Maine has a plan to fight climate change; now comes the hard part

A state climate council has completed a roadmap for reducing greenhouse gases, but the real challenge will be implementing it, advocates say.

The Maine Climate Council is set to release the final version of a four-year climate plan Tuesday, marking an important step for the state as it tries to meet an ambitious renewable portfolio standard.

Gov. Janet Mills signed the renewable standard into law last year, calling for 80% of the state’s electricity to come from renewable resources by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

Now that the plan is all but finalized, advocates say the hard work begins — particularly figuring out how to pay for the strategies it outlines.

The council approved the plan, which includes more than 50 proposed policies and goals, at a Nov. 12 meeting with stakeholders. Council members wrote it based on recommendations by six working groups that met beginning last year and focused on issues like energy, transportation, building efficiency and natural resources. Now that the body of the plan is set, the council — which includes lawmakers and executive branch members, as well as nonprofit representatives and municipal leaders from across the state — will make minor language changes and package the report.

“The plan itself is set in stone, but really we’re getting to the difficult part now, and that plan is going to have to be implemented,” said Jeff Marks, the Maine director at Acadia Center and a working group member. “In a way, putting together the plan was the easy part,” he said.

Read the full article in Energy News Network here

Maine’s bold climate action plan will require money, commitment

Flooded buildings and eroded beaches. More illness from ticks, mosquitos and high heat. A reduced lobster harvest, with crustaceans moving northward to cooler water. Down East weather that resembles present-day Rhode Island.

Those are some of the ways scientists say Maine will change over the next 30 years unless substantial steps are taken now.

To help slow the change, they say Maine urgently needs to slash greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for the myriad impacts of a climate that’s changing so quickly, it poses a cascading threat to the health, prosperity and way of life of every resident and enterprise.

The primary way to do it is to encourage a quick pivot from gasoline and heating oil, Maine’s dominant, longstanding energy options for fueling cars and warming homes. In their place, electricity from renewable generation such as wind and solar, coupled with evolving storage technology, will power electric vehicles and efficient heat pumps.

These areas get special attention because transportation accounts for 54 percent of Maine’s climate-warming emissions, followed by 19 percent for home heating.

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Notably, the plan demurred on endorsing a compact of East Coast states including Maine called the Transportation Climate Initiative. That approach would require fuel distributors to bid into a shrinking limit, or cap, of greenhouse gas emissions. Money raised through the process would go to states to help fund electric vehicles, mass transit and other priorities.

Environmental advocates are for it. Acadia Center, a clean-energy advocacy group with an office in Maine, is pushing for Maine to support what it calls “the only policy proposal that would reduce emissions while providing a stable and sustainable revenue source.”

Read the full article in the Portland Press Herald here

Gas or clean energy? How should Aquidneck Island stay warm?

If anything, the natural gas outage on Aquidneck Island in January 2019 exposed the vulnerabilities of an area that is literally at the end of the pipeline network that sends gas around New England.

The interruption, which left thousands of people without heat on some of the coldest days that winter, was the result of an extraordinary set of circumstances — a malfunctioning valve on a transmission line in Massachusetts, a spike in demand caused by the frigid weather and the failure of a liquefied natural gas plant in Providence to pump much-needed supplies into the system.

National Grid, the only utility that distributes gas in Rhode Island, is looking at ways to shore up the system on the island to try to prevent another outage from occurring.

It may seem a simple matter but many of the options proposed by the company rely on some type of expansion of the gas infrastructure on the island. Environmental advocates, meanwhile, argue that the last thing anyone should be doing in an era of climate change is ramping up use of a fossil fuel that would lead to more greenhouse-gas emissions.

“Every time you light a new fire with a new gas furnace, that’s a fire that’s going to burn for the next 20 or 30 years,” said Hank Webster, Rhode Island director for the Acadia Center, a Boston-based group that specializes in clean-energy issues.

Read the full article from the Providence Journal here

Will FERC’s Latest Order Open the Door for Distributed Resources?

