Massachusetts ranks number one for energy efficiency nationwide in the latest survey by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
Some other New England states also perform quite well. But the big hole in the bucket is New Hampshire and Maine. In terms of gas and electric utilities, Maine is actually worse than New Hampshire.
These states are not geographically destined to leak energy. Rather, these are program failures in a field where there is decades of experience and best practices are well known.
In this light the pipeline proposals old and new look like plans to expand gas capacity so that NH and ME can keep wasting energy. Memo to policy makers: Before your turn up the heat, close the windows.
Incidentally, because of the way wholesale energy markets work, the inefficiency in these states drives up electric and gas bills across the entire region.
Maine has been in a orgy of gas line expansion all this past summer, and is considering a new pipeline.
Meanwhile, back here in MA, National Grid has announced a FIVE YEAR MORATORIUM to repair deteriorated gas lines and joins, untouched for 40 years. No new hookups, not even for generators or home expansions. They suggest using propane for now, so it can be more easily converted to natural gas in the hoped-for renewal of services in 2020 or 2021.
Just in time for the announced 40% increase in electric rates.
YES, no inefficiency HERE.
got any links?
specific to Cape Cod.
The population of the towns along the moratorium area is about equal to the city of Newton.
Imagine if Newton was not allowed any new utility hookups for 6 years.
Just specific to Newton, of course.
at managing gas supply.
Whether on Cape or the rest of NE.
.
They’ve got rotten infrastructure, and had to dial back their capacity until they fix it. If the current users of that pipeline dropped their peak demand by 10%, it’s not at all clear that this would allow NGrid to take on new customers.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cost-effective energy efficiency, both electric and gas. I’d also like to see the PUC lean on NGrid to do the work more quickly, and see if a partial completion allows for a partial lift of the moratorium. I’m just not sure that this Cape-specific crummy pipeline problem is particularly related to trickle-up’s diary.
You’ve got a bottleneck on the Cape that bringing more gas into Eastern Mass. (or Maine) won’t fix.
Similarly improved efficiency in ME and NH won’t fix the cape either.
My point is that ineptitude or tea politics (in ME maybe) or whatever is going on is inflating demand for and price of gas regionally, and those leaks ought to be plugged before we sock consumers with the cost of a new pipeline.
Maybe efficiency on the Cape could help ease things there somehow, that’s not clear to me. You certainly have an opportunity to find out.
Not good at this.
Here’s the Globe story from a couple of weeks ago –
http://www.boston.com/business/personal-finance/2014/12/03/much-cape-cod-shut-out-from-new-natural-gas-hookups/O0AW9NcEyGsMQiqJ38QoJN/story.html
And here’s the latest local story – http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20141219/NEWS/141219383/101100/NEWS?template=printart
The most outrageous part of this is that they made the decision months ago, kept on taking permit applications, and then retroactively denied them after a press conference.
And, the Kennedy supported Cape Wind is now subject to yet another legal challenge.
But WE are the bestest state!
I thought the Kennedy clan largely opposed Cape Wind.
I suspect someone inadvertently lumped two of her bogeymen together, somehow forgetting that they were opposed.
Had wanted to say the Kennedy supported OPPOSITION to Cape Wind, aka the Alliance. I cal it that because even though Ted and his selfish desire not to have his view spoiled is gone, the next generations have jumped in.
I for one support the opposition to support for this opposing position. Who’s with me?
I oppose your support of opposition and, instead, support your opposition of support.
Unless, of course, your position is in opposition to the support and not in opposition to the position of support.
If, however, you support the position of opposition then under no condition can my position support the remission of opposition to the support… I may, in fact, have to resort to rendition if the condition of opposition calls for remission of support.
So there.
That goes without saying.
and raise you another ten.
All you need is some utility greed to make a crisis of it.
And besides, National Grid still has M&A costs to cover after it bought the previous utility.
Where are the natterers who would be out in droves if these contractors had been working on a public project? Isn’t this at least an example of how both private and public contracts that rely on subcontractors face similar quality issues?
Getting a decent list of solid trades is key for me as I deal with an old building that has a long backlog of stuff to fix.
There is a fair amount of sub par cheat work out there and some incompetence. I was looking at a new townhouse cluster over on Prospect that had to redo the siding skin on a building that’s only 5 years old.
It’s possible that some of said natterers might be disgruntled parties that didn’t get the bid accepted.
The report summary notes that this is the fourth year in a row that the CommonWealth topped the list having overtaken California in 2011.
