Is a wind farm in North Dakota helping make Cambridge, Massachusetts’ municipal electricity carbon neutral?

The City of Cambridge is part of the Consortium for Climate Solutions, a group of cities, universities and health care institutions that signed a long-term virtual power purchase agreement for renewable energy. 

The agreement includes the Bowman Wind project in Bowman County, North Dakota. Through this arrangement, Cambridge receives renewable energy credits associated with electricity generated by the wind facility. 

Those credits are used to offset the greenhouse gas emissions linked to electricity consumed in the city’s municipal buildings and operations. Although the electricity serving Cambridge continues to flow through the regional New England grid, the renewable energy credits represent the environmental attributes of the wind generation. 

Under widely accepted greenhouse gas accounting standards, the credits allow the city to claim carbon-neutral electricity use for its municipal operations on a net accounting basis, even though the power itself is produced outside Massachusetts.