It is time for the U.S. electric grid to start thinking small. The grid of the future will be built around distributed energy resources (DERs) such as rooftop solar, neighborhood battery storage, and advanced energy efficiency and smart appliances, capable of responding to fluctuations in electricity demand to optimize energy use and supply. DERs encompass a wide variety of technologies – they can be small-scale energy generators, smart appliances, renewable and non-renewable generating resources. In aggregation, DERs contribute to a more distributed, decentralized, and responsive grid. They also reduce demand for electricity from fossil fuel plants, avoiding the need for costly grid infrastructure like centralized power plants that spew greenhouse gases and air pollutants into the communities they are sited in. Thankfully, the grid is one step closer to this vision of a clean, distributed future thanks to the recent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 2222.

On September 17,  FERC, the federal body that oversees the regulation of the U.S. electric markets, will require regional electric regulatory bodies to come up with market rules to allow DERs to compete and be compensated for services provided in the wholesale electric markets. This will level the playing field for DERs, while providing owners of DERs, such as homeowners, with revenue for services delivered to the grid.

The U.S. grid is often called the most complicated machine in the world. Comprised of large fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants, renewable generators like wind, solar, and hydropower; poles, wires, sensors, and meters; and finally, end-use consumers, such as homes and businesses, the grid must balance supply and demand at every moment. Energy technologies have emerged over the last 20 years that allow consumers to generate, save, store, and use electricity on-site or send back to the grid. DERs , often called behind-the-meter resources, as they are sited behind the utility-issued electric meter at the distribution level[1], like rooftop solar systems, home battery storage, electric vehicles, and active demand response, can either reduce energy use during periods of high demand or sell energy back to the grid if the right price signals and market structures are present.

As the cost of these distributed technologies rapidly declined, consumers adopted DERs to reduce their carbon footprint, save energy and money, and improve reliability during power outages. In fact, the DER market is expected to play a vital role in the decarbonized and distributed grid of the future, with some estimates of as much as 380 gigawatts (GW), or almost one-third of installed U.S. generation capacity, of DERs over the next 5 years, with most of it at the residential level.

In New England, DERs have expanded rapidly and will continue growing. The regional grid operator, ISO-NE, noted that in 2019, DERs provided a full 20% of total system capacity. ISO-NE’s forecast anticipates continued rapid development and adoption of energy efficiency, demand response, rooftop solar, battery storage, and other DERs over the next decade, with an estimated 4,300 megawatts (MW) of additional behind-the-meter solar by 2029 (on top of 3,500 MW installed already), and up to 10% of energy demand met through energy efficiency efforts.

While DERs are an important and growing energy resource they are, on their own, often too small to effectively participate in wholesale markets due to high barriers to entry with specific participation parameters. Although DERs benefit the grid through reduced demand, reduced emissions, cleaner air, and enhanced reliability, they are not properly compensated for those services. Without clear market rules these DERs are unable to participate fully in the regional wholesale markets, meaning that vital revenue streams from the regional markets are not available to small-scale distributed resources. Under new market rules ordered by FERC, potentially millions of rooftop and community solar panels, batteries, energy efficiency investments, electric vehicles, and smart appliances can access revenue streams that previously excluded them.

Ultimately, FERC Order 2222 could be a game-changing piece of regulatory reform that opens the door to a cleaner, more reliable, more distributed and democratized electric grid. This a refreshing and needed piece of regulatory reform from FERC and in notable contrast to a number of recent rulings favoring large incumbent generators like natural gas and that continue to undermine state-level clean energy policy through heavy-handed and burdensome federal intervention into wholesale markets. Ultimately, FERC Order 2222 has the potential to spur new and exciting innovations in the clean energy sector, creating market opportunities for not-yet-invented technologies and solutions.

What does FERC Order 2222 Say and Do?

