College students are aiming to lead an effort to move Massachusetts toward using all renewable energy by pushing their schools to transition their operations to renewable power.
As part of a national campaign launched last week, 5,500 students in Massachusetts have joined a MASSPIRG effort to persuade colleges and universities to pull 100 percent of their energy consumption from renewable sources like wind and solar.
“Colleges and universities can lead the nation’s efforts to transition to 100 percent renewable energy to address our largest environmental challenges,” said Gabi Mathews, a UMass Amherst student who serves as MASSPIRG Students campaign coordinator. “Renewable energy makes our campus communities safer and healthier and helps end our reliance on dirty and dangerous fossil fuels.”
The college campaign launch comes after House and Senate lawmakers last month filed bills that would require the state to get 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2035 and 100 percent of its energy economy-wide – including for transportation and heating – by 2050.
Supporters say the legislation would set the most ambitious state-level clean energy commitment in the country while also protecting natural resources like air and water, helping fend off climate change and creating new jobs in the renewable power industry.
The idea has prompted skepticism from those who question the reliability of renewable power sources and the cost impacts such a transition would have.
“Any time you restrict – and particularly like this, so severely – where electricity supply can come from, you’re by definition cornering the market, limiting the type of competition that can occur, and that’s only going to drive prices up,” New England Power Generators Association President Dan Dolan told the News Service.
The bulk of Massachusetts’s energy – just over 44 percent, according to NEPGA – comes from natural gas, with another 18 percent coming from a mix of natural gas and oil. Around 15 percent comes from hydropower, 11.5 percent from coal and less than 6 percent each from oil and nuclear power.
“Until and unless there is a major technological breakthrough, it’s hard to see how the system would operate on just renewables,” Dolan said.
The college renewable energy campaign has been endorsed by at least 191 faculty members at Massachusetts schools, according to a list provided by MASSPIRG. The list includes 38 professors and officials from UMass Amherst; 32 from UMass Lowell; 27 from Fitchburg State University; 26 from Salem State University; 15 from Westfield State University; 13 from North Shore Community College; 11 from UMass Boston; six each from Bridgewater State University and UMass Dartmouth; four each from MassBay Community College, Framingham State University and Northeastern University; three from Wheaton College; and one each from Emerson College and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
MASSPIRG said it has focused its campaign more on public institutions where it has student chapters and has contacted a “limited number” of professors at private schools.
