Vox clamantis in deserto
Work interval
“Between Tides” (oil on canvas), by David Witbeck, winner of the Maxwell Mays Prize in this year’s Winter Members’ Exhibition at the Providence Art Club through March 6.
Tim Faulkner: Is fossil-fuel-loving Trump regime trying to sabotage offshore wind?
Vineyard Wind is coming to terms with the fact that its wind project is behind schedule, as accusations of political meddling escalate.
On Feb. 7, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) released an updated permitting guideline that moved the facility’s likely completion date beyond Jan. 15, 2022 — the day the $2.8 billion project is under contract to begin delivering 400 megawatts of electricity capacity to Massachusetts.
Vineyard Wind is now renegotiating its power-purchase agreement with the three utilities that are buying the electricity. The company is also in discussions with the Treasury Department about preserving an expiring tax credit.
The delay is being caused by a holdup with BOEM’s environmental impact statement (EIS). A draft of the report was initially expected last year, but after the National Marine Fisheries Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declined to endorse the report, it was pushed off until late 2019 or early 2020. Back then several members of Congress from Massachusetts claimed the delay was politically motivated.
BOEM now is predicting that the draft EIS won’t be ready until June 12, with a final decision by Dec. 18. The setback is significant because the draft EIS is being counted on to shape the mapping of other offshore wind facilities slated for the seven federal wind-energy lease areas off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
The Coast Guard recently released its Massachusetts and Rhode Island Port Access Route Study (MARIPARS). The report favors the grid design proposed by wind developers and discounted concerns about radar interference.
This navigational safety report also recommends that if the turbine layout in the entire Massachusetts and Rhode Island wind area is developed using “a standard and uniform grid pattern” then special vessel routing lanes wouldn’t be required.
The Coast Guard’s findings improve the prospect for development of all seven wind-energy lease areas. But the MARIPARS report and the draft EIS both require public comment periods and hearings.
Lars Pedersen, CEO of Vineyard Wind, said of the setback, “We look forward to the clarity that will come with a final EIS so that Vineyard Wind can deliver this project to Massachusetts and kick off the new U.S. offshore energy industry.”
This latest delay has again been criticized by members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation as a ploy by President Trump to demonstrate his aversion to wind energy and his favoritism for fossil-fuel companies.
On Feb. 5, two days before BOEM released the new timeline, Massachusetts’ two U.S. senators and seven members of Congress sent a letter to the U.S. Government Accountability Office expressing their outrage over Trump’s hypocrisy.
“Despite seeking expedited environmental reviews for numerous fossil fuel infrastructure projects, Trump administration officials in the Department of the Interior have ordered a sweeping environmental review of the burgeoning offshore wind industry, a move that threatens to stall or even derail this growing industry, and raises a host of questions for future developments,” according to the letter.
In a recent interview with the Vineyard Gazette, Rep. Bill Keating, D-Mass., whose district includes Martha’s Vineyard, said he believes BOEM planned to release the draft EIS much sooner, but stalled the report after political pressure from superiors in the Department of Interior or the Trump administration until after the presidential election in November.
“It’s clear to me that these are political decisions and not guided by wanting to mitigate environmental impacts,” Keating said.
When asked about the political interference, BOEM replied that the delays are caused by public comments that call for a more thorough review of a large and disruptive change to nearshore waters. Those comments cited the upsurge in new wind projects, an increase in the size of wind turbines used by Vineyard Wind, and potential conflicts with commercial fishing and navigation.
Meanwhile, investments in wind project port facilities continue along southern New England. Gov. Gina Raimondo has earmarked $20 million in her proposed budget for improvements to the Port of Davisville at the Quonset Business Park in North Kingstown, R.I. The work includes dredging, repair of an existing pier, and construction of a new pier.
Mayflower Wind, the next project after Vineyard Wind to win an energy contract from Massachusetts, recently announced its intention to make the New Bedford Marine Terminal its primary construction hub for its 804-megawatt project.
Tim Faulkner is an ecoRI News journalist.
'Physical truth into ephemera'
“Long Distance” (oil on canvas), by Iwalani Kaluiokalani, in her show “Magic,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, March 4-29.
The gallery says:
“Through movement and interaction, something beyond emerges in these paintings. Whether we call this connection, integration, or even divinity, we discover which both moves within and the boundaries of our perception. In these paintings, the artist has uncovered an embodied state of impossibility we could call magic. Magic is, in a deep sense the union of the impossible with actually seeing something that cannot be, yet is. These kaleidoscopic, repeated, rhythmic images exemplify the translation of physical truth into ephemera. The junction of what is and is not, through body and image, calls forth M A G I C.’’