FERC began addressing market participation for DERs in late 2015. The Commission collected data, held technical conferences, and released a proposed rule in 2016. In a separate but related order, FERC required regional grid operators to develop rules that allow battery storage located at the distribution level to participate in wholesale markets. After several years of legal challenges to FERC’s authority, the storage order was upheld in July 2020, paving the way for this new supplemental order affecting other DERs. Together, these two reforms will open the wholesale markets to battery storage and aggregated DERs, allowing groups of smaller DERs to participate in wholesale markets as if they were a single resource controlled by the aggregator.

FERC Order 2222 provides clarity to regional grid operators as they develop participation rules that remove barriers for DER aggregations in capacity, energy, and ancillary service markets. FERC found that existing market rules are “unjust and unreasonable” barriers to participation of DERs, hindering competition and increasing rates by creating barriers to emerging technologies by unfairly favoring large incumbent generators, such as fossil-fuel plants. FERC notes in its order that by reforming market rules to allow DERs to compete fully in wholesale markets, regional grid operators will be able to “account for the impacts of these resources on installed capacity requirements and day-ahead energy demand, thereby reducing uncertainty in load forecasts and reducing the risk of over procurement of resources and the associated costs.” Specifically, FERC requires that each grid operator develop market rules that address DER aggregation in the following ways:

1. Allow DERs to participate directly in the wholesale markets and establish DER aggregators as a type of market participant;
2. Allow DER aggregation to register under a participation model that accommodates the physical and operational characteristics of the DER aggregation;
3. Establish a minimum size for DER aggregation no larger than 100 kilowatts (kW) (roughly equivalent to 12 home solar systems);
4. Address locational, distributional, information and data, and grid coordination requirements for DER aggregator participation; and,
5. Require market participation rules for DER aggregators located in large utility service territories while allowing smaller utilities (defined as distributing more than 4 million megawatt-hours (MWh) in the previous year, approximately 70% of the U.S. utility market) to opt-in to the DER market rules.

By requiring regional grid operators to develop market rules allowing DERs to participate in wholesale markets, FERC Order 2222 paves the way for increased DERs, and will create markets and new ways to finance distributed energy projects. These market opportunities will make DERs more financially viable, increasing adoption, and result in a stronger, cleaner, and more resilient grid.

Next Steps

FERC Order 2222 goes into effect after publication in the Federal Register. At that point, regional grid operators will have 270 days to submit proposed changes to their market rules to implement the order. However, it will likely take several years before all the rules and processes are in place and full market participation is possible due to the need to develop, design, and implement complex technical and market parameters for participation. Acadia Center holds a membership position in NEPOOL, the region’s stakeholder governance body. Acadia Center will coordinate with state, regional and national stakeholders to ensure the region has fair and transparent market participation rules that support continued development of DERs.

[1] The electric distribution system is typically defined as electric transmission at 69 kilovolts (kV) or less, whereas the transmission system operates at higher voltages and travels further distances.

By Deborah DonovanSenior Policy Advocate and Massachusetts Director, and Stefan Koester, Policy Analyst

Energy Bill Takes on Storm Response and Grid Reform Challenges

Energy legislation wasn’t on the radar for any special legislative sessions called to deal with critical issues lost to the COVID-cancelled session from this winter. Even the annual July electric rate adjustment –- which this year contained big increases that sparked public outrage — would not have warranted legislation.

That was until Tropical Storm Isaias strafed Connecticut on Aug. 4, leaving close to 1 million customers without power and enduring the slow recovery that followed.

As legislators meet this week, a bill aimed at holding Eversource, especially, and the state’s other electric utility United Illuminating to account for future storm responses  is taking center stage. The legislation also contains provisions touted by Gov. Ned Lamont as: “Establishing a performance-based regulation to hold the state’s electricity, gas, and water companies accountable for the critical services they provide to customers.”

Well, sort of.

What’s in the latest version of the bill is eliciting few objections. It’s what it doesn’t contain that may cause problems.

What didn’t make it into the bill – now down to a mere 20 pages from its 40-page original – is a way to help stabilize the state’s solar industry as COVID continues its economic slash and burn. Also MIA is expansion of a wildly popular program to help municipalities benefit from clean and renewable energy even if they can’t site it in their own town.

