A ‘way too persistent’ man will get his own electric car charging station. Other Bostonians may not be so lucky.

Connecticut needs a plan — and a definition — for ‘clean hydrogen,’ stakeholders say

Hoping to tap into the billions of dollars in federal incentives coming available for renewable energy projects, Connecticut is preparing to lay out a strategic plan for developing a hydrogen economy.

A bill approved last week by the House Energy and Technology Committee charges the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection with developing a hydrogen strategic plan that encourages the use of hydrogen produced from renewable energy, and prioritizes its use in the sectors of the economy that are hardest to electrify.

The department would also have to write regulations defining “clean hydrogen,” a process that will likely generate considerable debate.

The legislation is based on recommendations from the Connecticut Hydrogen Task Force, which was established by law last year and led by the Connecticut Green Bank. A January report from the task force concluded that Connecticut is well-positioned to pursue the production and use of clean hydrogen as a fuel or energy source.

Environmental advocates had objected to a portion of the legislation that would have granted tax exemptions to projects related to clean hydrogen. The committee subsequently removed that language.

“It was a very broadly defined exemption for anything touching the hydrogen economy,” said Ben Butterworth, director of climate, energy and equity analysis for the Acadia Center. “You would end up incentivizing technologies that aren’t in line with the task force recommendations, like hydrogen passenger vehicles and hydrogen boilers for homes.”

You can read the full article from Energy News Network here.

With new commissioners, Healey aims to reshape an agency seen as critical to climate reforms

They could seem the most bureaucratic of appointments, just a few of several that Governor Maura Healey has made since settling into office. But her administration is casting her two climate-friendly nominees to help lead the Department of Public Utilities as a first step toward overhauling a critical agency that she has lambasted as ineffectual and too cozy with natural gas interests.

The new appointments — Jamie Van Nostrand, a law professor and clean energy advocate from West Virginia, and Staci Rubin, a Boston-based environmental justice specialist at the Conservation Law Foundation — starkly contrast with the commissioners they replace.

People familiar with the department’s inner workings said the new commissioners will have exceptional power to quickly change the department’s priorities, in part because they effectively act as judges atop a bureaucracy organized by the principles of the judicial system.

“It’s like a court,” said Amy Boyd, vice president of Climate & Clean Energy Policy at the Acadia Center, which advocates for clean energy. “They can choose how to sequence their docket, and the commissioners decide what takes priority.”

You can read the complete article from The Boston Globe here.

The Clean Energy Cost of Green Hydrogen

Despite calls from environmental groups for the strategic decommissioning of the Massachusetts’ gas system over the coming decades, the state’s for-profit gas utilities have been pushing to keep the gas network running indefinitely on a mix of biomethane and green hydrogen. While the utilities argue that this would allow them to save costs by making use of existing gas infrastructure, environmental groups have brought up a litany of concerns related to cost, safety, climate impacts, and the overall viability of this path.

A new report from members of the nonprofit organization Gas Transition Allies highlights another major issue in the plans of gas utilities — the large amount of electricity needed to produce enough green hydrogen to heat the state. According to this report, blending hydrogen into the state’s gas supply would require about 120% of all the offshore wind energy slated to come online by 2030. To meet all of the state’s gas heating needs entirely with green hydrogen, this would require nearly all offshore wind energy planned for 2050.

The report’s authors argue that this could jeopardize the decarbonization of the state’s electrical grid and would be a far less efficient way to eliminate heating emissions compared to relying on electric heat pumps.

This report comes as several other studies have cast doubt on the efficiency of using green hydrogen for home heating, despite the hopes of investor-owned gas companies.

There’s also a planning process that we’re in favor of which was put forward by Acadia Center, which is called RESPECT. And we think that that’s a very nice outline for how an integrated statewide or countrywide planning process should be put together. So that’s one of the takeaways — we need an integrated planning process.

To read the full article, click here.

