Foot by foot
New England Clean Energy Connect map
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
There’s recently been progress, albeit still too slow, on making New England’s energy greener.
First, there’s that a state jury in Maine has voted 9-0 to let proceed the long-delayed transmission line for moving electricity from Hydro Quebec into our region. In a deeply dubious move, foes of the line, including three companies with natural-gas facilities in the state, had sought to kill the Avangrid Inc. project, called New England Clean Energy Connect. They did this by putting up a ballot question approved by voters after a massive campaign against the project that was aimed at retroactively killing Avangrid’s project, which regulators had approved. Armed with permits, the company had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars before the ballot question to clear the wooded, mostly wilderness route, logically assuming that it could legally do so. Talk about unfair
The jury verdict came in the wake of a Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling that in effect backed the continuation of the project.
It seems that as of this writing that the project will be completed, adding more clean juice to the region’s grid to such other new green-energy production as also-too-long-delayed offshore wind projects and solar. (Will nuclear fusion to generate electricity eventually be our savior? Research on it, much of it happening in New England, is coming along at a good clip.)
Utility Dive reported:
Anne George, spokesperson for ISO New England (which manages the region’s grid), said that it’s pleased that the project can move forward.
“The New England states’ ambitious climate goals will require building significant amounts of new infrastructure in a region where building infrastructure has been difficult,’’ she said.
Phelps Turner, a senior lawyer at the Conservation Law Foundation, said the delay caused by the legal challenge is “symptomatic of building energy infrastructure in New England.”
“We lost a lot of time.’’
New England, despite many of its citizens’ progressive rhetoric, is a remarkably Nimby place, in energy matters, housing and some other fields. Many Red States have done far more than New England in setting up renewable-energy operations.
Then there are such little noted options as geothermal. Consider National Grid’s pilot program at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. The company will use boreholes to see if a geothermal network can be established there using piping and pumps to pull heat out of the ground to warm the university’s buildings in cold weather and then pump heat from them into the ground to cool them in the summer.
#New England Clean Energy Connect