Read the full article in the CT Mirror here

Maine Company Looks to Tidal Power as Renewable Energy’s Next Generation

After years of development, tidal and river energy supporters say the technology is on the cusp of wider commercial deployment, especially if it can win federal support.

With much of New England’s attention on offshore wind, a Maine company hopes to put itself on the map with tidal energy.

Portland, Maine-based Ocean Renewable Power Company recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the city of Eastport on a five-year plan to develop a $10 million microgrid primarily powered by tidal generation.

The project will be an opportunity for the small port city to expand its workforce and build its appeal for younger residents. It’s also an opportunity for ORPC to expand its reach as the company’s leaders try to find a viable market for ocean- and river-based generation in an industry largely dominated by solar and wind.

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“Tidal energy generally has been a bit of a background player in Maine’s energy world,” said Jeff Marks, Acadia Center’s senior policy advocate and Maine director. “But as far as Maine’s entrepreneurial energy world, it’s been pretty prominent over the last decade, and ORPC has been leading that.”

“Solar and wind are getting the attention now because they’re commercially viable and available today,” Marks said, but those resources spent a long time in development. “This is kind of how decarbonization and clean energy progress works in New England and throughout the country and throughout the world.”

Read the full article from Energy News here

Hammering out Maine’s Climate Action Plan: Deep Dive into the BIH Working Group Recommendations

Maine’s Climate Action plan is being hammered out this year by the Maine Climate Council, convened by Gov. Janet Mills. The Climate Action Plan will be a roadmap to achieving Maine’s goals of reaching 45% greenhouse gas emissions reductions by 2030, and at least 80% by 2050. This blog takes you on a deep dive into the process of creating recommendations for the Action Plan, particularly for the Buildings, Infrastructure, and Housing Working Group. You can access more of the recommendations here.

In May, despite the coronavirus, the Acadia Center and its partners convened a (virtual) meeting of more than 400 people, including dozens of environmental, labor, and public health organizations, to learn about how the Climate Action Plan will be created. The webinar, titled “The Maine Climate Council: Everything You Need to Know” was hosted by over 30 entities dedicated to reducing carbon pollution and equitably transitioning Maine’s economy to clean, renewable energy. Acadia Center joined its partners to call for action that strengthens the economy, creates well-paying jobs, improves public health, and ensures equitable distribution of investments, benefits, and opportunities. The full webinar can be found at this link.

Speakers at the webinar demanded a Climate Action Plan with concrete legislative and regulatory actions to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Clear implementation timelines and targets are also essential. Acadia Center has been working individually and with its coalition partners to influence policy strategies being developed across seven working groups of the Maine Climate Council. These working groups have been created to tackle the topics of coastal and marine issues; community resilience planning, public health, and emergency management; electricity and utility innovation; natural and working lands; and transportation. The working group members include businesses, legislators, nonprofits and foundations, scientific and academic experts, state and local governments, and youth representatives, each of which provide a different perspective on the issues. In their decision-making process, working group members considered costs and benefits; impacts on low-income, senior, and rural residences; funding and financing mechanisms; and economic and workforce results. During the webinar, Jeff Marks of Acadia Center presented the results of the Buildings, Infrastructure, and Housing (BIH) Working Group.

Why is the buildings and infrastructure sector so important to Maine’s climate goals? In Maine, this sector comprises 39% of total greenhouse gas emissions, with the residential sector the second highest carbon-emitter overall at 19% of the state’s emissions (transportation is first at 54%). Maine also has some of the oldest building stock in the country (56% of Maine homes were built before 1980) and the highest reliance on fossil fuels for heating. Sixty percent of homes still heat with oil, and 19% with natural gas or propane.

