Modeling Renewable Electricity Purchasing for Sustainable Management of Clarkson University’s Energy Portfolio

Abstract

Clarkson University changed their source of electrical energy to Brookfield Renewable in July 2019 as they moved towards their 2025 goal of being 100% renewable. To claim that a MWh of electricity used by campus is renewably generated, a Renewable Energy Credit (REC) has to be purchased or generated and applied to it. The new contract with Brookfield Renewable provides each supplied MWh with its own REC. Combined with Clarkson University’s other renewable energy sources, 95% of electricity consumed by campus can be certified as renewable. To model the remaining portion of electricity consumed by off-campus properties, we rely on data that accounts for consumed and delivered electricity, prices for that electricity, and monetary credits generated by local energy sources. Our developed dynamical system models the monetary credit generation, debt accumulation, and REC accrual over 34 months. We create periodic functions simulating energy inputs which can be used to generate alternative past and future scenarios. As not all data parameters were explicitly available, we explore estimating parameters in three ways: directly from the data as time-varying functions, as constants, and stochastically, as random variables with distributions consistent with the provided data. We validate the alternative models against the data and estimate sensitivity to parameters. Using real university data, we show the Potsdam, NY campus is 100% renewable with the university’s new contract with Brookfield Renewable.