On Earth Day, April 22, Kendal-Crosslands Communities (KCC) released the news that it had signed a contract for renewable electricity, starting next January and lasting for three years. That’s great news! We will be buying electricity from a wind farm in Priddy, Texas.

The Priddy Wind Project consists of 63 wind turbines, each 108 feet tall, located about 150 miles southwest of Dallas-Fort Worth. It is owned by Engie North America, a subsidiary of Paris-based Engie SA, a huge international energy company. The project produces enough electricity to power the equivalent of dozens of retirement communities the size of KCC.

Our cost for this electricity will be approximately the same as our current cost, possibly slightly less. The exact amount will be pinned down later in the year.

Impact on our carbon footprint. The most important implication of this contract is that our carbon footprint will drop dramatically. Most of the CO2 that KCC is responsible for putting into the atmosphere is from the generation of the electricity that we use. On the Pennsylvania grid, the majority of electricity is generated using natural gas. There is still a lot of coal as well.

We use over 13 million kilowatt hours of electricity each year and, based on the generation mix of Pennsylvania electricity, generating our electricity puts more than 9 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. That’s about 75% of all the CO2 we’re responsible for producing–about three times more CO2 than we produce through our use of fossil fuels consumed on campus (mostly natural gas and gasoline). By using wind-generated electricity, we will reduce our carbon footprint by three quarters.

Wait: how does that Texas electricity get to us? There are no direct electrical connections between the Texas grid and Pennsylvania. So how will we get the electricity from the Priddy Project? The short answer is, we won’t. It is basically a bookkeeping process: we will still use (somewhat dirty) electricity from the Pennsylvania grid, and we will pay for the same amount of (clean) electricity going into the Texas grid. For each kilowatt-hour of electricity of Pennsylvania energy we use, we will pay the Priddy Project (through a broker) for one kilowatt-hour of electricity that they feed into the Texas grid.

Even though we won’t be using wind-generated electricity directly, that doesn’t decrease the environmental significance of what we are doing. We really are helping to clean up the atmosphere.

An easier-to-grasp analogy is water pollution. Take two rivers (the Delaware and the Susquehanna, say) that both flow into the ocean. Community A contributes pollution to one of them, and community B contributes pollution to the other. Whether Community A pays for a clean-up project of its own pollution, or whether it pays for a clean-up project in Community B that reduces pollution by the exact same amount, the effect on the ocean is the same.

In the case of our wind energy, we will be eliminating pollution that would otherwise be created by generation in Texas, but we will still actually be using relatively dirty Pennsylvania electricity. The effect on total CO2 in the atmosphere will be the same as if we had completely stopped using Pennsylvania electricity.

What is still needed? The net effect of this contract is great for our atmosphere (and therefore, for the climate). That doesn’t mean our work is completely done. We still need to do what we can to clean up the Pennsylvania grid and to generate more of our own carbon-free electricity by installing more solar panels. And there’s still our use of natural gas and gasoline (and smaller amounts of diesel and propane) that we will eventually need to eliminate.

But all of that is a lot less important to the environment than the step KCC has just taken. This contract is a huge step forward toward eliminating our carbon footprint entirely.

Will this impact our “peak alert” program? No, it won’t. We’ll still use electricity from the Pennsylvania grid (including its polluting peak-period generators), and we’ll still get a surcharge on our bill derived from PJM, our regional grid operator, for the electricity we use during PJM peaks. In fact, the surcharge rate is expected to go up dramatically, starting in July. So we will need to continue doing what we can to save electricity during peaks.

If we reach the point where we get the majority of our electricity from our own solar panels, we will be able to phase out the peak-alert program. But that point is in the distant future.