The BIH Working Group moved forward strategies that lead to:

  • Cleaner industrial processes;
  • Clean heating and cooling systems;
  • Enhanced resilience to extreme weather;
  • Improved efficiency, comfort, and safety in existing buildings;
  • Low global-warming-potential building materials;
  • Net-zero, renewable-ready building codes;
  • Increased use of Maine wood products in building materials; and
  • Reduced energy costs

Acadia Center outlined six strategies to reduce emissions in buildings, infrastructure, and housing:

1. Improve the design and construction of new buildings through steadily and more stringent building codes, increased compliance and enforcement, and focus on both operational and embodied carbon.
2. Transition to cleaner heating and cooling, especially high-efficiency space and water heat pumps.
3. Enhance the efficiency and resiliency of existing building envelopes, including audits, deep retrofits, and weatherization.
4. Lead by example in publicly funded buildings, including affordable housing, government buildings, and schools.
5. Accelerate the decarbonization of industrial processes, including overcoming limited funding for industrial efficiency, combined heat and power, and microgrids.
6. Modernize and stabilize the electricity grid, including ways to meet new demand in parallel with beneficial electrification, decarbonization, electric vehicles, and authorizing state agencies to consider climate mandates in their regulatory processes and decisions.

The Working Groups submitted their recommendations to the Maine Climate Council in June 2020, with a final Climate Action Plan due in December 2020.

In addition, Acadia Center was part of an open letter calling on the Maine Climate Council to strategically prioritize specific recommendations – read the details here on our website.

Do you want to share your opinions with the Council? Fill out this survey on the Council’s website to share your thoughts!

Commentary: Maine’s renewable-energy industry gets a double shot in the arm

Opinion

Major new solar and offshore wind projects help position us as a hub to start, grow and maintain energy businesses.

Maine has incredible natural energy resources that can and should be an engine of its economy. New solar and offshore wind projects help position Maine as a hub to start, grow and maintain energy businesses in a global market. This week, Maine put out the welcome mat and opened the door to being a leader in clean energy.

First, two solar development companies on both sides of the Atlantic joined forces to advance projects to generate 350 megawatts of renewable energy capacity across eight Maine communities. The international partnership between European Union-based BNRG Renewables and Portland’s Dirigo Solar LLC is moving forward with large-scale solar projects to produce enough electricity to power 78,000 homes.

The next day, a $100 million joint venture publicly emerged to develop floating offshore wind technology off the coast of Maine, potentially bringing tremendous economic, energy and environmental benefits to Maine’s coastal regions and the state. The public-private partnership includes Maine’s flagship educational institution, the University of Maine, and New England Aqua Ventus LLC, a collaboration between technology giant Mitsubishi Corp. and the second largest offshore wind company in the world, RWE Renewables. According to a joint statement by Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King and Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden: “Maine’s offshore wind resource potential is 36 times greater than the state’s electricity demand, making this project so significant for Maine’s clean energy future.”

Read the full Op-Ed in the Portland Press Herald here.

Stop investing in natural gas. Invest more in renewable energy.

Opinion

With increasing renewable energy mandates in almost every New England state and growing amounts of imported power, there is only so much of the energy pie left for natural gas. Ten years ago, some might have called natural gas a “bridge fuel.” But it’s 2020. A better analogy is that we’re already halfway across the river.

That’s based on the results of a recent study from Acadia Center, The Declining Role of Natural Gas Power in New England. It shows that new natural gas power plants like NTE Energy’s proposed plant near Killingly — and the pipelines to supply them — are going to be hard to justify.

My colleagues and I who wrote the report question the value and economic rationale for additional gas plants, with our scenarios suggesting that by the end of the decade, natural gas would only be needed to meet about a quarter of the demand that it does now.

We looked at two scenarios: continued expansion of natural gas supply and generation capacity, and no additional investment in gas infrastructure. Both show similar reductions in the amount of natural gas-fired electricity, leading eventually to the region’s gas power plants being used at less than 10% of their capacity by the end of this decade.

Read the full Op-Ed at The Hartford Courant here.

