While our Sunday-Monday snowstorm didn’t quite rise to the “Snowmageddon” or “Bombogenesis” level, it came and left us with frigid temperatures, the kind of which we haven’t experienced for some time.
It seems we’re in the throes of a “Polar Vortex” — if not by name at least by chilling effect.
The last official prolonged dome of arctic air descended on New England back in the winter of 2017-18.
And in these intervening years, our ability to meet the energy demand required to keep our heat and lights on during such a cold spell hasn’t noticeably improved.
In fact, the same dynamic’s in play — a sort of power supply Groundhog Day — in which inadequate access to abundant natural gas, combined with the inability of renewables to fill that supply gap, forces the New England power grid to use dirtier oil and coal to fuel our power plants.
The most recent failure of renewable energy to deliver on its promise came with the activation earlier this month of a transmission line from Quebec to provide Canadian hydropower to Massachusetts and other New England states.
As we explained just a few days ago, customers of the state’s three major utilities – National Grid, Eversource and Unitil — should lower their expectations of cleaner, supposedly cheaper energy from this source.
By the way, those customers likely just opened the highest energy bill they’ve ever received — with even more household budget-besters to come.
Just days after the Healey Administration celebrated that new transmission line through western Maine, with a promise of delivering an uninterrupted supply of hydropower, the so-called New England Clean Energy Connect fell flat on its face.
During most of the past weekend’s combination of snow and ice-cold weather, when the New England grid likely could have used that transmission line’s supply, the Boston Globe reported that Canadian public utility Hydro-Québec kept the electricity for its own domestic needs, while also importing some power from New England via an older line.
It’s the same scenario we presented in a recent editorial.
While the New England grid wasn’t at risk of running out of power sources, it was forced to increase power-plant emissions, due to activating idled, oil-fueled turbines across the region to bolster reserves.
Given these energy shortcomings and the prospect of extended frigid conditions, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on Sunday determined that a “statutory emergency” existed within the six-state grid area operated by ISO New England, the independent, nonprofit regional transmission organization headquartered in Holyoke.
The secretary cited “a shortage of electric energy, a shortage of facilities for the generation of electric energy, and other causes” as reasons for his emergency order.
At ISO-NE’s request, the order Wright issued allows the grid operator to tap into the maximum output of certain power generation sources through Saturday, Jan. 31, in a bid to prevent blackouts.
ISO-NE said the emergency order allows it “to direct power plants and other generating resources to run in ways that keep the grid reliable, even if that temporarily overrides regulatory or emission requirements.”
Wright, in his press release, said that the “previous administration’s energy subtraction policies weakened the grid, leaving Americans more vulnerable during events like” this winter storm.
“Maintaining affordable, reliable, and secure power is non-negotiable,” he said.
Even before the massive snowstorm enveloped the region Sunday, the State House News Service reported that the New England grid was relying more heavily than usual on dirty fuels like oil.
As extreme cold set in last week, oil jumped from being used to generate none of the grid’s energy as of late Thursday to about 15% by the end of Friday, according to data from ISO-NE.
By late Saturday morning, oil had overtaken natural gas as the predominant generation source for the New England grid, and remained so until about 5 a.m. Monday.
That’s a chilling indictment on prior Democratic policies at the federal level and the current “clean” energy priorities of our governor, who’s now given the state’s power operators the OK to use the means necessary “to keep power flowing to people’s homes during this time.”
While oil’s generally a small part of the New England grid’s resource mix, when the demand for natural gas for home heating rises during extended cold weather, so too does its price.
And when natural gas becomes a more expensive option, some power generators choose to switch to burning cheaper oil. That choice leads to greater carbon emissions into the atmosphere, running counter to the state’s mid-century net-zero emissions mandate.
Paul Craney, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance and a critic of the state’s decarbonization mandates, said Monday that the grid situation “was entirely predictable…”
Added Craney: “While families were cranking their thermostats just to stay warm, state leaders were once again forced to fall back on oil because they have spent years blocking the infrastructure built on natural gas and nuclear that would actually keep the lights on,” Craney said.
We imagine Craney or another MassFiscal official issued the same comments back in the winter of 2017-18.
Because as we’ve been pained to point out, not much has changed.