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While much of the world frets about what to do about energy resources and climate change, three New England communities are showing that resourcefulness and ingenuity can still make a difference. Second in a two-part series about New England energy.
Photo/Art by Carl Wiens
New England Energy | Follow Us
Read Part 1: New England Energy | Power Struggles
The Milford Town Hall fills up almost an
hour before the meeting. It’s a small room—seating only 220—for this
“scoping” session, held last July by the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission to study the environmental impact of a proposed natural-gas
pipeline. It would run through Massachusetts and 17 New Hampshire towns,
including Milford. As more people arrive, they’re directed to an
overflow room to watch the proceedings on a video feed. Outside in the
rain, pipeline opponents on the common are waving signs to get cars to
honk.
It’s surprisingly festive in the hall.
Many of those waiting to testify know one another and are catching up.
Since the pipeline was first announced in 2014, a dedicated opposition
has grown up. They populate the hall in neon-yellow “Stop the Pipeline”
T-shirts, a few yellow hoodies, and some armbands. A woman gives out
“Stop the Pipeline” stickers, which some people add to their armbands.
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
Dan Blais is the project manager for an innovative pilot solar-energy effort in Boothbay, Maine.
Every now and then a young guy walks up to the front of the hall holding up two large poster boards he’s just been writing on: Clean says the first board; the second says Energy Now!!! Each time he does this, the room cheers as if we’re at a football game. Let’s go! Get in there, solar power, and fight! Fight! Fight! The mood darkens once the meeting is under way; a watchful anxiety spreads.
Clean Energy Now!!! That, in three
words, is the argument of the pipeline’s opponents. Natural gas is
advertised as clean, but that doesn’t account for the hundreds of
chemicals used in fracking to force it out, or all the methane that’s
released, say the opponents. Alternative technologies are being ignored.
There’s a different future out there, they say. Inevitably they’re
derided as “nimbys” (“Not in My Backyard”) but the opponents point to
many communities that are saying yes to these alternative
technologies—communities that are saying “Yes in My Backyard”—and yet we
don’t hear very much about these “yimbys.” I set out to see for myself
the future of clean energy in Maine, Connecticut, and Vermont, creating a
big carbon footprint in my quest for a smaller one.
—
In the old days—let’s say 30 years
ago—you had one phone company, three television networks, five or six
major car brands. All of that has been “disrupted,” to use the popular
word of the moment among tech entrepreneurs. All that’s really left of
that old world is our power grid. That power bill you pay monthly,
that’s not just your father’s bill; that’s your great-grandfather’s
bill. Our grid is just an aging version of how it was in its pioneering
days at the start of the last century. The joke in the industry is that
if Edison came back today, he’d easily recognize the power grid. But ye
olde grid is in rough shape.
The United States has more power outages
than any other developed country, and it’s getting worse. Since 2000 the
number of major outages has doubled every five years. In an average
year a New England resident will be without power for three and a half
hours; in Japan the average yearly outage is four minutes. One major
engineering organization grades our power grid as a D+.
Photo/Art by Dave Cleaveland/Maine Imaging
Special-purpose batteries fill racks inside one of three shipping
containers part of a revolutionary new
power system in Boothbay, Maine.
The grid is old and it’s vulnerable. One
federal study found that if terrorists shut down just nine of 55,000
transfer substations and a transformer manufacturer on a hot summer day,
the country could be plunged into the black for 18 months—or more. The
Pentagon is bailing out. The military knows that it can no longer rely
on the usual utilities to power its bases; it’s building microgrids that
can operate on their own if there’s a blackout. The Pentagon has also
become the world’s largest buyer of renewable energy. (It’s concerned
about our domestic oil supply. One of its studies showed that terrorists
could shut down three-quarters of the oil used in the eastern U.S.
without leaving Louisiana.)
A massive reinvestment is coming to
improve that D+ grade, and it could revolutionize the way we get
electricity. Instead of adding to big centralized power plants, new
technology will be local (“distributed” is the term)— solar panels,
battery backups, biomass (wood chips), windmills—and it will employ many
techniques to reduce peak demand. By 2040 renewables will produce
almost half of all electricity worldwide. In just the first half of last
year, 70 percent of new electric-power generation in the U.S. was from
renewables. “The days of monopolized power are coming to an end,” said
one respondent in a survey of the utility industry. “Get smart or get
out of the way.”
