I went to the Environmental Bond hearing on Tuesday at the State House, and heard most of Secretary Beaton’s presentation. The $1.4 billion bond bill, submitted by the Governor, is mostly a re-authorization of spending items in the $2.2 billion 2014 bond bill, with some $300M going to climate preparedness. This sounds good and welcome … and probably inadequate to the massive challenge at hand: Necessary-but-not-sufficient. There are some nice things in there.
The bill includes language on a “clean peak” standard — by which the state means to avoid bringing dirtier, more expensive energy online during peak demand. Beaton has insisted that this is not a backdoor invitation to bring more natural gas online: “That is not how we play ball”. Well OK then: These assurances were met with skepticism by Sen. Marc Pacheco and the Northeast Clean Energy Council back in April; as far as I can tell from the wording in the bond bill, all we have is Beaton’s assurance that gas won’t be part of the new regs. (Somebody tell me something different.)
We’re trying to avoid that dirty peak.
It should be obvious that the more renewable energy we bring online — say, via a 3% yearly increase in the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard! — the easier it will be to avoid dirty peaks, without new gas pipelines.
And energy storage is no longer a thing of the future. In Southern Australia, a single Tesla battery of 100MW has stabilized their grid, which serves some 1.7 million people. It seems strange for an administration to both tout its investments in energy storage — which are pretty small money, $20M! — and on the other hand work with utilities and fossil fuel companies to construct more gas pipelines, to the tune of billions of dollars.
If our concern is genuinely about the marginal pollution created during times of peak demand — the crux of the argument in the Globe’s splenetic editorials, for instance — there are many ways to skin that cat, much area in the Zone Of Possible Agreement between the various stakeholders (utils, enviros, labor, industry, etc.). More pipelines, more fossil-fuel infrastructure that lasts a generation, encourages fracking and leakage, and displaces renewables – those are an absolute non-starter. Let’s do something else.
Trust, but verify.
I am sure that Secretary Beaton is sincere, and bully for him, but his personal belief about how he or future secretaries or future administrations will seek to use these funds is not the point.
I hope the Legislature will hold firm on this.
And yeah, $300M is just a drop in the bucket for resiliency measures.
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.
The linked Worcester Telegram article says that the administration is amenable to language changes to clarify that natural gas is not clean energy. Good.
A big issue with bond bills, of which this is one, is that the legislation merely authorizes the Governor to borrow funds — it doesn’t require him to do that. Bond bills are different in this way from appropriations bills (aka budgets), where the Executive is legally required to fund the programs in the way and pretty much to the exact amount that the Legislature has specified.
A bond bill is like a credit card account that the Legislature has established with a specific credit limit. The Executive gets to decide how much borrowing actually happens.
Yes, and there have been questions as to why some funds from the last environmental bond bill have not been spent.
“Beaton told reporters the state doesn’t have enough money to responsibly spend $2.2 billion over five years on environmental programs.”
In other words, the current government believes that it’s much more “responsible” to saddle our children and grandchildren with 10s or 100s of billions of dollars in needed spending ten years from now.
My grandparents were born in the late 1880s, and they lived until the late 1980s. Their generation created the Olmsted Emerald Necklace, much of the infrastructure that makes downtown Boston and our waterfront so magical, many of our majestic buildings (like South Station). They built out many of our pipelines, electrical, water, and sewer services, That generation created our highway system. That generation built on, improved, and expanded the legacy they inherited.
Today’s government — and we voters who enable it — are squandering that legacy.
The truth is that the state has PLENTY of money. We are among the most prosperous states in the most prosperous society in human history. The residents of Massachusetts, in fact, control staggering amounts of wealth. We eat at marvelous and marvelously expensive restaurants. We sustain at least four major professional sports teams (Celtics, Bruins, Red Sox, Patriots), where ticket prices are sky-high. Most of us live in homes with more bedrooms, more bathrooms, and bigger kitchens than my grandparent’s generation (or even my parent’s generation).
We have PLENTY of wealth. The truth is that we have decided that we collectively would rather spend down our inheritance and bequeath a rotting, rusting, toxic mess to those who come after us. We bleat frequently and loudly about “the sanctity of life” while we destroy the ability of future generations to live life as we have lived it.
There ARE some states who don’t enough money to responsibly invest in required environmental programs — Michigan. Alabama. Kentucky. Tennessee. States that Republican governments have already run into the ground.
Now our local Republican government does the same.
Well this is timely. Today the Baker administration released its capital investment plan for the upcoming fiscal year. Here’s what the press release has to say about climate change:
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Preparing for a Changing Climate
The FY19 capital plan incorporates the goals of Executive Order 569, which was signed by Governor Baker in 2016 and outlines a comprehensive approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and protecting and preparing the Commonwealth for the impact of climate change. In building the capital plan, the Administration evaluated every investment for potential climate change implications.
The plan funds:
· $55 million for transit-oriented housing, increasing the use of public transportation
· $20.9 million for sustainability and resiliency improvements to state facilities
· $12 million to help communities address deteriorating dams and rebuild seawalls
· $11 million in grants to cities and towns for climate change vulnerability planning and adaptation efforts.
· $10.9 million for more energy-efficient transit fleets
· $5 million for a new program to accelerate energy efficiency improvements in public housing
***
Link to the report is here. Maybe our experts can do a deeper dive on what this all means.
I’m just an engineer. What I see is bullets totaling about $100M (I did it in my head), or about $0.1B. That’s in a bond bill where we’re talking about billions.
What I see is that “Preparing for the changing climate” is a noise-level priority for our government.