The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced a commitment in January to be greenhouse gas-neutral by 2050 after abandoning its plans to be coal-free by 2020.
The decision was made in January, but the timeline was not hashed out until three months later, in March.
“What we are working on is coming up with a realistic plan using technologies that are viable and developing a realistic financial time frame. We are highly committed to getting off of coal,” Brad Ives, associate vice chancellor for campus enterprises, told reporters at The Daily Tar Heel.
He continued in the Monday report: “We’re just not willing to set a timeline that is arbitrary before we know what our technology is going to be.”
Ives said the university would hash out a plan by the end of 2016 about the best way to wean its clean-burning coal power plant, the Cameron Avenue, off coal. He said UNC is also hoping to move up its timeline depending on a number of variables including future technology and new energy developments.
The university’s former Chancellor Holden Thorp, prior to stepping down as chancellor in 2013, formed a task force to determine how best to take the Cameron Avenue plant off coal.
David McNelis, the director of the Center for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economic Development, told The Daily Tar Heel the task force met with energy insiders about the kinds of alternatives the plant could use.
The shift from coal and toward alternatives is complicated, however, by the fact that the plant burns clean-burning coal.
“It’s probably the cleanest coal-fired power plant you’ll ever run into in your life,” McNelis said about the Cameron Avenue plant. “I would like to get off of coal also, but it is a particularly clean operation.”
The university is still paying for the 1991 construction of the plant, which made it more difficult to fork over the money necessary to shift the school completely off coal.
These confluence of events likely prohibited the school from transitioning the coal plant to biomass. Ives said in January the move to take UNC off coal was “quietly abandoned,” and replaced with a wait-and-see approach adopted in 2012 without public announcement.
“The community recognized the need to get off of fossil fuels, and in the case of UNC to stop burning coal. Finding a new solution to do that should not be thrown by the wayside because it’s a little more challenging than once thought,” he said.
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