New England faces shifting energy game

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These articles are the kickoff of a New England Futures Project aimed at identifying 21st century challenges facing the six-state region. Citizen reaction and participation, leading to a shared regional agenda, are key to the project. Your comments are welcome at www.newenglandfutures.org. Journalists Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson have reported for newspapers on the unique strategic issues facing two dozen metropolitan regions nationwide. Peirce is a syndicated columnist (Washington Post Writers Group) who also has written two books on New England. Johnson is a public policy analyst and a former community college president and Minnesota government official. They are co-authors of the book “Citistates. ”

New England historically has been America’s energy orphan, lying at the end of the energy pipelines. Only Hawaii is more vulnerable to interruption of imports or distribution system breakdown. Electricity costs are 36 percent above the national average.

Now, in a century shadowed by threat of global energy emergencies – Middle East instability and violence, Asia’s insatiable energy appetite, the prospect of more Katrinas and devastating flooding wrought by global warming – can New England survive and prosper?

Are the six states ready to unite in a search for radical diversification of energy sources? Can they conserve so smartly that they reduce their vulnerability?

The answers should be yes. The region has top corporations, nationally famed research laboratories, scores of activist groups, all pushing new energy experiments. Self-reliance and resourcefulness are New England hallmarks. Ingenuity and technological prowess are its trademarks. With a pioneering spirit, its six states working closely together, New England could lead America’s indispensable energy revolution.

What’s more, New England is at the receiving end of the Midwestern air corridor with its many coal-burning plants. It is afflicted by disturbing rates of asthma, plagued by acid rain destroying lakes and forests.

As early as the 1970s, far-sighted regional leaders – the late Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts at the fore – began to focus on New England’s energy vulnerabilities and suggest inventive regional strategies.

Massachusetts, in 1997, was the first state to set up a “renewable portfolio standard”- how much utilities are obliged to switch to wind, solar, biomass and other “clean” energy alternatives.

Connecticut, working with its utilities, has spent more than $1.5 billion in 20 years on conservation and load management. All of the New England states now have some kind of program to promote conservation and new energy sources. Most of the region’s utilities, savvy in energy technology, wired in politically, seem ready to be partners providing they’re allowed to charge customers enough to offset their extra costs.

The emerging megaissue is how to stem greenhouse gas emissions increasingly linked to global warming, rising sea levels, more dangerous storms and lung disease. And there’s now a friendly competition – New England and its New York-New Jersey neighbors versus the progressive West Coast trio of California, Washington and Oregon – in tough measures to achieve cleaner air and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Progress will be hard to register. New England is still a fossil fuel glutton, whether it’s heating oil or natural gas or gasoline. Regional demand for cleaner-burning natural gas has jumped 70 percent in recent years. Many hope that new liquefied natural gas terminals may smooth out the wide New England price swings; globally, however, there’s rising concern about reliable future supplies.

The harsh fact is that New England’s reliance on fossil fuels – whether from nearby Canada or such places as politically turbulent Venezuela and terrorist-supply-threatened Saudi-Arabia – costs billions of dollars that could be recirculating, creating new companies and new jobs to bolster the region’s perilously slow-growth economy. The lost opportunity is immense.

Plus, as Erich Stephens of Peoples Power and Light in Providence notes, today’s skyrocketing prices of natural gas mean New England has little choice: It must develop renewable sources if it’s to hope for any energy price stabilization.

Criss-crossing New England in the past two years, we were startled by the chorus of rising impatience with the energy status quo. Students on campuses, firms pioneering new technologies, mayors and grass-roots energy activist groups all are demanding a new, smarter energy future.

Many echoed Vermont energy expert Rich Cowart: “We should adopt, regionally, a suite of policies that are cost-effective in reducing our energy vulnerability. We’re talking smart energy, not cheap energy.”

