photo by: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File

Wind turbines are silhouetted against the sky at sunset Dec. 17, 2021, near Ellsworth, Kansas.

There’s one category that the University of Kansas is blowing away its Big 12 competition in — the use of wind energy on its campus.

KU leaders on Wednesday announced it had joined the Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership program, which promotes the use of renewable energy and also measures how well cities, counties, universities and other large organizations are doing in their efforts to move away from fossil fuels.

Data from the Green Power Partnership shows wind energy supplied nearly 85% of KU’s total electricity usage in 2021. Among the handful of other Big 12 schools that participate in the voluntary partnership, KU had the highest percentage of renewable energy usage. It also ranked higher than other universities in the region and several other universities nationally.

“We want to be a leader in sustainability and in reducing our footprint as much as possible,” said David Day, a spokesman for KU’s office of the provost. “Those are values that align with our community and our organizational mission and goals.”

Only three other Big 12 Schools are part of the program, and all fell below KU’s 84.7%, based on the most recent data, which for some schools was the 2020 reporting period. The University of Oklahoma had 71.8% of its electric usage supplied by renewable energy, while Oklahoma State was at 66.8% and Iowa State at 9.8%.

Other schools of note included: the University of Iowa, 72.9%; Stanford University, 68.7%; Penn State, 33.4%; University of Missouri, 29.7%; and University of Illinois, 9.5%. The partnerships also include at least one other Kansas-based university. Topeka’s Washburn University had 62.1% of its electric needs met by renewables, according to data from the partnership. The partnership doesn’t provide a list ranking universities. Rather, the Journal-World combed through the partnership’s overall list and spot-checked data for universities in the region or otherwise similar to KU.

KU’s climb up the renewable energy charts began in 2018, and, no, it doesn’t involve any large wind turbines on the KU campus. Instead, KU signed a 20-year deal with Evergy, the state’s largest electric utility. That deal committed the university to buy 31MW of electricity from the Soldier Creek Wind Farm. That deal, in turn, helped NextEra Energy Resources build the 120-turbine wind farm in Nemaha County in northeast Kansas.

In 2020, KU signed a similar deal for its Edwards Campus in Johnson County, except that deal purchases wind power from the Ponderosa Wind Energy Center in Beaver County, Okla.

When KU signed the 2018 deal with Evergy, its goal was to buy enough wind energy to meet 100% of the Lawrence campus’ electricity needs. Day said there are several factors that have stopped the university from hitting that mark thus far.

Day said weather plays a significant role in how much energy the wind farm can produce and also how much energy the KU campus needs at any given time, which can make hitting the 100% goal challenging.

“The wind farm outputs need to be high and KU needs to continue to make efforts to reduce electricity usage and become more efficient to reach and sustain the 100% goal,” Day said via email.

Day said the 100% target is still an official goal for the university, but there isn’t an estimate on when it will hit the mark.

But joining the EPA’s Green Power Partnership will provide an easy way for the public to track progress on the goal. That’s one of the reasons KU decided to join the partnership, which it did last month.

“Having some transparency in this type of reporting holds organizations accountable to doing what they say they are going to do related to sustainability,” Day said. “It holds them accountable to reaching those goals.

“It is easy to say you are committed to sustainability, but are you making progress in those goals?”

KU leaders also think being part of a partnership could be an important signal to send to prospective students. Day said it is clear that today’s students care about climate change and the environment. By being part of the partnership, KU could get recognized by those students particularly interested in a school’s environmental footprint.

“They are part of a generation where this is becoming (increasingly) important in their decision making,” he said.

When KU signed the deal in 2018, it anticipated the purchase of the wind energy would produce a net savings for KU and its electricity costs. That’s because KU locked in a “fuel-factor rate” of 1.8 cents per KWh. That fuel factor rate — which is the portion of the bill related to the fuel used to produce electricity but doesn’t include other costs like distribution expenses — was lower than the 2 cents to 2.5 cents per KWh that KU was paying at the time of the 2018 deal.

But on Wednesday, Day said KU didn’t immediately have specific figures on whether its overall electric costs have decreased since the deal began.

“What we can say is that our cost for the energy we used went down, resulting in savings,” Day said via email.