I will note that ranking of efficiencies is a grade upon the curve and the fact that the CommonWealth comes at the top of the list doesn’t mean we’re as efficient as we could be…
My first thought was to wonder if there are distinct, perhaps insurmountable, factors of geography and/or population density that might prevent such states as Maine and New Hampshire from ever achieving the kinds of efficiency seen by the CommonWealth, then I noticed that , besides California and Rhode Island, the top five list is rounded out with Oregon and Vermont… With Washington and Minnesota in the top 10. So I think that theory is unlikely.
What are the factors preventing Me and NH from achieving these same levels of efficiency?
A mixture of incompetence and outright hostility to efficiency.
Seriously. This is not rocket science. We know what works and what the benefits are.
I lived in both in the past. I was in Dover NH as recently as 2012. They are hurting from the decline of extractive industries like paper milling and lumber.
The south of NH tries to be some tax free utopia for disgruntled massholes seeking a free lunch but there is a tax problem when it comes to property taxes, which are high.
Power costs are high as well and NH has a lot of strange fees as if they just spell t-a-x as f-e-e. And if that weren’t enough of a handicap, they are only equal to Latvia as an engine of economic growth.
Maine is also playing out the last acts of manufacturing decline and migration of the pulp production to Canada.
As they get more threadbare, they get more fearful and resistant. Maine’s economy is equal to Luxembourg.
And, as I’ve noted, the Mass economy is the size of Thailand.
… perhaps my question was not sufficiently focused. I’m not familiar with energy policy in either ME or NH and so I’m genuinely curious. Allow me to try again:
What specific things are ME and NH doing that is in-efficient? What specific things are they not doing that prevents them from achieving efficiencies? Have they simply not even tried? Or, are there policy battles (and at what level) over energy efficiencies? If we ‘know what works’ can you point me to specific examples where they have tried it and failed at it (incompetence)? or to where just simply did not try it (hostility to) ?
I’m given to understand that two of the largest exports from Maine are lobsters (aquatic farming) and wood and wood based products (pulp, for paper, for example). Given that these are renewable resources with at least a plausible claim to rewarding efficiencies (in the specific case) one wonders how that has translated to the hostility (in the general case?) you mention or the incompetence you cite. I”m not arguing with you — I believe your claim — I’m just trying to understand it better.
and their reports are online, relatively short, and not written in an overly technical manner. I encourage you to have a look.
… I read the summary report linked to in the diary. I haven’t had time to read the full report. The summary didn’t seem to address my questions about ME and NH although it notes they haven’t changed much from last year. I was curious because trickle-up seems closer to the know than I.
I’m not sure why you would list these as reasons to read them.
Southern NH is the location of choice for large corporations that have to serve Massachusetts but want to dodge taxes and labor costs.
Comcast is one example. Liberty Mutual has a data center in Portsmouth.
And the housing stock is undervalued, especially in the urban centers like Nashua and Manchester. There isn’t a lot of incentive to make rental properties more efficient.
The wood industry was destroyed by free trade. One outcome is a significant increase in the amount of north Maine woods and North Country NH that is turning into open space preserves like state parks and forests as owner of last resort.
And the lobstering ‘industry’ is hardly an economic dynamo. I had a neighbor in Kittery who did it as a sideline while working at the Naval Shipyard as his ‘real’ job.
As much as I wholeheartedly support fossil fuel reduction and all, I’m also sympathetic to poor people and realize energy efficiency is another yuppie luxury for people living in a boreal counterpart to the rust belt.
The same situation prevails in much of the rest of Massachusetts when you are out of the yuptopia zone called metro Boston.
There may be a certain critical mass of basic security and prosperity needed before these things begin to rise in priority in the hand to mouth zones.
… what any of this has to do with energy efficiencies. The wood industry may, indeed, have been hit hard by ‘free trade’ but my point wasn’t that the industry is moribund (it still counts for a large component of Maines exports, perhaps smaller than previously… but still a large percentage) but rather what, if anything did they learn from it? Forestry and resource husbandry, one would think, might teach certain lessons about efficiency. Maybe not
I myself spent many days lobstering off the coast of Massachusetts in my youth — getting from buoy to buoy was how I learned the rudiments of sailing– in between school and/or ‘real jobs’. But any lobsters or crabs that I caught were either eaten by me or sold to a local restaurant to be eaten instate. As I bet your friend did also. But Maine lobsters are an export (try a Connecticut lobster sometime and you’ll pay anything to get one from Maine…) and they are still a component of the economy. But again, the relative strength of the industry isn’t my point, my point is how can you have several industries based upon careful resource management that leads to an economy that is actually antithetical to efficiencies? I’m not an expert in farming but I’m given to understand that farming of any type generally involves slim profit margins and therefore efficiencies are highly rewarded. If that wasn’t true, low cost migrant farm workers wouldn’t be the de fact efficiency for food farming. So, given that, how do you end up with an economy that despises inefficiencies if some of your major industries are absolutely tied to efficiency? Are the skills not transferable?
