The state races that may reshape U.S. energy

Control of Congress is up for grabs in the midterm elections — but for climate policy, state races may be the ones to watch.

That’s because much of the money in the new climate law will be distributed through the states. State leaders can apply for the Inflation Reduction Act’s numerous grant programs, for example, including ones that fund new large transmission lines and energy-efficient buildings.

With gubernatorial races on the ballot in 36 states, the scope and pace of the country’s energy transition may partly depend on who takes office.

“There’s a lot of decisions that state agencies need to make about what policies they’re going to prioritize and how to distribute the money,” said Amy Boyd, vice president of climate and clean energy policy at Acadia Center, an environmental group in New England.

…

Read the full article in Politico here.

As offshore wind plans grow, so does the need for transmission

…

Melissa Birchard, director of Clean Energy & Grid Reform at the Acadia Center, says that less onshore work also means less impact on people and communities.

“Will it still have impacts? Absolutely,” she says. “And I can imagine that there might be environmental justice communities or indigenous communities that we will need to listen to as the process moves forward. But by reducing the on-land impacts, we reduce impacts on those communities as well.”

And unlike onshore transmission development, which needs approval from many regulatory bodies and individual landowners, the only “land owner,” so to speak, in the offshore wind areas is the federal government.

An ocean grid could also reduce how much cable needs to be buried beneath the ocean floor. In the current project-by-project approach, most wind developers are planning to use cables that can each carry about 400 megawatts of electricity — an 800 megawatt wind project requires two cables, for instance.

Read the full article in WBUR News here.

Rhode Island starts to wrestle with what its net-zero goal means for natural gas

Rhode Island utility regulators are beginning to consider what the state’s mandate to zero out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 means for its natural gas system.

The state Public Utilities Commission, or PUC, has opened a docket to investigate the future of the gas distribution business, a response to the passage last year of the Act on Climate.

…

Hank Webster, Rhode Island director for the Acadia Center, a clean energy advocacy organization, said it’s crucial for the state to start this discussion now.

“The gas distribution system is one of the major sources of greenhouse gasses,” he said. “Every time a new gas connection is made, adding to ratepayer costs, it locks in long-term fossil fuel use.”

Read the full article at Energy News Network here. 

National Grid customers could see 64% increase in electric bills

BOSTON (WHDH) – National Grid customers could be in for quite the shock when they open their utility bills this winter.

The company has announced its winter rates, which go into effect on Nov. 1, stating that residential customers that use electricity can expect a price increase of 64%.

That means if you paid the typical $179 a month last winter, be ready for a monthly bill of at least $293. And it is not just an electric shock, either: customers who use gas will also feel a 22-24% price hike.

“At National Grid, this is the highest we’ve experienced,” said National Grid Chief Customer Officer Helen Burt. “Our customers pay what we pay. We’ve kept our electric distribution and transportation piece of the bill flat, year-over-year, and so this is entirely due to the cost of energy in the marketplace now.

Eversource is also predicting its gas customers will see their bills rise anywhere from 25% to 38%.

The massive price increases are reportedly due to natural gas production dropping during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the war in Ukraine, both straining production.

“Really, (customers) need to reach out to legislators to push for A, more renewables, more clean energy, and B, in the very short term, bill relief,” said Senior Policy Advocate Kyle Murray of the Acadia Center.

Read the full article here.

Trouble brewing in the power grid as officials warn of possible electricity shortages in N.E. this winter

…

“Investing in more fossil fuel infrastructure is not going to solve the problem,” said Melissa Birchard, the director of clean energy and grid transition for the Acadia Center, a clean energy advocacy group. “It just continues our cycle of not investing in clean resources, and can exacerbate climate change.”

Read the full article in The Boston Globe here. 

Local researchers are aiming to create the perfect battery. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Researchers and companies around the world are racing to solve the problem of storing clean energy when the sun isn’t shining on solar farms or the wind isn’t turning turbines. Of course, good batteries are already in common use in electric vehicles and Tesla Power walls, but those batteries rely primarily on lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and other rare materials. They’re expensive, flammable, and their materials available in limited supplies and from just a few locations, including in China, Congo, and some of the deepest parts of the ocean.

