In reliably-blue Massachusetts, leaders and advocates prepare to fight Trump on transgender rights, climate efforts

Hours after returning to the presidency, President Trump began signing a suite of executive orders Monday aimed at fulfilling campaign promises and jolting US policy rightward on issues from the economy to the environment.

“The inflation crisis was caused by lots of overspending and escalating energy prices,” Trump said at his swearing-in ceremony, adding, “We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth — and we are going to use it.”

“We are not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said.

Kyle Murray, the director of the state program implementation at the Acadia Center, a clean energy research nonprofit in Boston, said Trump’s plan to not issue federal leases for wind energy will have a big impact on Massachusetts’ plans to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

“The inability to secure those leases will make things incredibly difficult for the Commonwealth to meet its clean energy goals in the long term,” Murray said.

Still, Murray said that Massachusetts can respond to the slowdown in offshore wind development by ramping up solar development and accelerating the state’s energy efficiency goals.

To read the full article from the Boston Globe, click here.

Beyond infrastructure: Building a supportive community and policy environment

Introduction to the Energy is About to Shift report

A recent report by Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and Acadia Center examines the critical role community engagement will play in the build out of new, clean generation and transmission to meet New England’s 2050 decarbonization goals. This blog is the second in a two-part series, focusing on how to build a supportive, community focused environment for the region’s energy transition. The first blog focused on the clean energy needs of New England’s future grid. To learn more, read the full report, and attend our webinar coming up soon on January 16!

New England’s energy system must undergo an immense transformation to meet the state’s ambitious climate goals. Across the region, most states have adopted targets to reach 80 to 100% emissions reductions below 1990 levels by 2050, economy-wide. For this to happen, the region will need to shift away from aging, polluting, unabated fossil fuel infrastructure toward a cleaner, efficient, and electrified grid. This transformation is going to reshape the region’s landscape and require a myriad of communities to host clean energy infrastructure. These communities are at the center of the region’s energy transformation.

For New England to build out its infrastructure at the speed and scale needed to unlock an energy transition, it will take buy-in, acceptance, and trust from the communities that will host these clean energy resources. This will require proactive and meaningful community engagement of the region’s 1,300+ cities and towns, as well as numerous business districts, regional organizing networks, community organizations, and residents so that they can be active participants with a voice in the unfolding transition. This is for good reason, as the stakes in siting, permitting, and grid planning have important repercussions in how land use is prioritized, where clean air is enjoyed, who pays for infrastructure, and how other benefits and burdens are distributed. A community-centered decarbonized grid requires developing a system for engagement designed for the urgency of the climate crisis that values community access and standing in meaningful ways, including by offering communities the tools needed to provide input, express preferences, and participate.

The barriers to community-centered deployment

To date, New England’s track record on community engagement has been lackluster – with a trail of failed projects and lawsuits to show for it. This challenge transcends engagement practices at the individual project level; there are a variety of community-based barriers to energy infrastructure deployment at play. These barriers include policy, process, and institutional capacity challenges; land availability and competing uses of land; and community attitudes toward clean energy deployment. The sections below overview lessons and opportunities for each of these broader challenges, informed by six case studies on various clean energy projects around the region that exemplify project successes, challenges, and failures. To holistically address these challenges, the region’s policies and processes for siting, permitting, and community engagement must be improved and strengthened to unlock a clean energy transition. For more in-depth case studies and recommendations, see our full report.

Policy, process, and capacity challenges

In New England, there is generally a division of siting responsibilities, where smaller-scale generation resources are subject to local government approvals while larger projects and other infrastructure (e.g., substations or transmission and distribution lines) are subject to state-level approvals. Where siting decisions are made at the local level, restrictive permitting and zoning regulations have the potential to slow clean energy development. Local officials, zoning boards, and town councils, when confronted with siting and permitting a new technology, may understandably lack in-house technical capacity, including the funding, staff, and resources needed to fully consider how a project may fit into their communities.

In turn, localities may enact bans, moratoria, or other regulations that effectively limit the ability for communities to develop clean energy. While some moratoria are temporary, allowing cities and towns to update their codes to accommodate the new land use, others are indefinite to effectively prohibit project development. Approval and permitting processes can be time intensive and add great complexity for responsibly developed and well-sited projects, even if those processes are intended to filter out projects evoking legitimate local concern. Finally, a project in compliance with necessary permitting and regulatory requirements may not receive the necessary permits due to shifting regulatory goal posts or local leadership changes.

Where the state has authority over siting decisions, concerns may arise over a lack of opportunity for meaningful community engagement, lengthy and cumbersome review processes, and under-resourced state agencies. However, if well-designed, state siting policies can effectively balance state and local authority to meet state goals and ensure local engagement, as exemplified by recent legislation passed in Massachusetts. The new law consolidates multi-jurisdictional reviews of clean energy projects into a single permit, enhances community reviews to ensure engagement and participation (including via intervenor compensation), and improves transparency via an online clean energy infrastructure dashboard.

Options and opportunities:

Policies and programs to site and permit projects in a timely manner while incorporating meaningful community engagement opportunities include:

• Enacting statewide permitting reforms for clean energy and grid infrastructure that balance urgency and clear, consistent non-discretionary standards with early and robust community engagement.

