It’s just business. Good business, clean business and profitable business. Ian Bowles (come back Ian Bowles, come back!) recently chided the hidebound business advocacy groups for ignoring the state’s burgeoning clean energy/efficiency sector:
Here’s how it generally goes whenever there’s a push for more clean energy in Massachusetts: AIM and the Chamber complain that solar, wind, and a smarter grid are just too expensive to finance when electricity costs already are so high. Wrong.
There are ways to be clean and cheaper, starting with energy efficiency. It is the biggest source of untapped energy potential our state has available — and the most economical. Around the country, Massachusetts is widely considered the national leader on energy retrofits. With our state now in its fourth year as number one in rankings established by the leading national organization on energy efficiency, you would think the Chamber would be celebrating. Or at least figuring out how it could engage more with the companies that are helping the state earn such a distinction. It is doing neither.
You can think two things when you have high electricity costs (which we do): a.) It could cost less; or b.) we could use less of it.
First of all, efficiency = $ in your pocket. There are companies that exist for the sole purpose of helping you find that money. Go frack yourself.
Efficiency also has the effect of making energy more abundant, which has an effect on the market. The great under-told story of lower gas prices (for instance) is the effect of the Obama administration’s higher efficiency standards — which were extracted under duress from a car industry needing a bailout. The car companies survived, and we have cheaper gas — obviously not just for that reason.
But the efficiency standards will protect American consumers from future price shocks. The Baker plan to build more gas pipeline (eg) reflects the old and rather unimaginative thinking that if gas electricity is too expensive, we need to make gas cheaper. No, we need to make electricity — nope, not even that — we need to make running the business cheaper.
Building a gas pipeline is long-term thinking. Not good long-term thinking, mind you, but it’ll be there a long time. We need to go the opposite direction: To insulate ourselves as far as possible from the cost of energy, be it high or low; and do what we must to make it abundant, clean, and local.
The hard-to-deny prospect is that AIM and the Chamber doubtless have more sway with the Baker adminstration than with Patrick’s. It’s a pity that they seem to be trapped in old and narrow thinking.
More responses to Bowles’ op-ed:
- Chamber should support a carbon tax to encourage local industry.
- Fossil fuels are not “cheap” — they cost us all.
- Chamber should help reduce emissions faster to comply with Global Warming Act.
merrimackguy says
By all means let’s line the coast with wind turbines from Salisbury to Westport and on every island offshore.
SomervilleTom says
Seems like any gathering of a dozen or more politicians should make a fine location for a wind turbine optimized for hot air.
Christopher says
n/t
mike-from-norwell says
offshore no, at least from a cost standpoint. Was curious when the whole Cape Wind project was unfolding for purposes of comparison in costs quoted. Originally Gordon was talking about 12 cents/kwh as a cost for his project, then settled at 21+ escalator. Did some rough and ready searching, and the wind projects out in northern Iowa are around 6-8 cents/kwh. Line the coast with windmills (see Scituate, Hull, and Kingston already on the South Shore), but the significant costs in putting offshore don’t make a compelling economic argument right now.
stomv says
The wind profile on the coast and a mile or two off the coast are quite different. The wind speed, timing of the wind, and consistency of the wind are significantly different.
That doesn’t mean that offshore wind (or on-coast onshore wind) in the locations you describe is economic or uneconomic — just that one can’t simply dismiss one for the other without a significant technical and economic analysis.
merrimackguy says
I recall reading a Globe piece that pointed out that MA inland wasn’t the greatest for wind and that in/near the ocean was really the only alternative here.
stomv says
There are places inland that work just fine, or even better than fine. There are others that don’t. The specific topographical, meteorological, and electrical details matter.
Trickle up says
This is just a historical footnote, but back in the 80s the business lobbies and AIM in particular were all gung-ho for Pilgrim II, Seabrook I and II, and probably even earlier for the nukes proposed in Montague, Charlestown, and Wiscasset. Yup we needed all that generating capacity for growth.
Come the 90s and the bill for all of these dead dinosaurs was due, billions of dollars which was a lot back then.
AIM took the lead in a campaign that those costs should be loaded onto residential ratepayers only. If not, the businesses would all move to someplace that was not saddled with all that bad imprudent nuclear debt.
That was the original impetus behind the restructuring of the electric-utility industry in New England, under which the utilities divested themselves of their power plants.
These folks have a long history of being stupid about energy and their solution to the problems they help to cause is to shrug and shift blame and cost elsewhere.