California Catholic College says new energy independence plan models “creative” governance

A small Catholic college in California recently announced that it has achieved energy independence from the California power grid, marking a breakthrough in the use of alternative energy sources in higher education.

Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula revealed in a May 7 news release that the liberal arts college’s 130-acre campus in California has become independent from the California power grid after working with Catholic entrepreneurs and a local utility to develop an alternative energy source for the college .

Founded in 1971, Thomas Aquinas College today has two campuses, one in Southern California and the other in New England. The Southern California campus has approximately 350 students and has historically relied on Southern California Edison for its energy needs.

However, due to rising costs and frequent power outages, the university sought to create its own, long-term, alternative energy source.

“We thought outside the box with this plan,” Paul O’Reilly, president of Thomas Aquinas College, told OSV News. “We will continue to think outside the box, thinking about our responsibilities to be economical and efficient, and people having common sense, looking for alternative ways to solve problems, including energy efficiency.”

A few years ago, Thomas Aquinas College faced a serious challenge.

Located in a wildfire-prone area, the utility frequently turned off power for periods of up to 72 hours. According to Mark Kretschmer, the university’s vice president of operations, the company intended to reduce the risk of fires, but this proved detrimental to campus life and learning.

“We regularly experienced power outages that could be out for up to 72 hours, which really disrupted life on campus,” Kretschmer told OSV News. “That was one of the driving factors, that we can’t just sit idly by. The second factor was price increases and likely future increases in energy prices.”

So university leaders began exploring alternative options. Kretschmer contacted a school friend, Lawrence Youngblood, an electrical engineer whose children had attended Thomas Aquinas School.

Youngblood and Kretschmer explored various options, including solar panels and wind power. Ultimately, they settled on a plan that would leverage the resources of neighboring businesses.

“Harnessing solar power would take up acres of land, and you could only get power during the day unless you had a battery,” Kretschmer said. “But then we found a plan that leverages resources from oil company drilling – which they provide to us for free while we reduce both our carbon footprint and the oil company’s carbon footprint – all while being able to generate energy the right way here.”

Youngblood and biologist Thomas Kaiser developed a plan to convert excess natural gas produced in an adjacent oil field into a green energy source using Capstone turbines. Carbon California, the oil field operator, agreed to provide the school with excess natural gas at no charge.

“According to the Air Quality Management District, the Capstone turbine utilizes the latest and greatest control technology available on the market,” Youngblood said in a news release. “Instead of flaring with high emissions, we can burn gas using this turbine’s efficient combustion technology with significantly lower emissions.”

The university then stores the energy in a Tesla battery it received for free through the State of California’s 2020 Self-Generation Incentive Program.

“What’s unique about this project is that it uses fossil fuels to generate renewable energy at a time when fossil fuels are so frowned upon,” Kretschmer said. “This is an example of what it could look like today: natural gas and fossil fuels must play a role in the search for alternative energy sources; otherwise we will make a lot of bad decisions by trying to move too quickly to solar or wind when our electrical grids are not ready.”

The project required significant upfront investment, with the turbine alone costing $4.5 million. University officials, however, said Aquinas would save about $600,000 a year in energy costs. Therefore, the project will pay for itself within six years.

“Ultimately, this project saves us between $600,000 and $700,000 a year,” O’Reilly said. “So even though it was quite a significant investment, we did the calculations and determined that the investment would pay for itself within five to six years and then provide us with reliable power at a much lower cost. So it was a no-brainer for us.”

While the project aims to ensure that the school will no longer be dependent on California’s unreliable power grid, school leaders see it as an opportunity to be good stewards of school resources.

“We believe we are called to be good stewards of the assets entrusted to us, and we want to be responsible for the use of these gifts and the impact they have on our neighbors,” O’Reilly said. “We applied the same principle to the energy project.”

University leaders told OSV News that the project was not a direct response to Pope Francis’ frequent calls for sustainability and environmental care in his apostolic exhortation “Laudate Deum” and encyclical “Laudato Si.”

In response to Pope Francis’ frequent calls to protect the environment, bishops’ conferences, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, have renewed their efforts to promote sustainability and asked Catholics to care for the environment.

“Our goal was not to respond to Pope Francis or the USCCB with this energy efficiency,” O’Reilly said. “But it was about being good stewards of what we were given as gifts. We were guided by the more general principle that we have something that we need to use and we need to be careful not to waste our resources.”

Not only will the energy project save the school money, but leaders are looking to sell excess energy back to the state to make a profit.

The money saved will then be invested back into the school and its mission of providing need-based scholarships to students.

“We don’t have academic or athletic scholarships, we just need foundational scholarships and 65% of our students qualify for them,” O’Reilly said. “If we can manage the campus effectively, we will have more resources to devote to things that are more important to our mission, such as offering more scholarships and helping our faculty and staff in Southern California because housing is very expensive.”

Although Thomas Aquinas College is a small institution, O’Reilly and Kretschmer hope that other higher education institutions, both Catholic and secular, will use their energy initiative as an example of good stewardship of their resources.

“Especially with inflation and everything that’s going up, we and other institutions have to figure out how to get creative and use fewer resources,” Kretschmer said.

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