David Warsh: Blame political choices, not economists, for today's mess
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
A couple of recent books by well-regarded journalists – Binyamin Appelbaum and Nicholas Lemann, have blamed economists for the current state of the world. Reviewing these in Foreign Affairs last week, the peripatetic New York University economist Paul Romer embraced the authors’ judgments and added his own.
Having lost track of the distinction between positive and normative economics (is vs. ought), the profession has come to think of itself and be thought of by others as a tribe of philosopher-kings, Romer wrote. Citing the OxyContin epidemic and the 2008 financial crisis, he summed up in “The Dismal Kingdom”
Simply put, a system that delegates to economists the responsibility for answering normative questions may yield many reasonable decisions when the stakes are low, but it will fail and cause enormous damage when powerful industries are brought into the mix. And it takes only a few huge failures to offset whatever positive difference smaller, successful interventions have made.
A third book, Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago’s Abandonment of Classical Liberalism, by economists David Colander and Craig Freedman (Princeton, 2019), mentioned by Romer, hasn’t received as much attention. It sets out the case in detail, with clarity and in depth. A fourth book, In Search of the Two-Handed Economist: Ideology, Methodology and Marketing in Economics, by Freedman (Palgrave 2016), offers the deepest dive of all, but hardly ever comes up outside of professional circles (where it is often discussed with hand-rubbing, lip-smacking enthusiasm, thanks to the extensive interviews it contains).
Accoding to Colander and Freedman, economics began to go off-course in the 1930s, when it embraced an ambitious new program that came to be known as “welfare economics,” replacing the “classical liberalism” of John Stuart Mill. The new framework developed slowly, led by John Hicks and Abba Lerner at the London School of Economics, Arthur Pigou at Cambridge University, and Paul Samuelson at Harvard University and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but in the 1950s, seemed to virtually take over the profession, coming to be associated simply with the macroeconomics of John Maynard Keynes.
The new framework was conducted with mathematical and statistical models instead of arguments about moral philosophy and curiosity about, even respect for, existing institutions. Believing itself to be an understanding superior to what had gone before, This new approach – now simply “the new economics,” abandoned the traditional firewall between science and policy.
Irked and, for a time, flummoxed by welfare economics’ assertiveness, especially in its Keynesian form, young economists from all over congregated at the University of Chicago, starting in 1943. Led by Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Aaron Director, they began to look for flaws in Keynesian doctrines, which they viewed as “a Trojan horse being used to advance statist ideology and collectivist ideals,” Colander and Freeland say.
Secure in their belief that markets could, to a considerable extent, take care of themselves, thanks to the powerful solvent of competition, the Chicagoans responded to normative science with more stringent normative science. They devised an alternative “scientific” pathway that would lead to their intuited laissez-faire vision.
“Because of their impressive rhetorical and intuitive marketing skills, the Chicago economists eventually managed to engineer a successful partial counterrevolution against [the] general equilibrium welfare economic framework,” write Colander and Freedman. But embracing cost-benefit analysis required abandoning the tenets of debate focused on judgements and sensibilities – “argumentation for the sake of heaven,” as the authors prefer to put it
So what does a present-day hero of classical liberalism look like? Colander and Freedman cite six well-known exemplars: Edward Leamer, who wrote a classic 1983 critique of scientific pretension, “Taking the Con Out of Econometrics”; Ariel Rubinstein, a distinguished game theorist who describes models as no more compelling than economic fables; Dani Rodrik, a rigorous trade theorist who asked as long ago as 1997, Has Globalization Gone Too Far?; Nobel laureate Alvin Roth, who likens the role of many economist to that of an engineer; Amartya Sen, another laureate, recognized for his “scientific” work on collective decision-making but honored for his policy work on the development of capabilities; and Romer, another laureate perhaps better known for his biting criticism of “mathiness,” akin to “truthiness,” among leaders of the profession.
All are excellent economists. But almost certainly it was not the economics profession that led the world down a garden path to its present state of discombobulation. In his Foreign Affairs review, Romer asserts,
For the past 60 years, the United States has run what amounts to a natural experiment designed to answer a simple question: What happens when a government starts conducting its business in the foreign language of economists? After 1960, anyone who wanted to discuss almost any aspect of US public policy – from how to make cars safer to whether to abolish the draft, from how to support the housing market to whether to regulate the financial sector – had to speak economics. Economists bring scientific precision and rigor to government interventions, the thinking went, promised expertise and fact-based analysis.