This is the story hiding behind the
battles over building new powerlines, natural-gas pipelines, and large
windmills. A revolution is underway—one that’s taking place without the
protests surrounding pipelines, wind farms, and other huge projects.
What does it look like?
—
The first stop on my yimby tour is Boothbay, Maine. I drive into town like a tourist, stutter-stepping down narrow streets: Is this one-way? Can I turn here? Is that a parking space? It’s
this kind of three-blind-mice traffic that makes locals crazy.
Desperate to live in a town where people actually know where they’re
going, they put up more and more signs, which only further confuse
visitors. It’s a pretty town, but this is just about the last I’ll see
of postcard Boothbay. I meet Dan Blais, and we tour the backs of
convenience stores, shopping centers, and an industrial park by a gravel
pit—Wish you were here?—and, mercifully, the front of one inn.
It’s a tour of tan Dumpster-sized boxes, white tractor-trailer-sized
boxes, little tan boxes with fans, and solar panels. He talks kilowatt
hours, functionality, syncing.
Blais manages GridSolar’s Boothbay Pilot
Project. GridSolar is a private Portland company that, along with
environmental groups, challenged Central Maine Power when it wanted to
build new transmission lines across the peninsula to Boothbay to cover
the peak hours of summer demand. GridSolar said it had a different
solution and won the right to try it out. Eight years ago, the utility
doubted it would work. GridSolar installed rooftop solar panels on
hotels and municipal buildings, efficient LED lighting, backup
batteries, and Ice Bears, a kind of air conditioning that makes ice at
night to be used later for cooling at peak demand times. It also
installed a backup diesel generator.
In an industrial park, Blais shows me the
diesel generator, a 25-foot-long trailer known as a BUG (backup utility
generator). It wasn’t anyone’s first choice; funding for a solution
using renewable energy fell through. It’s not ideal, but Blais points
out that if it’s called into use, the emissions would be the same as a
dump truck’s. None of the backups has yet been needed; they’ve run only
during tests.
Farther into the industrial park, by a
gravel pit, we look at three long white shipping containers housing
backup batteries. It looks like a pristine NASA installation, as though a
Mars Rover could pull up alongside. Everything else nearby is weathered
and worn, looking as though Maine has had its day—old, leaning tractor
trailers, a left-behind boat (of course), and a big barn of a garage.
But these batteries look as though they’re still an artist’s rendering, a
fresh idea.
The other gadgets are unexceptional, like
the Ice Bears, light-brown Dumpster-sized boxes that look like the
usual stuff behind buildings. It’s undramatic, but it’s the face of the
revolution going on right now. This is what the future may look like.
The future was supposed to be flying cars and the Pan Am Clipper to the
moon, but this might be it: incremental technological improvements going
on all around us—and that’s why we’re missing it. The future wasn’t
supposed to arrive wrapped in dull boxes.
But these dull boxes have produced big results. GridSolar
has provided enough backup and reduced the peak demand such that the
transmission line won’t have to be built, saving ratepayers $12 million.
The company is looking to bring this approach next to Midcoast Maine
and Portland in larger projects that could save $50 million or more.
The Acadia Center, a nonprofit that
advocates for a clean-energy economy, was one of the environmental
groups that fought for the Boothbay Pilot Project. “We’re very excited
by this pilot. It shows that the model can work,” says Daniel Sosland,
the center’s president. “The energy future isn’t going to be in big
power plants and trans-mission lines. The system’s really going to shift
and transform dramatically. Communities are where the energy resources
can be located. They’re cheaper, they’re cleaner, and they offer
consumers more control over their energy bills and energy choices.” He
is, however, disappointed by the backup diesel generator and doesn’t
want to see that in future projects.
More important, Sosland points out that
canceling the transmission line saved money for ratepayers in all six
New England states. Each state’s ratepayers are billed for any project
to improve a transmission line’s reliability. But, under current
regulations, alternative technology like that in Boothbay has to be paid
for solely by the state. The deck is stacked for the old way of doing
things. This needs to be fixed, Sosland says. He points out that a heavy
investment in energy efficiency by Massachusetts and Vermont canceled
more than $400 million in transmission-line work, which would have been
paid for by anyone who turned on a light in New England.
