The Green Power Partnership is a voluntary program that encourages organizations to use green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with conventional electricity use. The Partnership has more than 1,700 Partner organizations voluntarily using billions of kilowatt-hours of green power annually. Partners include a wide variety of leading organizations such as Fortune 500® companies, small and medium sized businesses, local, state, and federal governments, and colleges and universities.

In May 2015, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was officially recognized as a Green Power Partner for its purchase of electricity from clean, renewable sources. This designation has been renewed annually, through the continued dedication to a clean energy future for the Urbana-Champaign campus.  In the early years of this designation, our campus needed 3% of the power to be coming from renewable sources, and starting in 2020 the requirement was increased to 7%.

As a Green Power Partner, Illinois joins seven other Big Ten universities in winning the EPA’s Collective Conference Champion Award for the last four years in a row (as of 2019). This award recognizes the collegiate athletic conference, and its member schools, with the highest combined green power use in the nation. The Big Ten’s collective green power use of more than 516 million kWh is equivalent to the electricity use of nearly 47,000 US homes.