It’s true, New England has made a start on a new generation of energy-efficient buildings, “green roofs” included. Top “headline” breakthroughs include the Genzyme biotechnology company’s stunning “LEED” (energy efficiency rated) 12-story building in Cambridge, and the ingenious geothermal heating and cooling system for historic Trinity Church in Boston proper.

Across the six states, there are broad efforts to retrofit and “energyproof” existing homes and buildings, with active encouragement of local utilities. There are pioneering spots of local generation and cogeneration of power, turning waste products into energy, applications of solar power and a renewed push for wind and solar. Burlington, Vt., now fills a startling 42 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources.

A number of institutions – the University of Connecticut, Mount Holyoke and Middlebury colleges and the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges among them – have begun to set ambitious “green” standards for new buildings, undertake recycling programs and cut overall energy use. Harvard now ranks as the country’s second-largest university buyer of renewable energy. Tufts University six years ago committed to meet or beat emission reductions outlined in the Kyoto Protocol, the international accord the Bush administration disavowed.

Lots of energy organizing is under way in New England, groups ranging from “Clean Air-Cool Planet” to the Conservation Law Foundation, “Smartpower” to PIRGs, or public interest research groups. All are pushing universities, businesses, towns and state governments to take strong action to cut back on fossil fuels and advance renewables. More compact city and town growth, they note, will mean less sprawl, gas and electricity consumption.

The activism seems directly linked to what some experts call “civic environmentalism” – an ideal rooted in the New England heritage of shared responsibility that began on the deck of the Mayflower in Provincetown Harbor on Nov. 11, 1620. The ideal was nurtured over centuries of town meetings and stewardship of local forests and farmlands. Starting in the 1960s, it expanded dramatically as towns across New England set up land trusts to protect treasured local lands, more recently to advance “smart growth” measures.

Even while hailing local activism, Charles H.F. Foster, Massachusetts’ first (1971-75) secretary of environmental affairs, says state government has a significant partnership role to play. That’s precisely what the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust, the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund and a smaller counterpart in Rhode Island are trying to do. Funded by a small surcharge on utility bills, they provide grants and loans to trigger progress from solar and wind to tidal energy experiments.

The benefits get compounded, says Robert Pratt, head of the Bay State’s Renewable Energy Trust. His group’s strategic grants to promising “green” enterprises have spurred more than 10,000 new jobs for high-paid scientists and engineers, but also the thousands of blue-collar workers likely to be busy for years if not decades retrofitting and building new facilities.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s Green Building Task Force is seeking to show how companies can reap such benefits as radically reduced energy costs, extended building life cycles, and greater worker productivity, outweighing higher construction costs often associated with green building.

Menino is hardly alone. Forty-three New England cities have signed on as members of the International Council on Environmental Initiatives, pledging to fight global warming through “green” public buildings, expanded public transit and buying more renewable energy. SmartPower, a Hartford-based nonprofit, persuaded Connecticut to commit to 20 percent clean energy use in its operations by 2010, and 100 percent by 2050. It’s pushing “20 by 2010” nationwide; recently Providence became the first Northeast capital city to sign on.

Many New England corporations are reporting major bottom line savings from energy conservation. “Green” received a huge boost last May when General Electric’s Jeff Immelt, CEO-chairman of the Connecticut-headquartered megacorporation, said he would cut back dramatically on GE’s likely future greenhouse gas emissions and that he would double GE’s R&D budget for such clean technologies as hybrid locomotives, water desalination and recyclable plastics. “Increasingly for business,” Immelt added, “green is green.”

None of this means that 20th century-style, “top-down” energy distribution – the familiar pattern of importing gasoline and heating oil from afar, electricity from big central power plants – will disappear anytime soon. Utility executives reminded us that renewable energy sources have a long way to go to meet New England’s existing (not to mention growing) energy demand. They favor at least one more LNG terminal, and would take a fresh look at nuclear power, which provided close to 50 percent of the region’s electric power in the early ’90s, still 25 percent today. (Even some environmentalists would favor a fresh look at nuclear power, because it produces zero greenhouse gas emissions. Politically, the issue is so radioactive that periodic relicensing of the region’s existing nuclear plants may be challenge enough.)

