ecO ‘lectrc’ty where art thou?

green power by S Migol Did you know that you have the option to choose who makes your electricity? Since deregulation in 1997, NSTAR no longer generates electricity. This is why there are separate charges on your utility bill for generation and distribution.

One of the hopes of utility deregulation in the late 90s was that it would allow for market forces to create a cleaner energy supply. The idea was that if customers were not forced to buy energy from their local utility they might express demand for less damaging electricity generation. Many academics and environmentalists were worried though, that consumers would instead focus on cost and become blind to other energy attributes, or remain ignorant of the specific ties and between power generation and the environment. This belief seems well-founded since more than five years into deregulation, fewer than 4% of Massachusetts customers had chosen competitive suppliers.

Bay State policy makers foresaw the difficulties for individuals in overcoming inertia to become informed and make the switch to another provider, an therefore included a novel clause in the deregulation act providing for something known as community choice aggregation. Community choice allows municipal governments to go through the competitive supplier selection process on behalf of all of their residents, permitting them to take advantage of the resulting collective bargaining power. Although Cambridge has not availed itself of this option, dozens of communities have, including those served by the well-known Cape Light Compact. Therefore, you are most likely receiving electricity through NSTAR’s default or standard offer service. Because NSTAR no longer runs power plants it acts as a de facto aggregator itself, and through an annual bidding process selects a provider for customers without a competitive supplier.

How green is this supply? What if you want something different? NSTAR began offering a wind-based power supply a little over two years ago, but there are other options available. At one point many businesses sought to be competitive suppliers in Massachusetts, but very few remain in the residential sector. Fortunately NSTAR provides a more up to date database of competitive suppliers. Simply search for your rate class (typically 01 for residential and 02 for small business) to obtain a list of alternative electricity suppliers.

Although it is still listed, Just Energy no longer offers service in Massachusetts. Neither Alternative Energy Resources nor Angora has publicly available information, and both did not respond to inquiries. The table below summarizes the information I was able to gather about the remaining residential competitive suppliers in Massachusetts. Prices are ¢/kWh for December 2009.

New England AverageNSTAREasy EnergyDominionHorizon
BasicGreen 50Green 100BasicGreen 50Green 100
Biomass6.0%10.1%12.4%2.1%0.2%
Hydro5.4%3.0%1.0%8.0%35.5%74.9%7.1%1.1%
Solar3.1%6.2%
Wind50.0%100.0%3.4%6.4%0.9%
“Renewables”3.3%8.0%5.0%
Incinerator0.5%3.0%0.6%
Landfill gas0.5%0.3%
Nuclear14.4%29.0%15.0%35.0%14.0%28.8%35.6%
Coal8.9%16.0%7.0%13.0%6.0%15.8%53.3%
Diesel2.1%
Natural gas38.0%35.0%17.0%27.0%16.5%35.1%7.5%
Oil24.6%10.0%5.0%11.0%4.5%2.9%0.6%
“Other”5.4%6.5%2.4%
Base9.229.229.228.68.68.6
Premium0.841.41.252.5

Sources:

How does your garden grow?

Jen's hands by jbrownell

April is National Garden Month, so get out there and get grubby! It’s an excellent way to get some Vitamin D, and fresh produce. Larger plantings or vines may also shade your home from the brutal sun of summer.

If you don’t have a yard, consider container gardening or applying for a plot in a community garden. Either way, you may want to take advantage of the city’s annual rain barrel sale so that you can water your plants with no-cost chlorine-free water. You can also feed your plants for free with compost available during normal recycling center hours (T&R 4–7:30PM and S 9–4PM) thanks to the city’s compost program and the local businesses and homeowners who contribute their food waste.

If you are lucky enough to have a yard, consider seeking Backyard Wildlife Habitat certification from the NWF. You should also have you soil tested for lead, especially if you plant to grow any root vegetables, herbs or leafy greens for the table. UMass Amherst offers a low-cost “standard test” which will warn you of any problems with lead, as well as provide information about basic plant nutrient levels.

