A group of Ohio educational institutions recently banded together as the charter members of The Ohio Educational Institutions Renewable Energy Consortium, "Kilowatts for Education". While the initial consortium members are from the State of Ohio membership is open to any educational institution interested.

Conserve First LLC, the consortiums facilitator and longtime advocate for renewables, conducted an initial round of research finding that educational institutions offer one of the speediest, most practical and most equitable ways to get real renewable energy projects in the ground and working.

Due to the natural spread of schools, they make ideal pilot projects for testing and practically modifying local and State policies. For many regions with limited available land resources, distributed generation may be the only practical way to cumulatively build to a larger overall impact. This said, if project aggregation laws can be changed, schools also offer a tremendous model for larger utility scale projects where a group of schools or institutions could band together on a larger project ideally sited to gain access to the best wind resource and sourced and managed to achieve the best economies of scale and overall economics. Not only would this allow sites with poor wind resources to participate, it would actually be easier on the utilities than having many small projects spread across the State. While the actual electrons could go to directly supporting the overall grid, a particular project participant could just receive their savings through accounting credit.

Click here for Consortium Agreement.