For the second year in row, the Sierra Club’s magazine has ranked UC Irvine the greenest university in the nation.

The ranking – released Tuesday and calculated from a 200-page questionnaire submitted by 153 colleges and universities nationwide – measured schools based on, among other things, where they get their electricity, academic programs in sustainability, recycling efforts and transportation practices.

In Sierra Magazine’s rankings, UCI was the only school in the country to score above 800 out of 1,000 – getting a score of 860. The runner-up, UC Davis, got 789.

UCI earned especially high marks in energy, transportation and waste.

“It’s pretty hard to score much higher than an 800,” said Avital Andrews, the lifestyle editor for Sierra Magazine and overseer of the rankings. UC Irvine, she added, is “definitely doing better than any other.”

The calculations heavily weigh a school’s electricity choices, and that’s a category in which UCI came out ahead.

In the past year, UCI has quadrupled its solar energy production by adding 11,700 solar panels, reducing carbon emission by 1,500 metric tons. Those panels are part of three on-campus solar projects.

The school also has a 19-megawatt turbine cogeneration power plant. Getting energy from renewable sources is a major component of the rankings.

“We have people dedicated to zero-waste and water preservation projects, alternative energy research and more,” UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman said.

Additionally, more than 80 percent of UCI’s campus waste is diverted from landfills, causing the school to fall less than one point short of the maximum for waste management, according to the rankings.

“The sustainability ethic permeates what we do in facilities and infrastructure,” said Wendell Brase, UCI’s vice chancellor for administrative and business services.

The Sierra Club’s rankings also look at a school’s academic commitment to sustainability. More than 200 UCI faculty either research or teach on environmental topics, such as collapsing glaciers, conservation biology, global climate modeling, energy conservation, transportation, land use planning and environmental law. There are also 22 student clubs on campus devoted to environmental issues.

“We have some of the best minds in the world working on these critical issues.” said Enrique Lavernia, UCI provost and executive vice chancellor.

When students are immersed in a campus committed to green lifestyles, research and thinking, they go into the world bearing those values, said Andrews, the Sierra Magazine editor. The rankings seek to reward schools with such a broad approach to sustainability.

“It has to permeate the school,” Andrews said. “It’s not just the buildings and the infrastructure. It’s also the culture.”

The university’s Sustainability Initiative promotes research on the topic while acting as an incubator for environment-oriented projects. The initiative offers public workshops and is a clearinghouse for academic courses in green topics.

Despite a sprawling, 1,475-acre campus situated in a 950-square-mile suburban county that is nearly impossible to navigate without a car, UCI got points from the Sierra Club for offering bus pass discounts and a free shuttle.

Sierra Magazine’s ninth annual rankings will be published in the September-October issue as part of its “Cool Schools” spread. The rankings also will go online and are the biggest traffic generator for the magazine’s website.

Schools in the University of California system – four of which were in the Sierra Club’s top 10 – aren’t making green choices just to court students, cut costs or reduce environmental impact. State law requires UC schools to be carbon-neutral by 2025.

While coastal California schools are able to trim energy use because of a generally mild climate, other schools in other regions have different benefits, Avital said. The University of Washington, for instance, gets 90 percent of its electricity from hydropower, matching statewide trends there.

But Andrews pointed out that UC Irvine and most other schools on the list could improve their ranking by taking endowment investment money out of fossil fuel companies.

Some schools in the United States already are divesting money from companies involved in oil and other fossil fuels. Stanford University is one of about two dozen colleges and universities nationwide that have committed to reducing their investments in carbon companies.

So far, UCI and the UC system overall have resisted calls to follow suit. Instead of eliminating the $10 billion of fossil fuel holdings from its $91 billion investment portfolio, the UC’s Task Force on Sustainable Investing started a program last year to invest $1 billion in profitable solutions to climate change.

In February, UC signed the Montreal Carbon Pledge, which commits the school to measuring and disclosing the carbon footprint of its investments.

“That’s an area a lot of schools have room for improvement,” Avital said.

Cal State Fullerton was ranked 119th on the Sierra Club’s list, the only other school in Orange County to submit information for ranking.