To learn more about the stuff you’ll playing in for the next few months check out Dirt! The trailer is below, and if you missed the recent showing at the Boston Public Library, it will be playing on WGBH soon during Independent Lens. It is currently scheduled for April 20th at 10PM, but will certainly be repeated a few times afterward.

Getting Agreement on Energy Policies and Plans

Energy planning ought to be about avoiding problems and seizing collective opportunities. Cities (and nations) have problems when there is not enough energy available at a reasonable price. And, if they could get their act together, cities, regions, states and countries could reduce wasteful patterns of energy use and take advantage of “greener” energy production technologies that reduce costs of all kinds—especially environmental cost—and increase energy independence (i.e. reducing our dependence on “foreign” oil). Energy planning is about figuring out the best way to match energy supply and energy demand in sustainable ways. It gets complicated, though, because different groups have their own ideas about (1) the desirability of relying on various sources of energy; (2) the desirability of relying primarily on markets to set prices, encourage technology innovation and meet long-term needs, and (3) the appropriateness of allowing some groups and countries to tightly control certain energy supplies. In the final analysis, negotiations at the international, national, state, regional and local levels determine which energy supplies are available and what price we pay to meet our growing demand for electricity, transportation, home heating, and economic production.

Imagine a pie chart that shows the composition of our current energy supplies. We can do this at any scale. Let’s think about the country as a whole. Coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, renewables (like solar and wind power), and a few other sources each constitute a wedge. A similar-sized pie chart shows how we use energy: industrial uses, residential uses, transportation, commercial uses, and the like. Supply and demand must be in balance in the sense that we can only use what we are able to find and pay for.

If you ask what the supply and demand pie charts will look like at a certain point in the future, say 10 years from now, there is no correct answer. Different groups will prefer a different mix of energy supplies and want to reshape energy demand, either because a shift will benefit them directly or because they are committed to improving the net overall impact on society in some way. One thing is for sure, though, experts can’t tell us what the pie charts ought to look like. We have to make those decisions for ourselves.

If it were up to you, how would you want to alter the pie charts for the United States? The current supply is made up of about 29% coal, 16% oil, 31% natural gas, 12% nuclear, and 11% renewables (including hydro). Current demand includes 30% industrial, 22% residential, 28% transportation, and 19% commercial. The overall price of energy is just over 9 cents per kilowatt, although not everyone pays the same price. The environmental costs of current energy use and production are hard to calculate. Sometimes these are framed in terms of impacts on public health: x people die or get sick each year from diseases associated with pollution of various kinds caused by energy production and utilization. Increasingly environmental costs will be framed in terms of what we would have to spend to artificially do the work that ecosystem do naturally like filter air and water or convert CO2 to oxygen. These are called ecosystem services and we can price them.

Any change in the overall size of the “pie” will effect certain groups—either changing the price they have to pay for a unit of energy, redistributing job opportunities, reshaping environmental costs, or altering the balance of power in the world. Someone’s got to pay for investments in new technology if we want to grow the pie or change the size of a supply or demand wedge.

Efforts at present, at the city level for instance, to change the pattern of energy supply and demand include (1) reducing the amount of energy used by municipal governments; (2) encouraging individual homeowners and businesses to conserve energy and reduce their carbon footprints; (3) encouraging more energy efficient patterns of land use and development, and (4) looking for ways to encourage more sustainable electricity production (through re-use of brownfields for renewable energy, building trash-to-energy plants and the like). In a big city, these can have a noticeable effect. Overall, though, states and national governments will have to get involved or the larger pie charts won’t look very different in the future than they do now. In recent years, states have begun to require that at least 20% of the electricity produced within their borders come from renewable energy sources by 2020 or 2030. We’ll see whether these provisions are enforces. If they are, the size of the renewable energy wedge could double in the national supply chart.

Unfortunately, we don’t have proper forums in which we can work out agreements on how existing supply and demand pie charts should look in the future. Congress has never faced this issue directly; preferring instead to make incremental decisions about whether to subsidize one form of energy development or not (often, at one location at a time). As a nation, we have not set supply or demand goals; instead, we have just bumped along. As I mentioned, states have been trying to encourage investment in cleaner forms of energy production, but they are limited by the grid—the system of power lines that allows energy produced and stored in one location to be “wheeled” to other locations as demand ebbs and flows. We need a national plan to expand and modernize the grid. We also need to figure out how to store and distribute highly distributed forms of (renewable) energy. We need to decide whether we are going to maintain or increase our reliance on nuclear energy even if we don’t have a plan for storing high level nuclear waste.

