3 Lehigh Valley universities, others are partners in a solar project in Kentucky

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — An innovative, large-scale project announced late last month aims to offset electricity use at three Lehigh Valley colleges — nearly 900 miles away.

“Our priority is to connect what students learn in the classroom with what they see on campus,” said Delicia Nahman, director of sustainability at Lafayette College. “And then extending our commitment to sustainability to the local community and then more broadly to the region and even nationally. I think this project kind of helps advance that story.”

Muhlenberg and Lafayette colleges, as well as Lehigh University and several others have formed a partnership to build and bring online a solar power plant in western Kentucky. Once completed, the facility will offset the institutions’ electricity use, effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation to zero.

While the effort, called a power purchase agreement, focuses on reducing emissions to mitigate the effects of climate change, the facility will also benefit Kentuckians by providing tax revenue and clean, renewable energy, while giving Valley students the opportunity to study the construction process as well as review data from the project, organizers say.

“There were a number of criteria that we reached consensus on, both in terms of economic savings and pricing risk, as well as ensuring due diligence on whichever project developer we ultimately signed a contract with,” Nahman said. “We certainly took into account the impact on the local environment and educational and research opportunities.

“It’s not easy to feel a high level of confidence in all these areas, and with this project we were as close to triple, quadruple wins as we could have imagined.”

Construction, dubbed the Sebree Solar II project, is expected to begin early next year, with commercial launch in late 2026. Local university officials did not disclose the cost of the 20-year contract.

Lehigh University did not respond by deadline to a request for comment.

“Powerful, significant, influential”

When purchasing electricity from the grid, buyers are paying for three different things, said Natalie Sobrinski, a sustainability specialist at Muhlenberg College. There is the cost of generating and delivering the electricity, as well as additional fees if it is produced by a renewable energy source.

“But because of the way the grid works and because everything is mixed on the same power lines, you can’t necessarily guarantee that the renewable energy you’re buying is actually the renewable energy you’re using,” Sobriński said. “So they separated it out and called it RECs, or renewable energy credits.

“You can buy them, and they are simply certificates that you support renewable energy production and you pay for a certain number of renewable energy credits to cover the electricity consumption in your home or business.”

The facility will be built near the Ohio River in Robards, Kentucky. Over its 30-year lifespan, it is expected to generate approximately $12 million in additional tax revenue for Henderson County and provide enough energy to power more than 24,000 homes each year.

Other colleges included in the agreement include Davidson College, Dickinson College, Elon University, Haverford College, Swarthmore College and Wake Forest University.

“This allows us to essentially count renewable energy credits into our consumption and makes our emissions neutral from an accounting perspective,” Nahman said.

This is the second power purchase agreement for the university in the last half-century.

Officials from Lehigh, Lafayette, Muhlenberg and Dickinson announced a similar plan in February 2020, becoming the first group of Pennsylvania colleges and universities to enter into such an agreement.

However, it never came to fruition – the contract was terminated due to price increases.

“I think there was a lot of disappointment that the original agreement had to be terminated,” she said. “I think we used this as an opportunity to reflect on our commitments and our desire to build a coalition and a consortium that included others who were similarly willing to demonstrate climate leadership.

“And ultimately it turned into a much more powerful, significant and impactful opportunity to leverage our collective purchasing power to enable an even bigger project on the dirty grid that would deliver the same social, environmental and financial benefits that we had hoped for.”

“Really Powerful Change”

Lafayette already has a solar array on campus on the roof of the Kirby Sports Center. Completed in early September 2021, the system is expected to offset 9,625 tonnes of carbon dioxide over its lifetime, the equivalent of taking over 2,000 cars off the road.

Officials also installed a wind turbine and two solar panels at Metzgar Fields, near LaFarm in Forks Township, for demonstration and research purposes.

However, the university’s climate action plan calls for both on-site and external renewable energy strategies.

“One of the reasons was, yes, the scale and cost of doing something locally on our campus,” Nahman said. “It was a similar conversation that other schools in our consortium also had.

“Not all of them have the land to be able to implement a project at the scale necessary to address the off-site capabilities of this project and the greenhouse gas emissions from our campus.”

For Allentown-based Muhlenberg, having a solar installation on campus is simply not realistic – there is no room for it.

“We are in an urban environment, like many other institutions we have worked with,” Sobrinski said. “And we all still want to do something to help grow this industry and reduce our impact on the environment.”

By “combining forces,” colleges found bargaining power “not just in a single institution, but in a conglomerate of institutions,” Sobrinski said.

“Since we were all higher education institutions, we also lobbied the power generation company to include an educational component to this,” she said. “This includes internships for students and access to data to use in the classroom for research purposes for students.”

While the efforts on campus “are a really high-visibility demonstration of our leadership on climate action,” Nahman said, the Kentucky project represents an opportunity.

“It creates educational opportunities and data that students and faculty can use in their classes and scholarships,” she said. “But to get to the scale we really want, by being part of a consortium we can get the scale and the costs.”

It also helps advance sustainability education across all academic disciplines, meeting growing workforce demands.

“We hear professionals, even graduates, say that any career can make a positive contribution to our social and environmental priorities and that you don’t have to major in environmental science to do this job,” Nahman said. “That’s why I think it’s a really powerful change.

“So if schools can help facilitate, design and take action in this area, it really makes what they learn incredibly tangible and gives them the best platform to launch their careers after leaving the institution.”