Even with the boom in renewable power, New England still gets about half its energy from natural gas – that’s a huge jump from 15 percent in 2000. The fracking boom in the U.S. meant a big investment in gas-fired power plants. But many environmentalists are pushing back,
worried about spending money on fossil-fuel infrastructure, just as renewables like wind and solar are taking off.
As part of the New England News Collaborative energy series, The Big Switch, Rhode Island Public Radio’s Ambar Espinoza looks at the controversy over whether to build another gas-fired plant in a small Rhode Island town.
When Invenergy announced plans to build a natural gas-fired power plant in Burrillville, Gov. Gina Raimondo called the project a key piece to solving New England’s energy challenges.
“We have a problem today: Our prices are too high; supply is too low; and we have climate change reality,” she said.
The six New England governors have made a commitment to tackle what they call a natural gas “supply crisis.”
And this new power plant, company officials said, would not only help protect New England against volatile natural gas prices, but also help meet its goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
John Niland, Invenergy’s development director, said fracking has made it possible to use the cleanest burning fossil fuel to produce electricity.
“As a developer, we were looking at alternatives to using natural gas and it was really either coal or nuclear,” Niland said at the press conference. “So without the advent of fracking, that’s what developers like myself would have been looking at.”
This proposed project was met with immediate opposition outside the building where the company and the governor jointly announced it. While labor union members showed support, protestors chanted, “No fracked gas in Burrillville. Stop it now,” while holding signs that said, “It’s time to cut carbon.”
Central Falls resident Lorraine Savard Ledoux would like to see Invenergy invest its $700 million on renewable energy instead.
“You know open up a solar power plant; buy wind turbines,” said Ledoux. “It needs to start now and soon. Not spend $700 million to support fracking.”
There’s no fracking for gas in New England, but fracked gas is piped in from nearby states like Pennsylvania.
Peter Shattuck with the environmental advocacy group the Acadia Center echoes Ledoux’s call for deeper investments in renewables and energy efficiency, which have already created a meaningful dent in the region’s peak demand.
The ISO New England, the regional grid operator, expects energy efficiency to “dampen” normal growth in peak demand, the periods of highest electricity usage, by more than 70 percent, from 1.1 percent to .4 percent from 2020 to 2025.
“If we keep doing that [investments in energy efficiency and renewables], then the need for everything – for overbuilding our energy system to meet those peak demands – declines,” said Shattuck. “We don’t need as many power plants. We don’t need as many transmission lines. We don’t need as many pipelines.”
Shattuck said the gas pipelines were constrained indeed, but relying too much on natural gas created other issues in the energy market that made those price spikes worse.
“A lot of the generators were unprepared,” said Shattuck. “And because we had become so reliant on natural gas, when the natural gas was not available for the power plants (because it was going to heat homes and businesses) that caused prices to spike.”
To fix some of those problems, the regional grid operator created a kind-of penalty and reward system for electricity producers to have a backup fuel to burn during the winter when gas might be hard to come by.
Under this program, Invenergy promises to produce electricity in the winter no matter what. Niland said the company is doing two things to be reliable.
“One is, we’re going to have the oil backup capability,” Niland told RIPR last October. “And the second thing that we are proposing to do is pay for an expansion of the gas pipeline so that we would be able to meet … get the gas when we need it.”
“If companies like this are stepping forward and saying we can take of our own business, there’s less of an argument for shifting the risk, for shifting the cost to consumers,” said Shattuck.
Govs. Gina Raimondo and Charlie Baker proposed having electricity ratepayers subsidize gas pipeline expansions in New England, stirring a debate about who should pay for pipelines.
That debate is over in Massachusetts, where the commonwealth’s Supreme Court ruled that idea too risky for ratepayers.
An independent study commissioned by the Massachusetts Attorney General also confirms the region doesn’t need more pipelines.
“So if a new gas-fired power plant is built, virtually 99 percent of the hours of the year, there’s plenty of gas available, plenty of gas transportation available to run that power plant,” said Paul Hibbard, co-author of the study.
But eventually New England will need power plants to replace the retiring ones to ensure a reliable electricity grid, Hibbard added.
“If there were a reliability deficiency even for one hour or two or three hours in the middle of the coldest day of winter, that’s a serious public health and economic concern for the region,” said Hibbard.
Hibbard said the region needs natural gas-fired plants that ramp up in minutes, even seconds, to step in when the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing. And this need poses a problem.
“When we did our analysis, in almost every scenario we reviewed, the level of emissions from the power sector that resulted were above the state’s collective goals for controlling carbon dioxide from power plants [new and existing] out through 2030,” said Hibbard.
Meaning that despite New England’s ambitious carbon emissions goals, and big investments in renewables, we’re still bound to burn too many fossil fuels.
Then, there’s the challenge of finding the best place to build a new power plant.
Invenergy thinks Burrillville may be an ideal location: on land owned by Spectra Energy, which operates pipelines and compressor stations. So the infrastructure is already there.
But it doesn’t look so good to many Burrillville residents and environmental groups, who routinely pack public hearings and town council meetings by the hundreds, raising concerns on a number of fronts: air and noise pollution, construction traffic, tanker deliveries, and damages to the local forest and drinking water supplies.
“I think our elected officials and our state representatives need to make a decision about what kind of town this is going to be,” said Kathy Sherman, who lives right next to Spectra Energy’s compressor stations. “Are we going to remain a small rural town or are we going to be the capital of power plants in Rhode Island?”
Ocean State Power operates a natural gas-fired power plant just five miles away from where Invenergy wants to build its plant.
Across the border, about 20 miles away, another company, NTE Energy, is proposing to build a power plant in Killingly, Connecticut. There’s already another plant in that small town.
That could mean four large power plants in one tiny corner of New England.
This report comes from the New England News Collaborative. Eight public media companies coming together to tell the story of a changing region, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