…

Environmental advocates in Massachusetts said they’re hopeful that technological breakthroughs would accelerate the adoption of large battery storage systems, especially as thousands of megawatts of new offshore wind are built in the region’s waters.

Kyle Murray, a senior policy advocate at the Massachusetts Acadia Center, called the region’s current rate of adoption “woefully slow.”

“We need to speed up the process so we can meet our state decarbonization goals and tackle the climate emergency,” he said. “We currently have batteries that can already do some marvelous things for society, and we need to be deploying more of them. That needs to be paired with developing and deploying new, amazing technologies.”

Read the full article in The Boston Globe here. 

Park City Wind Asks Connecticut to Adjust Energy Bid ‘to Reflect Current Economic Realities’

Avangrid Senior Vice President for Offshore Projects, Sy Oytan, said that the company will ask Connecticut for a “modest adjustment” to the state’s contract to buy power from the company’s planned 804 megawatt Park City Wind project south of Martha’s Vineyard, to “reflect the current economic realities.”

In a call with investors on Thursday, Oytan said the company would be delaying by a year both its Park City project and the 1,200 MW Commonwealth Wind project, and would ask both Connecticut and Massachusetts to adjust contracts to buy power from those projects.

…

Melissa Birchard, director of clean energy for the nonprofit renewable advocate Acadia Center, said that the “short delay” of the two projects is understandable given the global challenges in energy.

Birchard said it’s good news that the delay still keeps the projects in line to be completed within the timeframes laid out in their contracts with the states. She said the push for offshore wind needs to continue on multiple fronts, to make sure that progress is still being made even if individual projects are delayed.

“We need to do everything we can to bring offshore wind to customers as soon as possible, along with other renewables,” Birchard said. “The spiking costs of fossil fuels are hurting families and businesses and the impacts of climate change are getting worse every year.”

Read the full article in The CT Examiner here.

OpEd: Hydrogen shouldn’t have a role in heating buildings

NATIONAL GRID New England President Stephen Woerner recently wrote an op-ed noting how Greek architects practiced “a methodical, systematic style that appropriately balanced aspiration with sound architectural order for enduring results.” He compared this approach to National Grid’s planned strategies for injecting hydrogen and “renewable natural gas” (RNG) into our current pipeline system that distributes fossil (natural) gas to homes and businesses. Had the ancient Greek architects utilized such a short-sighted approach, the Parthenon would have long since crumbled to dust.

Far from the safe and successful heating source that National Grid describes, hydrogen is a highly combustible fuel that poses a significant safety risk in the context of residential and commercial buildings.  In fact, the lion’s share of energy flowing through the gas system would still be made up of methane, a greenhouse gas that is more than 84 times as potent as carbon dioxide.

This methane can come in several forms – natural gas, “renewable natural gas,” or “synthetic natural gas” – but they all suffer from a common problem: producing, distributing, and using these fuels results in massive amounts of methane being released directly to the atmosphere. Updates to New York state’s greenhouse gas accounting for natural gas emissions revealed that over 47 percent of total emissions associated with natural gas consumption in New York are the result of methane leaks along the entire gas supply chain. Massachusetts has gas infrastructure that is in similar shape, if not worse.

In “Majority of US Urban Natural Gas Emissions Unaccounted for in Inventories,” a long-term study by Harvard scientists released in 2021, the authors found six times more methane leaking into the air around Boston than reported in the Massachusetts Greenhouse Gas Inventory compiled by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

Of the six cities studied in the analysis, Boston had the highest natural gas leak rate (4.7 percent) from “well pad to urban consumer.” Because of these leak rates, any plan that relies on distributing a significant quantity of methane through the gas distribution system, like National Grid has proposed, will fall well short of the Commonwealth’s net zero target in 2050.