Heat Pump Challenges

One of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the US comes from heating buildings. The Biden administration is trying to change that by promoting efficient electric heat pumps. But as the Allegheny Front’s Reid Frazier reports, getting Americans to switch to heat pumps won’t be easy.

FRAZIER: When it comes to carbon dioxide pollution, the main cause of climate change. Heat pumps have two advantages over fossil fuels like natural gas, propane and heating oil. One is they use electricity, so it’s possible to run them on zero carbon sources like wind, solar and nuclear. The other is they’re very efficient. Amy Boyd is with the Acadia Center in Boston, which helps northeastern states meet climate targets. She says heat pumps work so well because they’re not generating heat like a furnace or stove. Instead, they rely on a clever piece of technology called a heat exchanger.

BOYD: The way that heat pumps work is they move heat. And so even if it seems cold to your eye, if it’s any warmer than the vacuum of space, then there is heat out there to be moved.

FRAZIER: Because it’s only moving heat around, not creating it. Heat pumps are up to four times more efficient than a standard furnace. In the summer, they can reverse themselves, doubling as air conditioners. Right now, about 10% of homes in the U.S. use heat pumps. That number will have to go up if the country is going to meet its climate goals.

BOYD: Eliminating the greenhouse gas emissions that are coming from our heat, particularly in the Northeast, is one of the biggest things that an individual consumer can do to fight climate change.

You can listen to the full exchange or read the entire transcript here.

‘Green Hydrogen’ Would Squander Renewable Energy Resources in Massachusetts

Efforts by natural gas utilities in Massachusetts to replace 20 percent of their fossil gas supply with “green hydrogen” derived from renewable electricity would consume more clean energy than would be produced by the state’s ambitious offshore wind energy buildout in the coming years while yielding few climate benefits, according to a report published on Monday.

Using heat pumps powered by renewable energy to heat residential and commercial spaces would be a more effective use of limited clean energy resources, the report, from Gas Transition Allies, a coalition of clean energy advocacy organizations in the Bay State, concluded.

“If you were to use green hydrogen for heating, you would be using roughly three and a half times as much electricity as if you were providing the same amount of heat to buildings with heat pumps,” said Gordon Richardson, a technology and business consultant and co-author of the report.

Hydrogen, a clean fuel that does not release carbon dioxide when burned, is produced by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, an energy-intensive process. If the electricity used for this process comes from renewable energy sources such as wind or solar, the hydrogen it produces is considered “green.”

The report doesn’t compare the cost of green hydrogen to heat pumps. Ben Butterworth, a director with the Acadia Center, a clean energy advocacy organization based in Rockport, Maine, said costs associated with the additional renewable energy needed for green hydrogen would be tremendous.

“It’s expensive to build this renewable energy capacity at scale already, and if we’re using or requiring 3.6 times as much electricity, that really underscores the cost difference between the two,” Butterworth said.

Butterworth, who reviewed an early draft of the Gas Transition Allies report, said he sees building electrification paired with energy efficiency measures as being the “lynchpin strategy” for decarbonizing buildings in Massachusetts.

“We know this, and we have to focus on that and not be distracted by putting green hydrogen into the gas distribution system because it’s just an inferior option all around,” he said.

A utility plan to replace gas with climate-friendly fuels is deeply flawed, according to new report

Massachusetts energy efficiency programs should shift focus to emissions, critics say

Massachusetts lawmakers and advocates are looking at ways to overhaul the state’s energy efficiency collaborative Mass Save, arguing that the longstanding, utility-run program isn’t up to tackling the present-day climate crisis.

A bill (SD 2346) filed in the state Senate calls for a wholesale reorganization of the program and the creation of a new leadership structure. At the same time, activists are pushing for an expanded mission that would focus more on accelerating the transition from fossil fuels by supporting electrification, battery storage and other clean energy investments.

Advocates would also like to see changes to the program’s funding. Currently, Mass Save is funded through a combination of sources, including a small fee on utility bills and proceeds from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. More — and more stable — sources of funding are needed for the program to make as much impact as necessary, advocates said.