Central Maine Power is reserving judgment on the Pilot Project until the full testing period is completed in 2018. “We
certainly support the testing of different methods for providing
reliable service, which can include alternatives to building
transmission,” says company spokesman John Carroll. He agrees that “it’s
absolutely the way the industry is going” and that the utility has “a
real obligation to look at all types of solutions,” but the company is
cautious, keeping its options open. The Boothbay peninsula has only one
transmission line, and CMP wants to be convinced that the Pilot Project
will be reliable. “It may be an interim solution,” Carroll adds, “and
eventually we’ll need to build a transmission line.”
We emerge from the back of buildings to
visit Brown’s Wharf Inn. The owner, Tim Brown, whom we flag down while
he’s mowing, has gone all in: new HVAC cooling units, solar on the roof,
LED lighting. He’s pleased. He’d do more; he only wishes that he’d put
solar on his own house when Maine was offering rebates, but he didn’t
get to it. The inn came first.
Brown was recently in Germany, where one
can see huge windmills next to castles, he says. The Germans have great
trains—he’d like to see that here, too. Once you start changing a few
lightbulbs, it seems, you begin to see that new things are possible.
I leave Boothbay with one question. This
pilot project used less than 1 percent of Boothbay’s rooftop space for
solar panels—why not do more?
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
demand times.
Photo/Art by Dave Cleaveland/Maine Imaging
These three shipping containers in Boothbay house backup batteries
(opposite, top) as part of
GridSolar’s innovative pilot project.
—
After a series of devastating storms,
Connecticut passed major legislation in 2011, known as Public Act 11-80,
to create a Green Bank to fund “energy resiliency.” Each dollar of
state money would be matched by $10 of private investment. In the first
year, 11 projects received the go-ahead, but 10 stumbled out of the
gate, failing to line up the right financing. Things are now going
better. The use of renewable power has grown tenfold. Rooftop solar
installations are soaring, while wind was stalled for years as the state
wrestled with where turbines should be allowed.
But it’s the planned microgrids that have
attracted national interest. A microgrid can stand alone when the rest
of the grid goes down; it has enough generators and storage to operate
independently. Eleven projects have received funding; three are
complete. I’m here to visit the first one, at Wesleyan University in
Middletown, driving onto a campus where students, in communion with
their smartphones, drift across the roads like jellyfish in the current.
They never look up.
I meet Alan Rubacha, a fast-talking,
fast-walking optimist who has worked at Wesleyan for 15 years, the last
three as director of its physical plant. He’s responsible for about 80
buildings and a small power grid that requires six employees to run.
Rubacha offers me some water, and as I’m nodding yes, he disappears,
then pops back into the room indicating that I should follow him. In the
few seconds it takes me to get up, he’s gone again. Out in the hall, I
locate him by following his voice, around a corner and down another
hall. He’s on his phone, which he is often. During our short interview,
he’s texting and taking calls.
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
676-kilowatt Guascor SFGLD360 engine, part of Wesleyan’s microgrid.
Wesleyan’s microgrid is a bit deceiving.
It was already in place, with the exception of an extension to the
Freeman Athletic Center, a 300,000-square-foot building to which was
added a big co-generation plant to produce electricity and heat. In an
emergency, the athletic center will be a FEMA distribution point. The
staff holds drills annually.
The university has been managing its own
power system since the 1960s. It added a natural-gas generator in 2009
and is adding solar now. The local utility supplies only one-sixtieth of
Wesleyan’s electricity; the rest is generated on campus. The university
can “island”: run separately in a blackout. It’s resilient. Wesleyan
won the race by starting one foot from the finish line.
Still, these people put it all together,
and the world has come to see their microgrid. Rubacha has had visitors
from 40 states and as far away as Australia and New Zealand. Even so,
this isn’t going to be the solution for most places, he says.
Connecticut has been “really forward-thinking” he notes, but “what they
found is that it’s harder to do than you think.” It demands an expensive
infrastructure. The university is set up to work on that and is
committed to reducing energy use, cutting 30 percent in the last five
years, while the square footage has increased slightly. The university
continues to pursue savings in everything it does, installing things
like new windows and more-efficient motors.
So Wesleyan’s system isn’t “the
answer”—no one thing is the answer. But it provides an important clue:
spurred on by the recent powerful storms, everyone is working on clean
energy now. “There’s nothing new in this at all, nothing that’s unique
to this, no special technology. It is as simple as simple gets,” Rubacha
says of the university’s microgrid. “It’s not a panacea, it’s not
perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction for now.”