If states try to change energy efficiency standards or subsidize new forms of energy production, they end up competing with each other. Localities are even more highly constrained. They can improve energy efficiency in public buildings, increase the efficiency of the municipal bus fleet and work with building owners to encourage retrofits that reduce the demand for energy. They can also urge residents to use less energy. But, most are not about to get involved directly in producing energy on their own. If we allow more drilling, maybe we can increase our reliance on oil and gas. But, how do we do that and decrease greenhouse gas emissions at the same time? Can we assume that technology innovation (i.e. clean coal technology or carbon sequestration) will resolve that apparent conflict?

What would it mean to create national, state and local forums in which we could negotiate agreements regarding the changes we want to achieve in the current supply and demand pie charts? At each level, we would have to bring together representatives of all the relevant interests groups, engage in joint fact finding (with the help of appropriately qualified experts), formulate comprehensive agreements regarding five, ten and twenty year objectives and commit to appropriate implementation strategies. These conversations would not be easy. It is hard to formulate overall “packages” that will leave everyone better off. Discussions of this sort need to be mediated by qualified consensus building professionals. At the national level, the Department of Energy could take the lead (in cooperation with the appropriate Congressional committees) but a great many other groups would have to be involved. At the state level, governors and legislative leaders could convene appropriate consensus building efforts, but first we would need to figure out how to define the scope of state energy policies and how they fit within certain national decisions. In every city, broadly-representative working groups would need to consider possible changes in their supply and demand objectives within the framework of state and national plans. Final decisions would be made, of course, by those with the legal authority to make them, but to ensure implementation, the trade-offs and shifting distribution of gains and losses would need to have broad political support.

In the end, energy policies and plans are political choices that ought to reflect the best possible scientific, economic and engineering inputs. Our traditional approach to making public policy—careening from one crisis to the next—won’t produce the interlocking decisions required. We need to commit to a consensus building approach to energy planning.

Sizing up the senatorial candidates

Ballot box dude
In case you had to work yesterday, and were unable to make the Environmental League of Massachusetts‘ Democratic Senate candidate forum1 at BU, we’ve managed to scrounge up some coverage of the debate. Although a live webcast was available, an archived stream does not seem to be however, NECN has a few minutes of video along with their summary. WBUR also has a brief, if blasé write-up, whereas the Globe’s article at Boston.com includes some colorful quotes.

The Massachusetts League of Environmental Voters—not to be confused with ELM above, but co-sponsors of yesterday’s debats—has compiled a set of resources which you may find useful in evaluating which candidate to vote for.

P.S. If you’re not yet registered to vote, applications must be postmarked today in order to vote in the primary; if you register as a member of a party holding one.

1. ELM is working to arrange a similar session with Republican candidates.

Jackfrost nipping at your nose

snowflake Although you could be forgiven for wondering if we even had a summer, it’s clear winter’s just around the corner. Here are some ideas to help you prepare:

  • Eat spicy food
  • Drink warm beverages
  • Use body heat instead of central heating: cuddle
  • Wear socks/slippers: warm tootsies = warm feelings

For other, more pragmatic tips, see the CEA website.

Free tickets for the Museum of Science

Museum of Science CEA has received a number of tickets for free general admission to the Museum of Science, and is making them available to interested parties. They will be available for pick-up from CEA’s offices beginning at noon on Friday 9/25, which should be staffed until 7PM on that date. Note: The tickets expire Wednesday 9/30.

Alas, this windfall comes a little late for you to catch Manufactured landscapes, and too early for Running the Numbers: Portraits of Mass Consumption. However, the museum has a number of other interesting exhibits—including several related to energy—as well as a special showing of the new film Food, Inc. on Wednesday at 2; advanced registration required.

The tickets were donated by The WhizKids Foundation, a Cambridge-based non-profit that works with local schools to improve STEM education.