On poverty: well, given the mother of invention (necessity), I don’t particularly think that the population of poor people is sizeable enough nor particularly conspicuous with their consumption enough to have so deleterious an affect upon both energy use and energy policy. Yeah, it might be part of it, but ‘yuppie luxury’…? I don’t think so. I think the poorer you get the more efficient user of energy you are likely to be: from food to heating, every decision has to be weighed and balanced. I don’t consider myself ‘hand to mouth’ but I’m watching everything I spend very careful. I don’t have the luxury of heating my apartment full blast or letting the windows leak heat or leaving the oven on… These are things I consider ‘yuppie luxuries’.
There is a huge inventory of windy rental dumps in both states.
The numbers don’t add up for landlords to improve them because they don’t get the kinds of rents Masshole landlords charge in greater Boston.
So heating costs just get passed on to tenants who don’t usually fix the buildings they rent.
To improve efficiency you need to have the money to spend. It is not really an option in the old moribund cities that lack a robust economy.
Metro Boston was similarly wretched in the 70s and 80s. It got lucky when biotech scaled up, but the northeastern most states never saw much of that prosperity and they have since lost much of what they did have.
And there isn’t much incentive for some new economic engine of growth. They are at the end of the line. It’s not like Bangor is going to be a nanotech manufacturing hub or Manchester is going to become the new regional finance and investment center.
There’s nothing stopping you from just going up there and poking around and it’s probably a more useful way to get the level of answer quality you demand than a blog.
… tenants who through money out the window until they get shut off. And the poor are likelier to be shut off that much the sooner. So I guess that reduces to the limit of windy rental dumps which end up freezing their tenants.
While it is true that tenants don’t usually fix the buildings they rent, tenants aren’t without recourse and resources and, as noted, must balance their income with their survival which is a real incentive for personal efficiencies. Your argument (it appears) reduces to the notion that inability to pay means the most spendthrift ways. My counter to that is inability to pay has limits to spendthrift built into it. The presence of a poor person in a windy dump isn’t, per se, inefficiency. If all the poor people in all NH and ME were to make a deliberate attempt to impact energy efficiency numbers, my question is, would they succeed in making such an impact or would they exhaust their funds well before that impact and thus be shut off? You can’t waste something you’re not using.
“”through money out the window” should be “throw money out the window”
Then figure out labor time. You can also evaluate their skill levels at making sense of old building issues.
Like I said, you are welcome to go research it beyond here. It is mildly hilarious that you expect random strangers on a blog to furnish answers that satisfy you when other research options that are more useful are at hand.
My broader point is that if you really care about these places you can always volunteer to show them the error of their ways. Now get busy. You’ve already wasted quite a bit of time on this circular routine.
Get back to us when you fixed the problem.
…rather than the substantial brick slums we build here. They may be chilly, but less dangerous than the cement project towers. And they’re on their own land.
Good luck caulking that.
Why do I get a sense you don’t get around Maine very much?
Was that you I saw on Great Wass Island? Or maybe it was over in Lewiston Auburn. No wait… you were over in Lubec… that’s it.
I bet you know the Great Heath like the back of your hand.
Lincoln County, Waldo County, Somerset County…yeah, a LOT of people live in trailers there. And that’s only half-way up the state.
My grandparents are from there, and I own land there with a camp.
Get off Route 1.
I’ve also been down every neck between Freeport and West Quoddy Head.
My favorite spot is Cobscook although Great Wass Island is pretty impressive.
Took you a while to work that one up.
Like the ones in places like Shirley (MA) and Chelmsford (MA), where the residents rent the land their trailers sit on? I’m beginning to think you may not be so familiar with Massachusetts, either.
You usually need caulking goop that works with metal. So there may also be issues regarding a working sense of trailer upkeep and characteristics.
The older cheap ones have crappy insulation, propane tank heat with carbon monoxide hazards and a tendency to be drafty and leaky.
Thanks, Dad, I’ll get on that right after my chores. Sorry I didn’t listen the first time… I was busy rolling a fat dooby and laughing at poor people. They are so funny when they are so poor.
Anything else I can do for you, Pops? Sing a song of sixpence? Move the entire CommonWealth three steps to the left? Anything? Anything at all?
A summary of comparative goop merits would be fun. There are a dizzying number of them from door and window formulations to bath and tub versions in addition to basic painters goop.