Far more persuasive were the natural experiments conducted in the language of the Cold War. They include the rise of Japan in the global economy; the decision of China’s leaders to follow its neighbors’ example and join the global market system; the slow decline and rapid final collapse of the Soviet empire; the financial-asset boom that followed Western central bankers’ success in quelling inflation; the globalization that accompanied a burst of “deregulation”; the integration that accompanied the invention of computers, satellites, and the Internet; and the escape from extreme poverty of 1.1 billion people, a seventh of the world’s population.
Rivalries among nations were far more influential in precipitating these changes than were contests among Keynesians and Monetarists, even their magazines and television debates. Political choices produced the present world – grass roots, top-down, and everywhere in between. Economists scrambled to keep up.
David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
© 2020 DAVID WARSH, PROPRIETOR
The same old, cold day
“The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
“Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.’’
— From “In the Waiting Room,’’ by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79)
Three deckers on Houghton Street, Worcester.
American Steel & Wire Company, c. 1905, employer of about 5,000 during Worcester’s industrial heyday.
We all swim in politics
Rhode Island Convention Center
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
With possible scandals swirling in and around the Rhode Island Convention Center – and such problems seem to eventually arise in every such facility -- we shouldn’t forget that having this attractive complex has been important in the revival of downtown Providence since the capacious facility was opened in 1993 during the visionary administration of the late Gov. Bruce Sundlun. For one thing, the building of the Convention Center led to a big increase in downtown hotel rooms, with all sorts of economic spinoffs, such as new restaurants. The only major drawback to its construction was that city’s main commercial inter-city bus terminal was moved from the Convention Center site to a depressing, wind-swept site on the edge of Providence, outside of walking distance for most people.
And yes, politics always enters into the running of facilities like the Convention Center. For that matter, politics (including nepotism) enters into the operations of pretty much all large organizations, in the public and private sectors. Much, maybe most, of human life is “politics’’.
'Inconsistencies of memory'
Work by Allison Bianco, in her show “Forget About It,’’ at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, May 9-July 31. The gallery says: “Allison Bianco is a printmaker who uses a combination of intaglio and screen print to depict landscapes diminished by massive oceans and infinite skies. Her vibrant prints explore nostalgia and inconsistencies of memory. ‘‘
'Joy shivers in the corner'
Here where the wind is always north-north-east
And children learn to walk on frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil elsewhere with such a lyric yeast
Of love that you will hear them at a feast
Where demons would appeal for some repose,
Still clamoring where the chalice overflows
And crying wildest who have drunk the least.
Passion is here a soilure of the wits,
We're told, and Love a cross for them to bear;
Joy shivers in the corner where she knits
And Conscience always has the rocking-chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The first cat that was ever killed by Care.
“New England,’’ by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), a Maine native and winner of three Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.
‘How in the hell did I wind up’ in Springfield?
In happier times? “View of Springfield, Massachusetts, on the Connecticut River,” c. 1840–45, by Thomas Chambers, in the Springfield Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“ route … brings me down and around to the city proper, a long, straight street in another country, with homemade shop signs in Spanish, blocks of Third World decay, citizens of many colors draped in windows, doorways, on corners, in parked cars, often with a look in their eyes that asks what you’re asking – is this right place, how in the hell did I wind up here?’’
-- John Edgar Wideman, on Springfield, Mass., in his 1994 memoir, Fartheralong
Chris Powell: Enough of Fotis, please, and cheaper housing needed in suburbs
Fotis Dulos’s police booking photo
For eight months most television evening newscasts and newspaper front pages in Connecticut have highlighted the disappearance of Jennifer Dulos and the suspicion cast on her estranged husband, Fotis. Now Fotis has killed himself and Jennifer remains missing and presumed dead and her body may never be found. Yet the TV newscasts and the newspapers are still full of them. Why?
In the last few days it has been because of the jostling by relatives over the couple's mansion in Farmington. The couple's general estates may be contested as well, not just by relatives but also by bondsmen and even Fotis Dulos's lawyer, Norm Pattis, who imagines the state prosecuting Fotis's estate for murder to oblige the lawyer's wish to clear his late client's name -- or maybe just to keep the lawyer's meter running.
