Blue Mass Group

Tommy Vitolo, our stomv, is a PhD energy expert at Synapse Energy. He is also a candidate for State Rep in Brookline, whom one should support enthusiastically and without reservation, natch. He, uh, demurs from Secretary Beaton’s strategy on avoiding “dirty peaks” in energy usage. The whole idea is off, he’s saying, because gas is dirty, and it’s running all the time.

Clean Peak is junk planning.

I write this as an electricity planning professional, though (as always) not on behalf of my employer or any client.

We need to transition to cleaner and cleaner energy, and one constant roadblock will always be cost. If clean is cheaper, it’s pretty easy to do. Same cost? Some challenges? A hair more expensive? OK, we can do some of that in MA. More expensive than that? Well, that’s tough.

Those oil-fired generators? They’re built and paid for. They provide an important reliability service in that they’re able to go when other supplies — including wind and solar and hydro — are inadequate. Clean peak standards elsewhere in the country have been used to justify exactly what the Boston Globe editorial pages have been arguing — replace 1% of oil and 2% of coal (page 14) with something “clean” — energy storage or natural gas or biomass or some kinds of hydro. Can’t use wind or solar, because it’s not dispatchable. Of those, which do you think is most easily sited and is low cost? Natural gas. Once that generator is built, do you think they’ll only use it between 1 and 3 percent of the hours of the year? Hint: they won’t.

If you care about local air pollution, you designate a region, set a standard, and require compliance, letting the chips fall where they may. If, on the other hand, you care about carbon pollution, than worrying about 1% oil or 2% coal isn’t the action in New England — it’s the 49 percent natural gas you need to be worried about. And, because gas is being used every single one of the 8760 hours of the year, bringing on any renewable energy of any technology is guaranteed to avoid fossil during all hours of the year it operates. Any new wind or hydro or solar or energy efficiency or geothermal in New England will displace far more CO2 from gas than it will from oil and coal — because gas is where the lion’s share of the emissions are.

But wait, you say — clean peak helps incentivize generating capacity on the hours when it’s the most valuable! Won’t we need that if we’re going to transition away from dispatchable fossil fuels? Well, yes, we’ll need it. But we already have a mechanism to get it, and we, the consumers, already pay for it. It’s the capacity market. We pay generators for their ability to generate during times of highest need. If there’s not enough capacity for or near-term future, the market price goes up until we gain more capacity. If we do have enough, prices stay low and we don’t get more.

The Clean Peak is a clever marketing turn of phrase in search of a problem. In places like Arizona (where it’s popular), they don’t have a capacity market (nor do they have virtually no coal, a winter that consumes natural gas for heat, or an especially sane legislature). It doesn’t make a whit of sense in New England and, in my view, actually works against our public policy goals if any amount of natural gas ever qualifies as “clean”.

It’s also troublesome because it’s forcing — it prescribes a specific solution, complete with arbitrary fractions and limits — to solving a problem that need not be overly constrained. For the foreseeable future, we don’t have any problems with reliability or with overgeneration of renewables. As either of those two realities approach, we will need to start doing some easy, cool stuff, including (1) more targeted energy efficiency to reduce load, (2) time varying electric rates along with IoT devices that control charging EVs & electric water heaters to push load around, and (3) customer-sited, distribution grid-sited, and transmission grid-sited battery storage to manage the diurnal supply/demand mismatches.

Even the charts provided — they’re not helpful. The oil just isn’t the problem. Make that same chart with all 8760 hours of the year, and you’ll see how minuscule the oil consumption is. The problem is the gas, and we’re a long way from needing any storage to deal with it because any new wind, solar, energy efficiency, or hydro will simply swap out for natural gas each hour its operating [and occasionally coal or oil, like maybe a handful of hours a year.

Eyes on the prize. RPS must grow 3 percent or more each year, and municipal electric utilities must be obligated to comply. 1600 MW offshore wind: build it, and contract for more. Fix (eliminate) the 1st in the nation solar charges on residential customers we inflicted in MA. Use dollars to install more solar on local, regional, state, and quasi- owned buildings — that there is a single roof owned by the people of Massachusetts that doesn’t have solar on it is a political, social & economic justice, and environmental disaster of missed opportunity. Fix the dang gas leaks. Improve energy efficiency programs to overcome split-energy challenges [e.g. electric A/C but gas heating] and split incentives [e.g. tenant pays bill, landlord owns physical infrastructure] so that we’re consuming less oil, gas, and electricity. EVs — buses, municipal trucks and cars, and private autos that charge curbside, at work parking lots, at apartment buildings, and in home garages — must be deployed with emphatic, broad, and supportive cross-jurisdictional & cross-agency policies.

