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Executive Director of Green Energy Consumers Alliance
Last week, we learned that National Grid and NSTAR decided to withdraw their commitment to purchase electricity from the Cape Wind project. Many of us were looking forward to seeing Cape Wind become the first offshore wind project in the United States. Now that seems unlikely. Without the contracts with NSTAR and National Grid, Cape Wind will find it extremely difficult to get financing.
*If you live in Rhode Island read the People's Power & Light version of this article here.
You’ve been good enough to voluntarily sign up for one of Mass Energy’s green power products, New England Wind or New England GreenStart (if not, click here to learn how). By now, you have probably read or heard that electricity rates for customers of National Grid, NSTAR, and Western Mass Electric are all taking a big jump this winter. These rates will be in effect until the spring. At that point, we expect the rates to come back down. Below is some information on the electricity rate increases and Mass Energy’s response.
The utilities buy electricity according to rules set by the Department of Public Utilities (DPU). Because this winter’s spike is so significant, the DPU has asked stakeholders for ideas on how to mitigate the rate increase and how to minimize its effects on consumers. Here’s what we had to say...
Acting on the recommendations of the Department of Energy Resources and Attorney General, on December 16th, the...
The Boston Globe recently had a good story about how cold weather reduces tire pressure. And low tire pressure reduces gas mileage. Or, in the case of my Volt, wind mileage.
In 2008, Governor Patrick signed the Green Communities Act (GCA) and the Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA). These laws propelled Massachusetts into the forefront on clean energy. The GWSA and its corresponding Clean Energy and Climate Plan mandate that the Commonwealth reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 80 percent by 2050, with an interim goal of 25 percent by 2020. These are ambitious targets, to be sure. In fact they are among the best in the nation, which is why the GWSA also says that the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is required to write regulations that would, “establish a desired level of declining annual aggregate emission limits for sources or categories of sources that emit greenhouse gases.”
The regulations were supposed to have been adopted by January 2012 to take effect in January 2013, but DEP has not written those regulations yet. So Mass Energy has joined with the Conservation Law Foundation and others in filing a legal complaint in Superior Court, asking the court to enforce the law and require DEP to write the necessary regulations.
Readers of this blog know that my family bought a 2015 Chevy Volt on August 21, 2014. I’m happy to report that two months later, we are thrilled with the car. After doing a lot of research on the Volt, Prius Plug-In and Nissan Leaf, we chose the Volt and it is exceeding our high expectations.
Background: The Volt is a plug-in hybrid. When the battery is fully charged, my Volt has a range of about 40 miles (I’ve gone 47), more than its 38 mile EPA rating. If I deplete the battery, the car runs on gasoline (actually gasoline fuels a generator that runs the motor on electricity).
There are some funny rules in the energy game. In both Massachusetts and Rhode Island, energy efficiency is required to cost LESS than natural gas or electricity. But natural gas and electricity are allowed to cost more than energy efficiency. There’s no level playing field. So how does that play out?
If we can avoid burning fossil fuels to make electricity (or heat our homes), we can avoid carbon dioxide emissions which cause global warming. Fortunately, we can do just that by buying green power and making our homes energy efficient. Can we quantify the benefits of green power and efficiency? Yes, we can! Here’s how:
The organization that runs the New England power grid does an annual assessment of air emissions made by generators in the region. The assessment reports on how much sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon dioxide are emitted in a given year, both on average per megawatt hour and at the margin. By “at the margin” we mean the last megawatt hour (MWh) produced. When we consider how avoiding emissions is a benefit, we calculate the benefit by looking at the marginal rate, which is the rate associated with the last megawatt hour we are using on the New England Power grid. For those of who are concerned about climate change, we are interested in the marginal rate of carbon dioxide emissions because we want to replace that last megawatt hour of dirty energy with something that is zero-emission. The point is that that we claim credit for avoiding the marginal rate rather than the average rate.
This past Friday, the Chretien family traded in our fabulous 2002 Toyota Prius and bought a 2015 Chevrolet Volt. After three months of research and test drives, we decided to go with the Volt if we could find a Chevy dealer we could tolerate. It was a difficult choice because we also liked the Prius Plug-In Hybrid and the all-electric Nissan Leaf. We would have been happy with either of those, especially given that we loved our 2002 Prius and still love our 2008 Prius. In fact, we even thought about holding off on buying a plug-in for a year or two because the 2002 Prius has been running great. On recent highway drives, it was getting 55 miles per gallon (mpg).
Before he died in 2011, Dr. Paul Epstein of the Harvard School of Public Health researched the impacts of global warming on public health. The work he did brought complicated science down to a very basic fundamental point – how does changing our climate affect human health? He illustrated the many ways that we are being harmed. Shortly before he died, he wrote a great piece for the Atlantic.
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