We agree with National Grid that there are industries which are genuinely difficult to decarbonize, such as shipping and aviation, and will require creative solutions that include green hydrogen. However, that is a far cry from utilizing it for home heating, where better choices are available. It’s essentially the equivalent of saying you could heat your home using $20 bills as kindling in your living room fireplace. Sure, you may be able to do it, but is that really the wisest idea?

Green hydrogen is, and will continue to be, an extremely limited resource. Using it in buildings is a low-value use of a high-value resource and will only make it more challenging to decarbonize the hardest-to-electrify sectors of our economy. Massachusetts has already laid out a roadmap for the future of heating that involves electrifying most buildings – the least-cost “All Options” scenario in the Massachusetts 2050 Decarbonization Roadmap calls for electrification of over 90 percent of residential space heating and 95 percent of residential water heating by 2050.

Whole-home electrification via heat pumps can save energy and money, especially when paired with common-sense weatherization improvements like insulation and air sealing. Heat pumps are also efficient and affordable, especially given the many incentives available at Mass Save, as well as the soon-to-be or already available options in the Inflation Reduction Act. All-electric heating is economical, with affordable housing making up 78 percent of all residential net zero and net zero-ready square footage, up from 54 percent in March 2021. Even without the incentives, an average home that fully converts from propane to heat pumps could save $1,650 annually on fuel. The annual fuel savings from converting to a heat pump will pay for the cost of installation in 5-11 years, and rebates from efficiency programs can increase fuel cost savings and reduce the payback period.

Heat pumps, despite their name, also cool homes significantly more efficiently than traditional air conditioning systems and save money on electric bills in the summer by displacing less efficient air conditioning units. And for those concerned about winter weather, heat pump technology has made major advances over the years, with many models heating homes comfortably in the coldest temperatures.

Maine, the coldest state in the Northeast, has installed over 82,000 heat pumps over the last nine years, including over 21,000 in 2021 alone. Vermont, the region’s second coldest state, has installed heat pumps in about 1 percent of its homes every year since 2015. Heat pumps, paired with properly weatherized buildings, can reliably and affordably keep Massachusetts’ residents warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

Right now, we have the chance to adopt solutions that truly transform our building, transportation, and power systems. We cannot follow the old models and systems that led us to the climate crisis in the first place. Our Commonwealth can embrace realistic and proven solutions. Saving green hydrogen and “renewable natural gas” for limited purposes in hard-to-electrify sectors, and electrifying buildings quickly with highly efficient systems is that solution.

This OpEd was published in CommonWealth Magazine.

Why electricity prices are rising unevenly across New England

You may have noticed that your most recent electric bill is higher than usual — and if that change hasn’t happened yet, it’s probably coming this fall. These price spikes are occurring across New England, but bills are rising more in some places than others.

Some ratepayers in New Hampshire saw the price of electricity double this summer, resulting in bills up to $70 higher, while many in Massachusetts are only paying an extra $11 per month.

If it seems unfair, blame the energy markets. And if it’s confusing because everyone in New England shares an electricity grid, well, read on.

…

“We just have a physical constraint of how much gas we can deliver through the pipeline system to New England,” said Ben Butterworth, director of climate, energy & equity analysis at the Acadia Center.

Read the full article at WBUR here.

High bills, blackout risks: Grave winter energy forecasts drawing lines across New England

During a media briefing Tuesday, clean energy advocates targeted perceived longtime messaging from the region’s grid operator ISO-New England that natural gas and reliability go hand in hand, a mindset they feel has kept renewable energy off the grid and ratepayers subject to the volatility of a global commodity.

…

Ahead of the forum, representatives from Acadia Center, Northeast Clean Energy Council, Slingshot, Conservation Law Foundation and Advanced Energy Economy said more natural gas is not the solution to the region’s reliability issues, and that ISO-New England should stop putting “too many eggs in one basket.”

Melissa Birchard, director of clean energy and grid reform at Acadia Center, said federal energy officials, state leaders and ISO-New England are all worried about keeping the lights on this winter.

Read the full article in The Providence Journal here.