It is hard to see how news organization should consider Connecticut so interested in probate details that are not only without relevance to anything that matters but also without the horror, heartbreak, and prurience that sustained attention to the Dulos case for so long.
While the substantial wealth of the Duloses may have made the case more interesting, Connecticut remains horrifyingly full of domestic violence among people of all economic classes and ethnicities. Several such cases lately have involved illegal immigrants who should have been deported long before they killed their girlfriends or romantic rivals. News organizations pay little attention to seemingly ordinary domestic violence cases, though any of these cases might have more relevance to how Connecticut and the country operate than who ends up with the Dulos mansion.
xxx
For racial and economic class integration, Connecticut needs more inexpensive housing in its suburbs. Rising housing prices may seem great for those who already own their homes but they are bad for society generally, since housing is as much a necessity of life as food and electricity. Rising housing prices are less a sign of prosperity than of worsening economic inequality.
But government's sometimes awful operation of inexpensive housing is often why suburbs want no part of it, as the New Haven Independent inadvertently demonstrated the other day.
The newspaper told how city police officers had gone to a public housing project and bravely subdued a mentally ill man who threatened his wife with a knife and then brandished it at the officers, daring them to kill him. The police could have shot him but managed to disarm him short of that. He was taken by ambulance to a hospital.
It turned out that the man had caused a similar incident with a knife elsewhere in the city last year. In that one it took an hour for the cops to persuade him to put the knife down.
Since the state no longer operates institutions of confinement for the chronically mentally ill, except for those who have already killed someone, people like the chronic case in New Haven increasingly are placed not just in public housing projects and other subsidized units but also in projects meant for the frail elderly. So advocates of putting more such inexpensive housing in the suburbs should explain why anyone should want to live near chronic cases state government fails to handle properly.
One of the heroic cops in New Haven said he hoped that the mentally ill guy would get "the help he needs." It sounds wonderfully humane but that mentally ill guy is a chronic case precisely because "the help he needs" doesn't exist. The help society and his neighbors in New Haven need is protection from him. He'll be back soon.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Raking it in at Harvard, Yale, etc.
The Harvard seal
Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary’’ in GoLocal24.com
Consider the FBI’s arrest of Charles Lieber, chairman of Harvard University’s Chemistry Department, on charges of making false statements to the Defense Department and to Harvard investigators about his hugely lucrative participation in China's Thousand Talents Program, created by the Chinese government to strengthen China's scientific competitiveness. It’s a reminder of how much the Second Gilded Age money culture has infected academia. With multimillion-dollar payouts to football and basketball coaches and university presidents and huge paydays via outside contracts to professors in the sciences, engineering and business faculties, what had been a calling has been turned too often into a business, instead of a “vocation,’’ in this “nonprofit’’ sector.
And now the U.S. Department of Education is investigating Harvard, Yale and other elite universities for failing to disclose hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts and contracts from foreign donors. How much of this is an honest probe and how much is politically instigated by the fact that most of the leaders of these institutions and their professors oppose the Trump regime is unknown.
For more on Professor Lieber, please hit this link.
'Between intention and accident'
“Introvert” (archival pigment print), by Daniel Feldman, in show “Commotion,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, through March 1. The show features digital works in which, the gallery says, elements “vibrate between intention and accident.’’
Daniel Feldman, Introvert, 2018, archival pigment print, 36" x 29".
From February 5 through March 1, Bromfield Gallery presents "Commotion" by Daniel Feldman, digital works in which elements vibrate between intention and accident; and "Plus One," showcasing guest artists invited by Bromfield Gallery artists. The opening reception is Friday, February 7, from 6:00𔃆:30 p.m
Llewellyn King: Ditch your optimism: U.S. democracy is imperiled
We are an optimistic people. And in today's world, there's the rub.
By nature, we are sure that the extremes of any given time will be corrected as the political climate changes and elections bring in new players. The great ship of state will always get back on an even keel and the excesses, or omissions, of one administration will be corrected in the next.
Maybe not this time.
The norms uprooted by President Trump are possibly too many not to have left lasting damage to this Republic.
Consider just some of his transgressions:
· We have abandoned our place as the beacon of decency and the values enshrined in that.
· America's good name has gone up in smoke, as with the Paris climate agreement and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear forces (INF) treaty.
· The president has meddled in our judicial system by intimidating prosecutors and seeking to influence judges.
· The president has blown on the coals of prejudice and sanctioned racial antagonism.
