Cambridge and Local Consortium Win Award for Pioneering a New Way of Procuring Renewable Energy

The ground-breaking public-private collaboration that made it possible for Cambridge’s City operations to go carbon-free starting in 2026 has been recognized with an award from the Environmental Businesses Council of New England. Cambridge and other members of the Consortium for Climate Solutions, led by Harvard, MIT, and Mass General Brigham, were honored for working through complex financial and legal barriers to create an innovative model for large scale energy procurement. The EBC credited the Consortium with dramatically lowering the bar for businesses, institutions, and public entities to successfully decarbonize their electricity emissions.

“They cracked the code on how to buy clean power smarter, and in doing so spurred development of enough new solar and wind power to power 130,000 homes every year,” Cambridge Climate Chief Julie Wormser said earlier this month at City Winery Boston, while accepting the Nicholas Humber Award for Outstanding Collaboration on behalf of the Consortium. “And they did so in parts of the country that are otherwise dependent on coal and oil to power their grids.”

The Consortium brought many local partners together in a combined effort to support the development of a wind farm in Bowman, North Dakota, and a solar project in Bell County, Texas. Through the contracts—called Virtual Power Purchase Agreements, or VPPAs—Cambridge and other Consortium members will receive renewable energy certificates (RECs) toward decreasing their own carbon emissions.

“At MIT, we knew that to meaningfully contribute to accelerating the clean energy transition, we couldn’t act alone—so we built a consortium to prove that collective demand can shape markets, open doors for smaller players, and deliver impact at a scale no single institution could reach,” said Steven Lanou, Senior Project Manager for MIT’s Office of Sustainability. 

VPPAs are one of the most impactful ways to purchase renewable energy: they allow people in states like Massachusetts with requirements to decrease carbon emissions to fund cheaper large-scale renewable energy projects in places that need to get off fossil fuels.

"This VPPA project—and the EBC award recognizing it—reflects the power of coming together to do what none of us could do alone: access utility-scale renewable energy and drive real emissions reductions,” said Heather Takle, President and CEO of PowerOptions, the nonprofit that helped negotiate the Consortium’s VPPAs. “We’re proud that our model helped make this possible for the City of Cambridge and all our participating members."

The Consortium’s VPPAs are projected to keep nearly a million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year from contributing to warming the planet. 

“The transformative power of partnership sets this Consortium apart as a first-of-its-kind collaboration. By uniting the City of Cambridge and smaller non-profits together with Harvard, MIT, MGB, and PowerOptions, we created a renewable energy aggregation that has a far greater impact than any one of our institutions or organizations could have achieved alone,” said Heather Henriksen, Harvard Chief Sustainability Officer.

The RECs the VPPAs provide play an important role for Cambridge as it strives to reach its commitment of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or earlier. The City is also taking aim at reducing emissions from their largest local source—big buildings. Next year, for the first time, Cambridge’s Building Energy Use Disclosure Ordinance, or BEUDO, will require larger non-residential buildings to start decreasing their carbon emissions.