Gun design guidelines would rock. The English design or the good old USA.?
And the tip bead… should the cut reveal 1/8th inch diameter or is 1/4 inch best? Do you prefer a finger or a wet cloth to handle the inevitable excess?
Any brand loyalties? I’m kind of a DAP man, myself, but I’ll work with the generic Ace Hardware stuff in a pinch.
I’ll be breathlessly waiting, I promise.
If you’re already dizzy, what with the array of caulks, and all. This may help: Many of the different caulks are actually the same — as in identical — with different packaging and pricing. How can you tell if the Silicone Bath Caulk is the same as the Silicone Weather-Pruf Exterior Caulk, at double the price? I wish I knew.
Goop types usually aren’t too vaporous anyway.
why not read how the ACEEE reporting system works. They score EE based on policies and laws in the state, not undervalued housing stock or data centers or wood industry or lobsters.
If it looks good on paper, they’re done.
But the core of energy efficiency is in the enforcement and support. In actual things. There are fundamental ground conditions that don’t match up with well crafted policy and paper.
So it is flawed. Mass has lots of window dressing stuff but tends to choke on follow through, enforcement and support, especially beyond the 495 donut, where it starts to look more like the rest of the US.
I pored over the site and spotted references to evaluating results but not much in the way of these result evaluations.
It’s interesting how the worst case miscreants seem to have tiny populations. Wyoming has fewer inhabitants than Boston.
So it’s laudable enough as far as it goes but if there isn’t much context, there isn’t much understanding and you just get empty scolds and redundant attaboys.
There is a lot of ‘what’ but not much ‘why’ and yet the ‘why’ of it is always more compelling to me than the ‘what’ of it. What’s are easy. Why takes effort.
So I offer up what effort I’ve made as a by product of living in the places to see if a why or two might be useful.
If not, there’s always carping and scolding to fall back on.
these fuzzy qualitative assessments measure things that have cut U.S. energy consumption by more than half compared to projections.
The best practices for these programs are well known. They are neither new nor radical. I think the worst you can say about leading-edge programs like those in Mass. is that they could actually be even better (a point Petr makes upthread).
I didn’t really follow the stuff about the “why,” but the rationale for efficiency programs is both simple and compelling.
I made a sustainability blog in 2007 or so with lots of information and links. It’s probably due fora bit of work but it still has considerable utility.
I’m also a building super for an office building with ongoing EE improvements. I’m working on the plans to do conversion to LED tubes for all the fluorescent fixtures we have and have overseen three high efficiency furnace installs in the past 4 years.
Why shouldn’t be a challenge. If people are poor and in some defensive crouch, they are less likely to have enthusiasm for spending money as any observant person will note in our own recent midterm outcome.
The voters backed away from anything that wants to take their money, no matter how progressive and well intended it may have been.
And if you have some sense of this, it is useful for figuring out remedies. If the Governor of a state like Maine is a stiff about implementation then something akin to Habitat for Humanity from a private direction might be in order.
The rank and file Democrats who don’t share the goals of progressives are basically turning independent and voting GOP in part from all the scolding and expectations for action about something that isn’t on their radar screen.
The Daily Beast just ran a pretty good summary of the problem.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/21/time-to-bring-back-the-truman-democrats.html
While I wish it weren’t so, there is a reasonable amount of cited polling data laced through it.
Self identified progressives are generally seen as unhelpful and insensitive scolds by people who comprise a much larger part of the party base.
These affluent coastal enclaves are essentially bubble zones and as I look at people here attempting to figure out their neighbors as if they were a mystery, it is a challenge to not heap derision on the glaring conceits expressed.
State of the art efficiency programs–which I agree just scratch the surface–decouple profits from sales, then seek to fund all cost-effective energy efficiency, usually from rates.
This saves a lot of money, so the objections downthread about poverty, insofar as I understand them, are wrong headed. Cost-effective efficiency = paying less.
Yes, there are market failures that cause businesses and households to avoid cost-effective efficiency; the purpose of these programs is to bridge those failures with information and incentives.
The correct economic test of cost effectiveness includes all costs and benefits. Divestment of generation or supply from transmission, though in theory not required, has proven helpful in practice.
I’m not au courant on ME and NH but historically NH has been hostile to most of the above, partly from ideology and partly because of the lingering impact of the Seabrook debacle and bankruptcy.
Some of that applies to Maine too. I was actually surprised to see NH rating better than ME. Maybe the current governor’s thralldom to the fossil fuel industry makes the usual Yankee frugality an anathema.
From the report I see that MA funds efficiency at $76 per capita per year, but that same figure is only $34 and $27 in ME and NH respectively.
