Led by the University of Pennsylvania, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week recognized colleges and universities across the country for the green power initiatives.

For the second year in a row, the Ivy League won the crown as the overall champion conference in EPA's 2007-2008 College & University Green Power Challenge. This year's challenge included 40 competing institutions representing 18 different conferences nationwide.

The Pennsylvania schools recognized in the challenge were: University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University and Duquesne University.

In total, the colleges and universities represented in this year's challenge are buying more than 960 million kWh of green power annually. EPA estimates that this amount of green power is equal to the electricity needed to power nearly 97,000 average American homes each year.

"EPA applauds this year's College & University Green Power Conference Champions for their leadership in green power purchasing," said EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson. "By switching to green power resources these schools are proving that doing what's good for the environment is also good for education."

Since the spring of 2007, EPA has ranked collegiate athletic conferences by the total amount of green power bought by their member schools. To be eligible, each school in the conference had to qualify as an EPA Green Power Partner and each conference had to collectively purchase at least 10 million kWh of green power.

Green power is a subset of renewable energy and represents those resources and technologies that generate electricity with the highest environmental benefit. Green power is produced from eligible resources such as solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass and low-impact hydro. Green power has a superior environmental profile to traditional power generation, generating electricity with no net increase of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere.

EPA's Green Power Partnership encourages organizations to buy green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with traditional fossil fuel-based electricity use. The partnership includes a diverse set of organizations including Fortune 500 companies, small and medium businesses, government institutions as well as a growing number of colleges and universities.

A complete list of all partner organizations in EPA's Green Power Partnership is available online. More information is available online at the College & University Green Power Challenge webpage.

5/2/2008