is a huge energy hog.”
While it is easy to criticize Yale for not switching to renewable energy, it is significantly harder to explain how it should do so. Two of the most feasible alternatives to the Yale power plants—using geothermal energy or relying on the Connecticut grid—are both flawed.
“The problem is that there is no existing technology from which you could build an equivalent new power plant that would run on either … geothermal or external electric power,” said Daniel Prober, the Director of Undergraduate Studies for Applied Physics.
Geothermal, as used in Kroon Hall, faces significant challenges. On a simple level, it is not an especially well-understood technology. “Geothermal is not proved anywhere in an existing 10,000 or 20,000-person operation,” Prober emphasized. The boring of holes for geothermal and its withdrawal of heat from the Earth also risks causing small earthquakes, a disaster waiting to happen in New Haven.
The Connecticut grid itself, conversely, is reliant primarily on fossil fuels, which account for 55% of its energy production. As such, the grid is presently only marginally cleaner than Yale’s own power plants.
The use of power from the grid would also prevent Yale from self-sufficiently producing its energy. Energy companies drawing from the New Haven grid would provide Yale with interruptible contracts. These contracts mean that since Yale is an institution that has the capacity to be self-sufficient, companies are able to withdraw power from the campus in periods of exceptionally high demand.
Even minor interruptions in Yale’s energy supply would be disruptive to the community. Given the time that it would take to evacuate campus, students could be marooned on the campus for days without basic utilities.
“If the campus system failed, you couldn’t even send home all the students in six or ten hours,” Prober explained.
If Yale lost its energy, it could disrupt research projects as well. “We have labs that have to be supplied with heating and cooling, laboratory animals, cell samples,” Prober continued.
Gas, while a flawed method of energy production, is consistent. The technology is well-understood and Yale keeps three-day emergency stores of fossil fuels that could power the entire campus. The use of gas thus, for now, allows Yale the reliability in its energy production that protects its students, faculty, and research.
Schweitzer disagreed with Prober’s assessment. “There’s always groups like ISO New England, their whole job is to manage power supply and make sure there is sufficient power. And the utilities get paid extra money … to pay for these extremely expensive generators for backup use four times a year. I have a hard time thinking that they couldn’t manage enough electricity to keep Yale’s campus going.”
Moreover, Schweitzer fails to see why Yale needs to be completely self-sufficient. “The [Connecticut] grid will be 90% clean by 2025,” Schweitzer emphasized. To him, this means that Yale has an imperative to switch to it.
Retiring Yale’s central power plant would require the full electrification of the campus. This would entail a near-total overhaul of the campus facilities. With the exception of Yale’s newest buildings, the campus’s infrastructure is reliant on gas and fossil fuels. To change this would be a daunting prospect.
“There’s no technology based on electricity that could run the university today without a huge multibillion-dollar redesign of almost all the buildings,” Prober noted.
Despite this difficulty, Yale has devoted itself to decarbonizing its campus. The University has committed itself to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2035 and actual zero emissions by 2050.
Achieving this goal may require phasing out reliance on the Central Power Plant. However, it is unclear whether Yale can easily do so. Even with the money and technology, this task remains difficult.
“A really big issue with the availability of the workforce to just doing the actual work,” said Casey Pickett, the head of Yale Carbon Charge, a university-affiliated initiative to test the feasibility of carbon pricing on campus.
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Carbon Charge is committed to reforming the campus in smaller ways. Pickett described the initiative’s mission as “a scheme that charges buildings on the campus for each metric tonne of carbon they produce.” The goal of the project is to incentivize buildings to switch to renewable energy.
The changes Carbon Charge has brought have been small, but nevertheless significant.
The School of Management now turns its jumbotron screens off by 8PM instead of 11PM. When the School of Forestry, now the Yale School of the Environment, was preparing to replace a boiler in one of its buildings, Carbon Charge showed them how they could save money in the long term if they invested in the more efficient boiler option (although the option was more expensive over the short-term).
Carbon Charge is not a panacea. It will not free Yale of the fossil fuels produced by its two main power plants. However, it does represent one of many steps Yale has taken to concretely try to achieve its net-zero goal by 2035.
Transitioning to renewable energy will be a daunting project. There are many significant roadblocks to electrification and achieving net zero. However, every year that Yale does not transition to green energy, it continues to contribute to climate change. “To say they’re going to close [the power plants] in 20 years means hundreds of thousands of tons of greenhouse gasses per year,” Schweitzer said.
In the meantime, communities like Leon will continue to be affected by hurricanes and other natural disasters worsened by climate change. While Yale can plan decades in advance to mitigate these effects, low-income communities such as Leon cannot. Individual farmers, when their homes are wiped out and livelihoods destroyed, have little way to adapt.
“At some point, the Earth just can’t take all this damage,” Schweitzer said.