New York State Moves to Tackle Grid Decarbonization

New York has some of the most aggressive electrical grid decarbonization goals of any state. In 2019, Governor Cuomo signed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), a broad legislative mandate that requires the state to source 70% of its electricity from renewable resources by 2030 (70 by ’30 goal) and achieve 100% zero-emissions electricity by 2040. Meeting the 2030 goal requires a significant increase in renewable energy procurement from offshore wind, solar, and hydropower, as well as reforms to the regulatory structure of the state’s electricity markets. On June 18, 2020, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and the state’s Department of Public Service (DPS) published a report outlining how existing regulatory and procurement processes under the state’s clean energy standard (CES) can be used to meet the 2030 requirement and set the state on a path to meeting the 2040 goal, while proposing new policies and modifications to the CES to align the program with the CLCPA.

The New England states, much like New York, have ambitious climate change goals and strategies that require greater deployment of zero-carbon electricity sources. The table below outlines the economy-wide greenhouse gas reduction commitments in New England and New York. Since other sectors such as transportation and buildings will need to move to clean electricity, rather than burning fossil fuels electricity, it is crucial that the electric gird decarbonizes as soon as possible. The report notes that “decarbonization of the generation sector and electrification of other sectors – all while ensuring efficiency and cost-effectiveness – must be carried out simultaneously and vigorously.” Decreasing emissions from buildings and transportation through energy efficiency, electric vehicle (EV) adoption and home electrification will be critical, which will also require an increase in renewable electricity through growing offshore wind, solar, and hydroelectric resources. Many of the suggested market reforms laid out in the NYSERDA report are relevant to New England, especially as both areas plan for a dramatic increase in offshore wind and are concerned with the environmental justice issues of existing natural gas infrastructure. Meeting decarbonization goals will not be easy, but New York, as detailed in this report and mandated in the CLCPA, is a taking a wide-ranging and holistic approach to decarbonization from which other states and regions can learn.

Progress To-Date and Roadmap to a Cleaner Grid

NYSERDA lays out the progress that New York has made toward meeting its 2030 goal. The graph below illustrates that:

1. Even though New York expects increased electrification of home heating and cooling through air- and ground-source heat pumps, as well as increased demand for electricity due to EV adoption, overall electric demand is projected to decrease by 6% between 2020 and 2030 due to increased energy efficiency and behind-the-meter solar, such as residential rooftop solar panels.
2. Non-renewable generation will have to decrease from roughly 75% of total generation today to 30% by 2030 (orange wedge). Below, we estimate that non-renewable generation will retire in straight linear fashion, however, retirements are likely to be stepwise as large fossil plants are required to come offline before 2030.
3. Approximately 25% of New York power generation in 2018 came from renewable energy (dark blue wedge), a sizeable portion that counts toward the 2030 goal.
4. New York needs additional renewable energy procurement beyond existing contracted renewable resources (light-blue wedge) including the 1,826 megawatt (MW) Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind projects and the 6 gigawatts (GW) of community-scaled on-site solar through the state’s NY-Sun program, both expected to be operational by 2025. This leaves a gap of roughly 43,000 GWh, or 28% of projected 2030 load, of new renewable energy (green wedge) that the state must supply in order to meet its 2030 target, a substantial but achievable goal. This remaining renewable generation is split between the mandated 9 GW of offshore wind by 2035 as required by the CLCPA and new renewable generation that has not been built or contracted.

Existing Clean Energy Standard Challenges and Recommendations

In the report, NYSERDA details challenges that the state faces and presents a number of recommended changes to the state’s procurement processes for renewable resources to ensure that the state meets its 2030 goal.

Concluding Thoughts and Next Steps

In order to stave off the worst effects of climate change, the science indicates that we must decarbonize our electricity supply as quickly as possible. In fact, as we increasingly rely on the electric grid to power transportation and heating, it becomes even more important that those sectors electrify using renewable electricity. New York, like New England, has ambitious grid decarbonization goals, with this report illustrating that the transition to a clean energy future will require long-term planning, proactive state-wide policy, flexible renewable energy development timelines, and a focus on environmental equity and justice.

Opportunities to Take Action:

NYSERDA is currently taking comments on the report through August 18, 2020.

by Stefan Koester, Policy Analyst