• Improving siting and permitting processes by creating avenues to expedite approvals, streamline appeals, and increase coordination across state agencies, and between state agencies and local governments.

• Increasing government capacity by hiring staff with technical expertise at permitting entities, providing financial resources for technical consultants, and establishing state-local liaisons to improve coordination and assistance.

• Providing technical support to local governments through financial incentives, educational workshops to local governments, and robust informational resources for community members.

Land use and siting challenges

Where land may theoretically be well-suited for clean energy deployment, project-specific considerations may limit a potential site’s practical feasibility, effectively reducing the amount of land suitable for development. Many factors go into siting a single energy facility. On top of the resource capacity to power energy generation projects (i.e., suitable solar or wind resources), a potential site must also have proximity to transmission or distribution lines, the appropriate landscape and subsurface characteristics, and a large enough parcel size or the ability to aggregate multiple parcels. Even if a site is deemed suitable, it still may face challenges like high land prices, local zoning regulations, landowners uninterested in selling or leasing their land, or opposition from community groups. For transmission projects, developers must secure rights-of-way from all landowners along the proposed route, spanning multiple jurisdictional entities with their own regulations.

Conflicting tensions around how land is used, and the conversion of land from one use type to another, create additional friction around clean energy development. Land is a finite resource, and competing land use interests, such as agriculture, conservation, industry, and urban development further restrict the availability of sites for clean energy infrastructure. In New England, concerns around conversion of agricultural and forested land are particularly prevalent.

Options and opportunities:

Policy and programmatic solutions for addressing land use challenges of clean energy projects include:

• Integrating clean energy into land use planning to provide opportunities for self-determination, align development with the long-term goals of the community, and reflect the tradeoffs of siting energy resources.

• Prioritizing low-impact development and account for cumulative impacts through incentives and state review processes.

• Balancing farmland and wildlife protections with energy deployment by providing developers with best management practices to minimize impacts to wildlife and agricultural lands, or through the adoption of mitigation hierarchies.

Social barriers and historical impacts

Clean energy infrastructure is bound to have some impacts, both positive and negative, on a community; but failures to communicate these impacts and procedurally address community concerns can exacerbate tensions.  Furthermore, community opposition to a project can galvanize longer-term community attitudes and even build local level organizing networks that may engage on future nearby siting matters, potentially in an unconstructive posture. Failure to address community concerns is both an acute challenge for individual projects and a chronic challenge the region must find systematic ways to address.

Lack of information, misinformation, and poor engagement practices on behalf of developers can further increase opposition from communities. A 2022 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that 30% of opposition to renewable energy projects in the United States stemmed from a lack of procedural equity, meaning the process of community engagement, such as the community’s ability to influence project outcomes, was inadequate.

A failure to diversify the region’s energy mix has perpetuated its reliance on fossil fuels and contributed to chronic fuel shortages, high electricity rates, and risk of winter energy shortfalls, contributing to distrust of energy projects generally. Decades of investment in fossil fuels resulted in heavily polluting infrastructure with real impacts on the health and well-being of communities, especially marginalized and disadvantaged communities. This legacy has created baseline sentiments of public and community-group distrust in institutions like ISO-NE, investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and transmission owners, and some project proponents. These sentiments of distrust can be difficult to repair and can make future developments additionally challenging.

Options and opportunities:

Ways to rectify past procedural equity issues and galvanize more community support for projects include:

• Facilitating proactive developer communication and engagement with communities that convey positive and negative impacts of proposed infrastructure development, as well as opportunities to mitigate impacts.

• Delivering meaningful benefits for communities through a community-led process that not only informs the structure of community benefits program but also incorporates community input into the design of the project itself.

• Modifying permitting standards and processes to account for cumulative impacts of projects to limit further burden on communities that have historically housed energy or other industrial infrastructure.

A community-centered energy transition

In New England, “the energy is about to shift” has a dual meaning: the region’s physical energy systems must rapidly shift from fossil fuel to clean, renewable energy, and the region’s policies and processes for siting, permitting, and community engagement must also shift to be improved and strengthened commensurate with the task ahead. For all the infrastructure build-out that must occur to unlock New England’s energy transition, none of it will be possible at scale and on time without genuine buy-in, acceptance, and trust from the people whose communities will host the many clean energy resources that must be sited and constructed.

Heat pumps are designed to operate when it’s still cold out. Really cold out.

Two years ago, the mercury dipped well below zero, significantly colder than this week. The Globe reached out to heat pump owners to see how their systems fared in the bitter cold in February 2023. Here’s what we found.

Greenhouse gases produced by heating buildings, including homes, account for about a third of Massachusetts’ climate-warming emissions.

Ben Butterworth, the director of climate, energy, and equity analysis at the clean energy advocacy organization Acadia Center, said he wasn’t surprised that heat pumps performed well. “After years of falsely being told that heat pumps weren’t suitable for extreme cold, I do think this moment was critical for instilling confidence in heat pump users,” he said. “Continued reliance on fossil fuels to heat our buildings is simply incompatible with the state’s climate targets.”