“I have a dream that we can use tax dollars to fund climate as if it’s actually a priority of the state, not just one they claim is a priority,” said Amy Boyd, vice energy of clean energy and climate policy at the nonprofit Acadia Center.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Why a ‘temporary’ Portsmouth LNG site is expected to remain for another decade

PORTSMOUTH – Ever since a faulty valve in Weymouth, Massachusetts, caused Enbridge’s Algonquin natural gas pipeline to fail in January 2019 and threw Newport County residents into a heating crisis for a week, Portsmouth Town Councilor Keith Hamilton has been advocating for new natural gas infrastructure on Aquidneck Island.

Specifically, he wants a second pipeline connected to the island, both to serve as a redundancy for the existing line and to complete a loop system that would connect the island to the larger regional transmission network from two directions and address the potentially catastrophic issue of low pressure in the lines.

As Rhode Island begins the statewide process of working towards ambitious emissions reduction goals set forth in the 2021 Act on Climate (10% below 1990 levels by 2020; 45% below 1990 levels by 2030; 80% below 1990 levels by 2040; net-zero emissions by 2050) environmental and clean energy advocates such as the Acadia Center are calling for a complete moratorium on natural gas infrastructure, including a ban on residential and commercial hook-ups in new developments.

Hank Webster, senior policy advocate and Rhode Island director of the environmental policy non-profit Acadia Center, comes to a very different conclusion than Hamilton.

In a text message to the Daily News, Webster said, “We don’t think the (Old Mill Lane LNG storage) facility is necessary if (Rhode Island Energy) instead pursued investing in improvements that actually benefitted their customers, like weatherization, cleaner, safer appliances, and demand response programs. Proposals to build new infrastructure only benefit the companies building the project and the companies selling the gas.”

He continued, “Let’s not forget that the federal and state government found that the January 2019 outage only occurred because of an extraordinary coincidence of management failures and lack of attention to existing infrastructure like an upstream valve and backup power module. Without any one of those, the outage would not have occurred, and we would not be seeing these proposals for new long-lived infrastructure.”

Despite the state’s continued reliance on natural gas and local concern in both Middletown and Portsmouth about the siting of an industrial LNG storage facility in a residential neighborhood, there seems to be limited appetite at the state level for an infrastructure project of the magnitude Hamilton has in mind. This is not least because pushing for a second pipeline to the island would necessitate a huge political battle at a time when Acadia Center and other Act on Climate advocates in the state legislature and in the ranks of Rhode Island’s registered lobbyists are beginning to actively fight for a moratorium on natural gas infrastructure and eventually full abandonment of natural gas as an energy source.

Despite mounting public backlash from neighbors who have seen the facility in their backyards expand its capacity from one to five portable LNG tanks over the course of the past four winters, public documents submitted by Rhode Island Energy to the PUC and the state’s Energy Facility Siting Board indicate this “temporary situation” is likely to be in place for at least another decade to come, at an estimated cost of $31 million as opposed to $147 million for the construction of a second pipeline extending from the main line in southern Massachusetts. Webster and Acadia Center’s preferred solution, weatherization and electrification, is the most expensive option at $190 million.

Rhode Island climate goals may require statewide ban on new gas hookups

The chair of the state’s Public Utilities Commission said Thursday that a statewide ban on new gas hookups could be necessary to meet the state’s mandatory target of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

A wide-ranging discussion followed about the many challenges and conundrums facing the commission in the so-called “Future of Gas” docket. Regulators opened the investigation in response to the passage of the state Act on Climate, which includes a mandate to zero out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Ben Butterworth, director of climate, energy and equity analysis at the Acadia Center, said in response that the commission must prioritize safety above all else first, but could perhaps investigate ways to repair pipes rather than replace them. That would reduce costs and the time period over which the utility is spreading those costs.

“That’s why it’s essential to determine a plan as soon as possible for the future vision of the gas system,” Butterworth said. “It might make sense to do it on a case-by-case basis.”

Read more here.