Expanding from the Energy Conservation and Creation Project to President Project 4
In 2013, the university constructed the largest mega solar power plant in Japan, the largest of its kind in a Japanese university, on land owned by the university in Noda City, Chiba Prefecture. In April 2014, the university began a solar power generation business, selling electricity to Tokyo Electric Power Company, applying the government's FIT scheme, which supports the introduction of renewable energy.
Even before the construction of this power plant, President Yukihiko Harashina, who was Professor in the School of Policy and Information at the time, had been thinking about how the university could become a base for the introduction of renewable energy. Professor Harashina asked his colleague Professor Yurika Ayukawa for help in disseminating information outside the university and raising public opinion within the university, and in 2013, CUC began holding open lectures at the Marunouchi Satellite Campus. The theme of the first year was "Considering sustainable environmental energy policies" (total of six lectures).
Professor Harashina (at the time) became Dean Policy and Information Studies in 2014, and decided to hold the CUC Open Lectures every year as a faculty. Starting in the spring of 2014, a joint seminar was held by three of the faculty's seminars: Harashina Yukihiko, Ayukawa Yurika, and Sugimoto Takuya, and members of the NPO Eco League, a student organization that conducts "eco-university rankings" from outside the university, also participated. As a result of this activity, it was estimated that the power generated by the Noda Mega Solar Power Plant would be just over 60% of the total power consumed by the university at the time. Professor Harashina issued a press release on September 4th of the same year, announcing the results and expressing his intention as Dean to aim for a 100% renewable energy university. Thus, the School of Policy and Information Studies began a project to consider a net-zero energy campus, where the power generated by the Noda Mega Solar Power Plant would be reduced to zero by the amount consumed on campus.
In 2015, with the help of external experts, we obtained a subsidy from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to investigate the possibility of becoming a net zero energy campus. It was found that the power generated by the Mega Solar Noda Power Plant in the first year was equivalent to 77% of the electricity consumed at the Ichikawa Campus. As a result, it became clear that if the remaining 23% could be reduced through energy conservation and energy creation, the campus could become a net zero energy campus, in other words, an "RE100 university" on the net. Therefore, the "Energy Conservation and Energy Creation Project" aimed at creating a net zero energy campus, which had been carried out mainly by the School of Policy and Information Studies, was expanded to a university-wide initiative.
Since then, this initiative has gained a deeper understanding across the university, and activities toward becoming a "100% renewable energy university" have been fully launched as one of the four President projects proposed when President Harashina Yukihiko took office on March 1, 2017. This involves generating electricity from renewable energy sources equivalent to the amount of electricity the university itself uses.
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