Since every dollar spent on cost-effective efficiency saves more than it costs, this is just throwing money away every year.
There are other components to ACEEE’s scorecoard, but utility-funded energy efficiency is a good indicator. Well-designed efficiency programs tend to go with efficiency building codes etc.
From data I’ve seen over the years, aging rental housing stock is one of the main efficiency loss culprits.
I practice a form of tenant stewardship in places I rent, so I’d just do the weatherizing, whether I paid for heat or not. But that isn’t something everyone readily understands.
If you don’t know how to do it and or can’t afford materials, you’ll need to find someone who can and probably pay them. That is why those service programs can make a big difference.
At my Dover NH dump, I couldn’t even get the landlord to fix a rotting bathroom floor so I just did it and billed him for materials by deducting from rent and providing receipts.
He was on a much lower margin than the Boston gougers. Up there you can find tolerable rental housing for around 300 to 350 a month per bedroom.
I’m under no illusion that everyone else is me.
And I have a feeling a good part of Mass outside the bubble is in a similar fix. The cost structure of rental housing in Fitchburg is about the same as Dover. I wonder how low income rental property weatherization is doing there?
I’m not arguing the merits of the effort or the economics. I’ve been observing it all personally since the late 70s. I don’t even own a car and never have.
I’m just trying to provide a sense of factors at play in these places where I’ve lived in order to provide a bit of empathy and insight.
People assume a good idea will roll on its merits but sometimes there needs to be situation analysis, persuasion and assistance.
… prior to now, you specifically postulated “the poor” and “poverty” at the heart of efficiency issues. Unless you are prepared to defend the notion that all renters are poor and that only the poor rent, this represents a shift from your previous argument. The poor have limited purchasing power –that’s sorta the definition of poverty– and with limited purchasing power comes a limit to the amount of energy they can purchase and, therefore, a limit to the amount of energy they can waste.
But not all renters are poor nor do only the poor rent, so your oblique suggestion that we should do something about poverty (tho’ a worthy goal in and of itself) to address issues of energy efficiency would elide the problem most adroitly. Some might see that as unhelpful. The tone you take, whilst being thus unhelpful, might earn you the sobriquet ‘insensitive scold.’ Just saying.
It is called “split incentives” in the efficiency business and applies to situations where the renter pays the bills.
Said renters could invest in, say insulation, but would basically be improving the owners property in exchange for benefits unlikely to pay off the investment within the term of the lease. The owner could make the improvement (and indeed some do) but would see insufficient direct benefit. Split incentives.
It’s not about poverty per se, it’s about how the structure of the market thwarts economic efficiency among even rational actors maximizing their self interest. It’s really only the sort of thing that a program like Mass Save can resolve.
For me, I’d just go fix stuff because it improves the near term living quality.
But the labor cost was just my time. If someone has to pay a contractor it becomes less appealing. Materials like old fashioned rope caulking, goop tubes, felt strips and draft barriers are fairly inexpensive but you have to know they exist and have basic tool skills.
Mass Save is interesting. I have been looking up rebate programs for a furnace we just replaced and am trying to make sense of LED tube conversion incentives.
They function as an umbrella/coordinating organization but I end up being steered to N Star, my particular utility, and they can be a bit less responsive.
I’ve had a few flirtations with energy audits but having a credentialed person do it seems cumbersome, especially when you can just look a lot of it up. I have two more furnaces that will probably die over the next few years, some outside lighting upgrades and exterior skin repairs.
That is a very useful observation. It is a combination of structural elements like incentive splitting combined with the low income issues.
In most markets, the higher priced luxury rental housing is generally new or retrofitted. It’s the low end crap rental housing where most of the efficiency gains remain to be made.
The Dukakis administrations had weatherization assistance programs that involved training community people and then offering subsidies to get the work done. I think it was under a rubric called CETA as a form of work creation during one of those grim recession bouts in the 70s and 80s.
Mass. Weatherization Assistance Program.
And Community Labor United has been doing work on weatherization in low/middle income communities. This includes a recent victory on an MBTA Youth Pass, the revival of which came from a sit-in at the Dept of Transportation back in June.
So there are groups connecting the very dots you’re talking about. And again, it’s with the idea that “green jobs” = jobs, and that non-wealthy communities have a *ton* to gain from efficiency and otherwise climate-friendly actions, both personal and political.
I heard about it when I was working on a concert project at Roxbury Community College in 2008 but you never know if these initiatives will last and I was too lazy to keep track of it.
Does it look like it”s here to stay or will it be ditched by the latest GOP weasel to be a DeLeo pinata?