(Nagel Photography / Shutterstock.com)
America’s Windy City is proving itself to be an environmental trailblazer. As EcoWatch celebrates, since the start of the New Year, all of Chicago’s 411 municipal buildings have been running on renewable energy. These civic buildings include fire stations, airports, water treatment plants, libraries, and the city’s iconic Classical Revival-style municipal hub, City Hall, opened in 1911.
What is clean energy?
What is renewable energy exactly? It refers to energy originating from natural sources, such as sunlight, wind, hydropower and ocean energy, and geothermal energy. All are replenished at a higher rate than they are consumed, as the UN’s Climate Action website explains.
These energy sources are very different to fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, which are non-renewable resources that take hundreds of millions of years to form. In addition, fossil fuels, when burned to create energy, give off harmful greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide. Generating renewable energy, meanwhile, creates significantly fewer emissions.
The nuts and bolts of Chicago’s renewable energy project
“Every Chicagoan interacts with a city-owned building, whether the cultural center, City Hall, Harold Washington Library, O’Hare and Midway (international airports) or your local library. To be able to achieve this milestone on behalf of city residents is exciting,” chief sustainability officer for Chicago, Angela Tovar, told the Chicago Tribune at the end of December.
According to the paper, this achievement will eliminate 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, which is equal to taking over 67,500 private cars off the road in any one year.
As this switch isn’t as simple as connecting a municipal building to a solar panel, or a wind turbine, green business news site, The Cooldown, reports that Chicago Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, took out a five-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with an energy supplier, Constellation. This ensures that the local grid will have enough renewable power to serve the city’s energy demands.
PPAs are often seen as a win-win solution for all collaborating parties. The longer-term commitment lets the power source operator benefit from tax savings as well as income generation. The customer, in this case Chicago, can access clean energy but free from the costs of installing the infrastructure.
But there are some direct energy provision examples too. Since the start of 2025 for instance, 70 percent of the electricity in Chicago’s municipal buildings will be sourced from Double Black Diamond, a huge, new 4,100-acre solar farm.
Appreciating that meeting green milestones isn’t black and white
In introducing this change, as the Chicago Tribune reports, the Windy City joins just a handful of cities taking in Houston to Burlington, Vermont, that have transitioned municipal buildings to renewable energy, although Chicago will be the largest city in America to do this, as the city’s mayor reports in our video clip above.
The reality of implementing these environmentally-friendly changes isn’t free of complexities, as EcoWatch covers.
Concerns remain regarding renewable energy credits (RECs), where funding from the Chicago Municipality’s energy bills is channeled into clean energy projects around the USA, for example. Some critics argue that these credits represent a form of greenwashing that may not contribute to local green energy generation. Chicago’s Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer, Jared Policicchio, told climate solutions news portal, Grist, however, that in the longer term, an emphasis on local environmental planning is built-in.
He detailed that the city is planning a departure from energy credits, as well as several moves towards creating its own infrastructure such as solar panels on buildings, so boosting its clean energy independence. He believes this will expand to take in all Windy City Buildings, beyond municipal ones alone.
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