He asks me about what I’ve seen so far on
my yimby tour. “I’m interested to see what it’ll look like in 20
years,” he says. Energy “is going to be way more distributed. I think
there’s going to be a power something on every corner, whether it’s PV
[solar panels], or a little engine, or a little storage container, who
knows what. It’s going to be great.”
—
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
Each time I visit Montpelier I’m struck
by how diminutive Vermont’s state capital is, as if I were in an
HO-scale train layout, but one with locavore dining, organic cafés,
brewpubs, and white-collar state and insurance workers in blue jeans and
L.L. Bean checked shirts. Montpelier has a soothing rationality. This
tiny state capital makes it seem as though no problem is too big.
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
Tim Shea, chair of the energy advisory committee in Montpelier,
Vermont, and assistant city manager
Jessie Baker at the Vermont District
Heat plant.
With that attitude, Montpelier has taken
on a gargantuan task: to be a “net zero” city by 2030. This, says
Vermont’s Energy Action Network, is “a bold, audacious, collaborative
effort to have Montpelier lead the way as the nation’s first state
capital where all of our energy needs—electric, thermal, and
transportation—are produced or offset by renewable energy sources.” But
this isn’t a moon-shot crash program; it’s Montpelier-size. The net-zero
campaign is run by a committee of volunteers. We do everything with
volunteers in New England’s small towns and cities, from putting out
fires to feeding the hungry, but getting an entire city to cover all of
its energy demands seems impossible.
Tim Shea is chair of the 16-member energy
advisory committee. In his day job he oversees facilities at National
Life Group, which occupies the largest office building in Vermont
(550,000 square feet). The company has converted to a biomass heat
plant, saving $400,000 in fuel costs just in the first winter, and added
four acres of solar panels to its existing array to provide 15 percent
of its electricity. I talk to Shea and assistant city manager Jessie
Baker in National Life’s cafeteria, which is far better than it sounds: a
pleasant room with high ceilings and sweeping mountain views.
How will Montpelier get to net zero in
just 14 years? By taking a thousand, thousand small steps. Each
improvement is incremental, and each incremental step is made up of
hundreds of smaller steps: meetings, studies, grants, private and public
partnerships. You need “day-one savings” to woo the public, Shea says.
“It’s hard to dismiss day-one savings.”
As the first steps, Montpelier has
installed solar panels to provide 70 percent of municipal electricity at
a 15 percent savings over the old utility rates; installed LED
streetlights; “weatherized” 500 houses; and replaced a brace of aged oil
burners with a centralized biomass boiler system for 21 government and
private buildings, eliminating 137,000 gallons of oil annually, Baker
notes. These efforts have won the city some national recognition.
Montpelier is in the running with 49 other communities for the
Georgetown University Energy Prize of $5 million to be awarded next
year, and the U.S. Department of Energy has named the city a Climate
Action Champion, giving it an edge for certain federal programs.
All of which is encouraging, but
Montpelier is just at the starting line. Shea says that the city aims to
be halfway to net zero by 2023. Transportation is the high hurdle; it’s
nearly 50 percent of energy use. Shea and Baker talk up rezoning to
lessen reliance on downtown parking, adding bike lanes, and encouraging
car sharing and public transportation. “You can eliminate parking if
more people are biking and walking,” Shea explains.
“Have you said that in a public meeting: eliminate
parking?” I ask. Having served on a planning committee, I know that
parking spots can be revered as holy land.
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
Rooftop solar panels at the National Life Group office building in Montpelier, Vermont.
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
Biomass fuel (wood chips) at the Vermont District Heat plant.
Photo/Art by Bob O’Connor
The plant’s wood-chip-fired boilers generate steam, heating a number of downtown Montpelier
buildings.
Shea, who drives an electric car, doesn’t
hesitate. Look at the city map, he says: “It’s amazing how much real
estate” is devoured by parking. That’s land that could be used for
taxable development and for housing.
As we were sitting there, gas was at
$2.35 a gallon in the city, bringing on a winner’s smugness as people
filled up. You have to approach some collapse-of-civilization scenario
before you can imagine prying Americans out of their cars—and Vermonters
drive more miles each year than most other Americans. (They rank sixth
on the mileage list.) Shea
concedes that the low price “makes the paybacks harder,” but he’s
steadfast, talking about finding the right mix of “carrot-and-stick”
programs to move the stubborn-mule public.