We know what we need to do for 80% CO2 reduction by 2050. Don’t play buzzword bingo. Don’t dream, don’t dicker, don’t delay. Deploy.

 

I’ve made some updates to the Dem primary page, based on OCPF reports. Please do check it out and let me know what I’m missing or getting wrong.

The local media coverage of these races has always been frustratingly light. But in doing this exercise, I feel like I’ve gotten a better sense of the field of play in the legislature. Again, this points out just how many opportunities there are for leverage — with special emphasis on the House. Yes, Bob DeLeo runs a top-down operation; but power is never totally a one-way street. If either a.) progressives win a bunch of primaries and elections, or b.) candidates are hearing about progressive priorities from constituents , that changes the conversation inside the State House.

Hope you find it useful.

Governor Baker has a habit of trying to skip questions he finds inconvenient, usually by declaring them outside his purview as governor. Even as a candidate in 2010, he infamously declared himself “absolutely not smart enough” to know if climate change was caused by humans. (And no, I will never let him hear the end of it.)

Here he is pretending not to know if Trump should have a Nobel Peace Prize. (This is not a difficult question.)

D: Consider this: There are seven Republican governors saying President Trump should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. What do you think about that?

BAKER: To tell you the truth, I have not thought about that for five minutes [etc etc]

Now … does this matter? Who cares what Baker thinks about North Korea?

This was a softball question, and like so many, it actually reveals more than one might wish. Those seven Republican governors are playing to a base: They’ve made their bed with Trumpism, and now they’re going to lie in it. Massachusetts Republicans are deciding now between following Trump down an abyss of corruption, bribery, and downright literal disloyalty to country; or keeping their distance. This is an awkward time for some of them, and they’d all prefer to think of something else.

What would it mean if Baker, along with Maryland’s Larry Hogan, and Ohio’s John Kasich, were to actually confront Trump, on anything, rather than avoiding the subject? These are among the most popular governors in the country. It would give breathing room for a genuine Republican opposition to Trump — which would substantially help in, say, preserving the rule of law and the Republic. Baker does indeed have a national role to play; but since he feels the need to keep his own Trumpist MA Republicans in the fold, he’s just choosing not to fulfill it.

Or what if he’s perfectly happy with Trump?

Let’s not forget Baker’s enthusiasm for police cooperation with ICE. He loves to tout his opposition to Massachusetts becoming a “sanctuary state”: It was one of his big applause lines at the MassGOP convention. He introduced legislation to allow local police to cooperate with ICE — but only for the really bad guys, you see.

Federal judges in Massachusetts have noted that this is an agency known for its viciousness:

Over the past year, federal judges in the Boston courthouse have been unusually outspoken in criticizing immigration cases, as the Trump administration steps up apprehensions and detentions. The critical judges include two Obama nominees, a Clinton nominee, and Wolf, a Reagan nominee.

…

In December, Judge Leo T. Sorokin ordered the release of a Yale University-educated Kenyan national who had been detained for nearly a year.

In a biting memorandum, Sorokin blasted the Department of Homeland Security’s “repeated errors,” which he said suggested “negligence, incompetence, or bad faith on the part of the agency.”

The negligence and incompetence are not accidents. They serve the purpose of terrorizing immigrants — documented and undocumented alike; DREAMers, refugees, and sometimes even American citizens. The chaos and unpredictability is policy.

We know that Trump is a raw-racist, who refers to immigrants and refugees as “animals”. His Chief of Staff (Boston, come get your boy) subscribes to shockingly racist, perverted (and self-indicting) views of immigration. Trump’s Massachusetts chairman Geoff Diehl runs on an anti-immigration platform. The MassGOP rails against sanctuary state legislation. (Congratulations to Sen. Jamie Eldridge on his choice of enemies. Well done and keep it up.)

There’s a context to all this. So when Baker pretends not to have an opinion about Trump, remember that in substance, he’s absolutely on board with the shockingly racist, cruel and abusive immigration policy. He’s using this issue — at the cost of all the human pain that goes with it — to keep himself in good standing with some of the ugliest elements in his own party.