But above all, Trump has tested the constitutional limits of presidential power and found that it can be expanded exponentially. He has expanded executive privilege to absolute power.
Trump has done this with the help of the pusillanimous members of the Senate and the oh-so-malleable Atty. Gen. William Barr – his new Roy Cohn.
The most pernicious of Trump’s enablers, the eminence grise behind the curtain, gets little attention. He is Rupert Murdoch, a man who has done a lot of good and incalculable harm.
The liberal media rails -- indeed enjoys -- railing against Fox News but has little to say about the 88-year-old proprietor who, with a single stroke, could silence Sean Hannity and tame Tucker Carlson (whom I know and like).
But Murdoch remains aloof and silent. The power of Fox is not its editorial slant but that it forms a malignant circle of harm. It is Trump’s daily source of news, endorsement, prejudice, and even names for revenge.
There are two other conservative networks, OAN and Newsmax. But neither has the flare that Fox has as a broadcast outlet, nor acts as the eyes and ears and adviser to the president.
I am an admirer of Murdoch in many ways. But like a president, maybe he should get a lot of scrutiny.
Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia, where they dominate, have rejected climate change, and possibly played a role in the country not being prepared for the terrible wildfires.
In Britain, he has stirred feeling against the European Union for decades. His Sun, the largest circulation paper, is Fox News in print and was probably the template for Fox having campaigned ceaselessly and vulgarly against Europe.
After long years of watching Murdoch in Britain and here, I know the damage he can do and why he should be named. I must say, though, that Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, better than before he bought it.
The Democrats, to my mind, present a sorry resistance. None of their presidential candidates has delivered a speech of vision, capturing the popular imagination.
Democrats search the news for the latest Trumpian transgressions and get a kind of comfort by seeing, by their lights, how terrible he is. But there is none of the old confidence that the president will be trounced in the next election and the ship of state will right itself because it always does.=
Maybe it will list more.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Will entertain for food
The Absolute II Cardinal Bird Feeder
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary’’ in GoLocal24.com
This winter, I’d like one big nightime snowstorm, preferably with high winds (creating gorgeous drifts) and silent lightning, in which one could tramp along the roads in muffled magic. No traffic. Then, bright and early the next day, I’d like all the snow to evaporate in an hour, without congealing into a frozen mess, and the crocuses to commence popping. But wait! We’re better off letting the snow melt gradually into the water table
We fill bird feeders in the winter not so much to feed the birds per se as to bring them close to us so we can enjoy their colors (e.g., cardinals) and movement, to strengthen our sense that we’re part of Mother Nature and to tell ourselves we’re helping to keep beautiful creatures alive, as marginal as are the benefits of bird feeders. (Keeping cats indoors, where they can’t kill birds, is better.)
Our day after day of clammy, cloudy days, in the 40s, recall London. It makes one want to pull down a long Dickens or Trollope novel, pour a Guinness Stout and throw some coal on the fire.
xxx
We’re in frost-heave season. That reminds me to write that mixing regular asphalt with crumb rubber made from recycled tires both reduces frost heaves –and thus the expense of road repair – and cuts road noise. It also increases skid resistance. Perfect for New England.
Boost for Maine's innovation economy
Collage of Portland scenes from Wikipedia
The New England Council’s (newenglandcoincil.com) comments on Northeastern University’s plan to use a $100 million gift to open a new research institute in Portland:
“The new center, named the Roux Institute after its benefactors David and Barbara Roux, will focus on the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the digital and life sciences. Citing the Boston-based university as ‘an elite university that’s not elitist,’ Roux selected Northeastern after a two-year search for the right fit to lead the institute. The new campus will offer graduate degrees and certificate programs in order to help create a tech hub in the largest city in Maine. Additionally, the Roux Institute will feature partnerships with leading employers in Maine and across the country. The move highlights Northeastern’s continuing expansion, with regional campuses in Charlotte, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and London already established by the university in recent years.
“‘The Roux Institute at Northeastern University brings a new vision, critical investment and proven research capacity to the Portland region,’ said Dannel Malloy, University of Maine system chancellor. ‘It can be a game-changer for Maine’s participation in the innovation economy and create new opportunities for Maine’s students and entrepreneurs.’’’
