Vanderbilt University will be partnering with Nashville Electric Service and the Tennessee Valley Authority to produce clean energy on a large scale to mitigate Vanderbilt’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The 20-year agreement was signed to help reach the goal of having the West End campus be powered and carbon neutral by the middle of the century. The energy will be produced by a solar farm in Bedford County run by Nashville based solar company Silicon Ranch.
The university is the first large customer to partner with the TVA on this type of green energy production and is the first agreement to come under the TVA’s new Green Invest program.
The solar farm is slated to come online in late 2022. It will supply up to 35 megawatts of clean, renewable energy, offsetting close to 70% of the university’s greenhouse gas emissions from purchased power. This same amount of electricity could power up to 5,000 homes in the Nashville area for one year, so this is a significant amount of energy.
The Nashville Area is going green, and if you want to get on the bandwagon, start with a complete LED lighting retrofit and be ready for the solar revolution. This is a cost-effective way to begin cutting your power usage and lowering your electric bills as well as contributing to a cleaner and greener environment and will help achieve goals of Net Zero and Net Positive carbon goals for the Tennessee area.
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