Montpelier was able to add its solar
panels and biomass boiler without expending any of the city’s tax
dollars. But to achieve the committee members’ goal, won’t they
eventually have to spend the city’s money? They firmly say no.
Montpelier has a high tax rate, Baker explains, with a population of
about 7,800 having to provide services for up to 20,000 each day. She
hears from residents who are concerned about “how to balance this
audacious goal against the financial realities of our municipal budget,”
she says. A good case can be made for the long-term benefits, but she
knows that “there’s some fear in the short term” about taxes.
To get to net zero, Shea says, “a lot of
this basically comes down to behavioral marketing.” There’s strong
support from Mayor John Hollar and a core of committed citizens. “We
just need to keep pushing that 80 percent in the middle to help us get
there.” Mont-pelier could be a demonstration project for Los Angeles or
Seattle or Chicago, he adds: “Now, they’ve got their own things going,
but with a lot of what we’re doing for a northern climate, we can really
become the pilot poster child for—this might be a little grandiose—a
national movement.” Other places large and small can learn from what
people are doing in Montpelier, he says.
Striving to be a net-zero city appeals to
old New England virtues: It’s pragmatic, it’s thrifty, it’s the right
thing to do, and it plays to the region’s pride in independent thinking.
“Resiliency” is the buzzword of this new energy movement, and in that
word is an echo of another old New England virtue: self-reliance. “Our
residents have this culture of being innovative, being progressive,
being willing to try things,” Baker says. “The size of our community
lets us perhaps do some ambitious things a little more easily. We know
each other. We go to church together. We go to soccer practice together.
And it kind of contributes to that Vermont way of doing things.”
—
Will this work? Can we patch together
enough solar panels, efficient lighting, and generators to tame our
energy hunger? Can we do enough quickly enough to slow the planet’s
warming? That’s what this is really about. We’re on a roller-coaster
ride of ever-wilder storms and hotter summers. My short yimby tour is
encouraging, showing how we can swiftly change things, but I may be
cheering a short parade.
When you see these new ways of doing
things, it’s freeing. It’s as if you were hearing long-stuck machinery
moving. But then you leave these new projects and head into the
gas-and-go haste of how we’ve done things forever, and the fossil-fuel
present seems iron-bound and eternal, “ a fate … that never turns
aside,” as Thoreau said of the technology of his day.
What’s holding us back isn’t technology,
and not even the old regulations, though those have to change. What’s
holding us back is that we don’t believe we can change things. In
a region once renowned for its mechanical literacy— for backyard
tinkerers filing a flood of patents for improved water turbines, steam
engines, early automobiles and airplanes—somehow we’ve lost our belief
in Yankee ingenuity. Of course there still are many can-do inventors,
designers, and builders among us, but, lacking millions of dollars for
advertising and lobbying, they can be lost in the noise.
—
I have one more stop to make before I
leave Vermont. I drive a half-hour south of the capital to visit someone
who has been at this solar thing since he was an architecture student
in 1970. I go see architect William Maclay at his Waitsfield office.
Recently he wrote the definitive book, The New Net Zero, a hefty
552-pager giving many successful examples and extensive construction
details for houses and large commercial buildings.
“We’re not in the world we were in 10
years ago,” Maclay tells me. “For me, an advocate for doing solar for
40-some-odd years, to say that I can live on less money with solar than I
can with fossil fuels is just a radical change. And it’s a radical
change that 2 percent of the population realizes.” People don’t know
that they can afford solar, that they can afford net zero, he explains.
He sets out the numbers: For solar panels
there’s a 30 percent rebate off the top from federal tax credits;
historically low loan rates; and plummeting solar-panel prices, which
are 75 percent lower than they were a decade ago. It’s cheaper to
install solar than to keep paying for oil, Maclay says: “Renewably
powering your electric bill is cost-effective today. That’s just huge.
It’s never been that way before. You can hop onboard and save money and
do the right thing at the same time. Climate’s an issue; there’s no
excuse not to be addressing that. [This] isn’t some weird technology we
have to wait for. It’s here today.” This isn’t your hippie uncle’s solar
energy.
“Will Montpelier succeed?” I ask.
“I think they’re going to get there, and
everybody’s going to get there, or we’re not going to be around,” Maclay
replies. And with that we adjourn to look at the small tan boxes
outside his office and an adjoining house (heat pumps) and the gray
boxes in the basement (a solar-power inverter). They’re not much to look
at, either, but they may mean the world.
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