To read the full article from the Boston Globe, click here.

FERC Sides with New England Developers on Interconnection Complaint

New England transmission owners no longer can require interconnection customers to pay operations and maintenance (O&M) costs for required system upgrades.

Joe LaRusso, manager of the Clean Grid Program at the Acadia Center, wrote on social media that “FERC has broomed away a significant obstacle to interconnection that was unique to New England.”

To read the full article from RTO Insider, click here.

More heat pumps and help for renters: What’s in the new Mass Save plan

In a new plan, leaders of Mass Save pledged big changes to the statewide program that provides rebates to residents to make their homes and businesses more energy efficient.

Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director at the Acadia Center, a climate advocacy and research group, called the plan “innovative.”

“The plan includes record-breaking numbers all around that will keep Massachusetts a leader in progress on climate,” he wrote in an email.

Murray added it would help many residents — including renters and those with lower incomes — save money and reduce their homes’ climate footprints.

While the Healey administration is not expecting Mass Save alone to shoulder the 2030 goal, it did ask the utilities to estimate what it would cost to cut 2.2 million metric tons, or half the total state goal, by 2027.

The answer: at least $16.3 billion.

Murray of the Acadia Center said that’s too much to put on the backs of ratepayers.

“We have likely hit close to the maximum output of the current funding model,” he said in an email. “It is of the utmost importance that the Commonwealth make finding outside funding for the programs a top priority.”

To read the full article from wbur, click here.

State lawmakers pass bill that could change the way millions of Americans heat and cool their homes: ‘The gas system is not here forever’

Massachusetts lawmakers just approved a bill that will make it easier and quicker to build renewable energy projects across the state, while putting new limits on natural gas growth, reported Canary Media.

The new law creates a one-stop approval process for clean energy projects through the Energy Facilities Siting Board, removing red tape that often slows construction. It also sets time limits on legal challenges to renewable projects, capping them at 15 months to prevent lengthy delays.

Kyle Murray, director at the Acadia Center, added:

“I think this DPU takes that mission seriously. And so I’m confident they will take these updated provisions seriously.”

To read the full article from The Cool Down, click here.

Massachusetts shifts gears: New Mass Save plan targets rental units for green upgrades

A few months back, Frank Hays found himself in what he calls a “landlord’s plumbing nightmare.” At both of the rental properties he owns in Worcester, and even at his own home in Framingham, things just kept going wrong. Water heaters? Busted. Heating system? Down. Appliances? Shot.

Kyle Murray, of the Acadia Center, said there are some efforts underway by advocacy groups and the utilities to identify other funding, but that largely, the shortfall isn’t being addressed.

“We’re pushing these programs as far as they can go on current budgets,” he said. “We really need to be finding alternative sources of significant funding for the program that doesn’t put it again on the back of ratepayers.”

To read the full article from the Boston Globe, click here.

Clean energy experts warn new Trump tariffs could produce ‘chilling effect’ on green jobs

SOMERSET — The now-defunct Brayton Point power station looks like a relic from another time, a collection of aging industrial warehouses ringed by parking lots with cracked pavement and rusty chain-link fences.

Yet here is where the future of energy in Massachusetts is poised to take its next big step, as SouthCoast Wind’s offshore wind project gears up to make landfall on nearby shores, and the Prysmian manufacturing company prepares to launch a new facility for the undersea power cables that will pipe in electricity from the new wind farm off the state’s southern coast.

But under Trump, the costs of imported equipment could spike, dealing a “fairly significant hit” to the clean energy industry, said Kyle Murray, director of state program implementation at the climate nonprofit Acadia Center — and to the state’s goal of adding 34,000 clean energy jobs to the workforce by 2030.

“If you’re driving up prices … energy would not be spared,” Murray said. “There’s a lot of things the state can do regarding incentives and tax breaks, but we’re gonna have to think creatively and work quickly to try and mitigate any potential harms.”

To read the full article from the Boston Globe, click here.

David vs. Goliath: Mass. tries to even the playing field for decisions about energy infrastructure

Decisions about where to locate energy facilities like power plants and substations can have a major impact on a community’s health and well-being. But in Massachusetts, those communities have rarely had a seat at the table.

The problem: It can cost tens of thousands of dollars to hire lawyers and expert witnesses to influence the process, and unlike energy utilities, community groups can’t recoup those funds from ratepayers.

Looking ahead, Kyle Murray of the Acadia Center said the new program is critical for addressing historic hardships for average people and small cities and towns.

“This funding is critical to put these participants on an even playing field and ensure that their voices are heard.”

To read the full article from the Boston Globe, click here.

ISO-NE Stakeholders Respond to Potential Long-term Transmission RFP

Regional stakeholders widely support the New England States Committee on Electricity’s (NESCOE’s) proposed procurement of transmission solutions in Maine and New Hampshire but have differing views on the scope and format of the solicitation, according to public comments published Dec. 2

The Acadia Center submitted additional comments advocating for flexibility in potential solutions, a priority for using existing rights of way, and consideration of benefits related to increased interregional transmission capacity and offshore wind compatibility.

To read the full article from RTO Insider, click here.