Students pressure University of North Carolina to stop heating campus buildings with coal
Business Week
May 4, 2010
Student environmental activists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill won a commitment from administrators to stop using coal for campus heat and power within a decade.
The university will begin testing alternative fuels such as biomass to help switch away from coal by May 1, 2020, Chancellor Holden Thorp announced today. The campus generator is among the most efficient in the country and could run for an additional 30 years to 40 years, Thorp said.
The North Carolina school is among 60 universities with coal-fired power plants targeted by the San Francisco-based Sierra Club, an environmental group that is campaigning to close existing plants and block new construction. Burning coal is linked to about half of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions that are blamed for global warming.
“You could almost do anything and it would be better than burning coal,” said Stewart Boss, the 19-year-old coordinator of the Coal-Free UNC campaign who joined the effort last year. “The university is actually pretty progressive. They realized very early on they don’t like burning coal very much either.”
U.S. schools burning coal for heat and power include the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and Pennsylvania State University in State College, said Bruce Nilles, who oversees the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.
