Decarbonizing the Yale Campus

from dailykos.com

Renewable Tuesday: Decarbonizing the Yale Campus

Yale came late to the environmental movement, but has since taken a leadership position, greening the campus, adding environmental courses and research programs, and creating the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. The issue of divesting the vast Yale endowment from fossil fuels has recently been raised very publicly, as in the photo above, taken at last year’s Yale-Harvard football game.

See also: The Race To Cut Carbon, Yale Alumni Magazine, Jan/Feb 2020

By Steven Lance ’18JD

In April 1998 the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, in the persons of members Everett Meyer ’98, Deborah Sabater ’99, and Emma Tsui ’99, delivered a report to the Dean of Yale College on a proposed Yale Green Plan.  Two decades later, Yale is greener, bike-friendlier, and more energy-efficient than it was in the ’90s. Rick Levin ’74PhD, who as Yale president from 1993 to 2013 oversaw the university’s environmental awakening, says the changes on campus from the early days of his tenure are “profound”: “It’s a different world today.”

For example,

West Campus solar array will generate 1.6 million kilowatt hours of electricity yearly.

Yale West Campus solar array generating 1.6 million kilowatt hours of electricity yearly

Yale University has begun to augment its renewable energy sources with electricity generated by a one-megawatt AC output photovoltaic solar array on roof space at the university’s West Campus.

Yale is purchasing the solar power from SolarCity, America’s largest solar power provider, at a discount to current utility rates.  SolarCity designed and installed the system of more than 4,400 solar panels spread over 350,000 square feet of a warehouse roof. Multiple members of SolarCity’s team that worked on Yale’s solar project are also Yale alumni.

The solar project is part of Yale’s effort to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, and is one of a number of sustainability initiatives announced by President Peter Salovey in August 2014.

F&ES 635b / 2019-2020: Renewable Energy Project Finance

Credits: 3
Spring 2020: M, 2:30-5:20, Burke

The course is intended to be a practicum, exposing students to real-world tools of the trade as well as the theory underlying them. In place of a textbook, students are provided with approximately 400 pages of actual project documents used for a U.S. wind energy project constructed relatively recently. Through weekly homework assignments, students develop the skills necessary to construct a detailed financial model, largely comparable to what would be used by an investment firm, project developer, or independent power producer. Modeling skills include sizing debt capacity, sensitivity analysis, stochastic forecasting, taxes, and the creation of financial statements. Lectures also provide an introduction to risk management, energy market dynamics, alternative contractual structures, financial structuring, and the core engineering and risks inherent in the most common renewable energy technologies.

Yale wants to change the national culture, starting by exposing all of its students to its Green initiatives. This sets Denialists’ teeth on edge and fuels their Conspiracy Theory about elitist Liberal educational institutions out destroy the previous culture of entitlement and irresponsibility. But they needn’t worry, really. Entitlement and irresponsibility are, as ever, alive and well at Yale.

Divestment at Yale

Yale’s Endowment Won’t Divest from Fossil Fuels. Here’s Why That’s Wrong.

Two climate activists and Yale alumni confront the arguments of Yale’s chief investment officer, arguing that he must summon the moral clarity to end support for fossil fuel companies.

The university’s chief investment officer, David Swensen supports a carbon tax and has limited Yale’s fossil fuel investments to businesses that would be viable after such a tax is implemented, he opposes full divestment. While he acknowledges that climate change poses a serious threat, he believes that divestment unfairly targets producers of fossil fuels rather than consumers, an argument commonly leveled against the movement.

At its essence, divestment is a symbolic, culturally punitive act. Yale’s divestment would not subtract from the supply of fossil fuels available to burn. Nobody’s respirator would get turned off if Yale divested, and I could still march into my nearest H&M and buy a $3 T-shirt made of petroleum, whizzed around global supply chains in carbon-intensive production and transportation. What Swensen argues, though, is that our dependency on fossil fuels makes it both inappropriate and ineffectual to stigmatize suppliers. He equates dependency on an industry with a free pass to invest in that industry.

But using dependence on fossil fuels as an argument against divestment misrepresents the role of the investor. When you invest in a company, particularly with the long-term horizons of private equity fundamental to Swensen’s strategies, you support the growth of that company.

The Yale Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility (CCIR) has claimed that climate change is “more appropriately corrected by government action.”

Will Swensen and the Yale Corporation buckle? We hope so, because Yale’s divestment would be an act of courage on the part of the well-coiffed status quo, an implicit acknowledgment of our need to transition away from fossil fuels, as well as a political move that would shift the urgency to act on climate change to a more centrist position.

This article is nonsense. The correct reason for divestment is that fossil fuels are going to lose money big-time. Coal is dying, and may be gone in the US within ten years. Fracking has been a money-loser from the beginning, except to the extent that the drillers can unload wells onto the current crop of Greater Fools. Oil more broadly is going to start dying when electric cars and other vehicles, up to and including airplanes, go mainstream. Gas will die as peaker gas plants are replaced with battery storage, and combined-cycle baseload plants are replaced by ever-cheaper renewables. Tens of trillions of dollars in nominal value of fossil fuel assets are going to be stranded, and eventually worthless.

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