Renewable energy choices remain the bright frontier. Though on a 1 to 10 scale of where New England could be on energy conservation and new source development, it’s probably at just 3 or 4 today. Most of the inventing, financing, putting-in-place of a truly less dependent regional system remains to be done.

Some movement is starting on the private capital side – for example, the New Energy Capital Corp., a New England-based investment firm with a biomass power plant in Maine and a cogeneration plant in Massachusetts.

Yet ironically, part of New Energy Capital’s funding comes from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System. Right now, California has a massive lead on the renewable energy front. The headlines have gone to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “million roofs” solar proposal. But what’s already in motion, demanding New England’s attention, is State Treasurer Phil Angelides’ “Green Wave” initiative. The goal: to mobilize the immense investment powers of the state-run, multibillion-dollar pension funds to develop clean technologies in California that then can be sold across the globe. If there’s any parallel effort by New England state treasurers, it’s a well-kept secret.

With money, there’s also need for strong regionwide commitment. Each New England state is individually just too small, too interlinked with its neighbors, to innovate effectively alone. Biofuels present golden opportunities, but they cry out for a rational New England-wide distribution system developed with the utilities savvy in building and managing energy grids.

Handling sudden emergencies underscores the need. After a frightening 1965 energy blackout, the region created “New England ISO,” an around-the-clock watchdog-coordinator of power flowing over the region’s 7,000 miles of electric transmission lines, ready to protect the region against sudden outages.

But a lot more may be critical now. More hurricanes like Katrina could cripple the nation’s oil refining and distribution capacity. A sudden jolt in global markets could send oil prices soaring north of $100 a barrel. New Englanders’ capacity to heat homes, businesses, schools – or drive cars – could be stretched to a breaking point. Interstate plans for massive bus and other alternative transportation modes would be mandatory. Today, in large part, they don’t exist.

It’s not just political leaders who need to lead New England’s energy revolution. New ideas, skills, advocacy, need to come too from corporate leaders, scientists, planners, and the region’s rich array of nonprofit groups. Where conversions to a new energy age hit barriers, civic and political New England’s leaders need to be on deck. Think of the impact of top public-private leadership standing up, collectively, to local opponents of energy breakthroughs – opponents of wind farms off Cape Cod, and in the Vermont mountains, for example. The message wouldn’t be hostile, simply that every reasonable new piece of energy supply is needed to enhance New England’s energy future.

It needn’t all be an “eat your spinach” exercise. Why not hold a New England-wide natural resources summit, suggests Rick Handley of the Coalition of Northeast Governors. Patterned after a successful Maine conference convened by Gov. John Baldacci, its theme could be economic and environmental opportunity. Imaginative research and development agendas could explore new ways to tap energy potentials from the northern forests to the region’s ocean frontiers, with narrowly conceived single-state efforts replaced by smart interstate sharing of research capacity, capital and planning.

We did sense that the combination of new energy initiatives across New England – by governments, universities, corporations, utilities, nonprofits – may be ready for spontaneous combustion. New Englanders are supposed to be a smart bunch. It’s time to overcome old turf barriers and move the needle forward – fast.

For more information on New England’s energy activist organizations, renewable energy “pioneers” and technical information, check the Web site at http://www.newenglandfutures.org/issues/energy/resources.

The sponsoring Partnership for New England includes the Vermont-based Institute for Sustainable Communities (which will coordinate follow-up public debates across the region), the New England Council, the New England Initiative at UMass Lowell, Mount Auburn Associates, the New England Association of Regional Councils and the Orton Family Foundation. Financial backing comes from community foundations in all six states, the Bank of America Foundation and others (full list at the Web site). The articles are an independent editorial product, not necessarily the view of any sponsoring organization or funder.