“Because Northeastern’s new campus will offer only graduate programs, it won’t be directly competing with many of Maine’s higher education institutions, according to Malloy. The new venture can, however, provide both school systems with a potential new influx of students and opportunities for joint programs and fellowships between them, Malloy said. A rural state with an aging population, Maine has subsequently been facing enrollment challenges in higher education; the Roux Institute is a bet that the new Portland research institute can change that.
“‘The impact of the Roux Institute will reverberate across the region for generations to come. It will serve as a national model for expanding growth and innovation, and reducing inequality,’ Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun said.’’
Keep it plain, please
“Pilgrims Going to Church ,” by George Henry Boughton (1867)
“Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There’s something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.’’
— From “Puritan Sonnet,’’ by Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)
Leap year at the Chazan Gallery
“Total Lunar Eclipse November 8, 2003 “ (photo), by Robert Horton, in the group show “Intercalary Event 2020,’’ at the Chazan Gallery at the Wheeler School, Providence, Feb. 13 through March 4. Robert Horton grinds and polishes optics for telescopes and has spent over 40 years photographing the night sky.
The gallery notes:
”An 'intercalary event’ refers to a day or month inserted into a calendar to allow said calendar to align with the solar year. Feb. 29, more often known as Leap Day, is a intercalary event that will be occurring this year.
“Intercalary Event 2020” shows the artwork of, besides Mr. Horton, Katie Bullock, Sean Salstrom and Jocelyne Prince.
Tim Faulkner: Future of region's fossil-fuel plants looks shakier
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
The latest auction price for the ISO New England electricity contracts dropped to a historic low, signaling an uncertain future for power plants that run on fossil fuels.
The cost of $2 per kilowatt-month marks the steady decline of wholesale electricity since it reached a peak of $17.73 per unit in 2015. The price has been in free fall ever since, dropping to $4.63 in 2018 and $3.80 per unit last year.
Rhode Islanders learned about forward capacity auctions during the contentious permitting hearings for the Clear River Energy Center (CREC) proposed for the woods of Burrillville. In 2016, the developer, Invenergy Thermal Development LLC, was awarded an electricity purchase agreement from ISO New England for $7.03.
The capacity supply obligation, or CSO, became a point of debate as Invenergy argued that earning the contract from ISO New England proved the power plant was vital to the region’s energy needs and therefore the project deserved a license to operate.
However, the CSO was awarded to only one of CREC’s two proposed electricity generation units. Project opponents argued that the limited CSO proved that only a portion of the power plant had a place in the regional electric grid and therefore the project was too large to approve.
Invenergy argued that it could still sell the electricity from the second power unit on the open market and earn a profit.
But the Chicago-based company was no doubt in a bind because reducing the size of the project from two power units to one would require a new application, an expensive and time-consuming process.
Problems over cooling water and other setbacks in the application proceedings forced Invenergy to sell its CSO capacity during the years the energy facility was supposed to be producing power. The delays prompted ISO New England to suspend Invenergy from participating in the CSO auctions for its second power unit. In 2018, Invenergy was dealt another blow, when ISO New England rescinded the first CSO contract.
All the while, the CSO unit prices continued to drop as electricity capacity grew and demand held steady, due in part to the success of energy-efficiency programs and new renewable-energy projects feeding into the regional power grid.
The falling auction unit price gave CREC opponents further conviction that the fossil-fuel project was redundant. This reasoning was part of the argument the state Energy Facility Siting Board used to ultimately reject the CREC application in June 2019.
ISO New England, the operator of the six-state power grid, also forecasts energy needs and trends for the region. The nonprofit sees the drop in CSO price as a win for ratepayers.
“New England’s competitive wholesale electricity markets are producing record low prices, delivering unmistakable economic benefits for consumers in the six-state region,” said Robert Ethier, ISO New England’s vice president for system planning.
The pricing also reflects the growing flow of renewable energy into the grid. Of the some 600 megawatts of new electricity approved in the auction, 317 were from land-based and offshore wind, solar, and solar paired with batteries.
Behind-the-meter solar is also reducing demand for utility-scale power. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, New England added 493 megawatts of rooftop solar last year.
“This is good news for consumers all over New England,” said Bill Eccleston, a former activist against the Invenergy power plant. The lower auction price “also contradicts the propaganda that we need to be building more fossil-fuel power plants.”
“There’s a glut of (electricity) supply on the market,” said Jerry Elmer, senior attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).
Elmer and CLF opposed the Burrillville proposal and as intervenors argued before the EFSB. Elmer and CLF staff are steeped in local energy markets because they serve on ISO New England’s working committees.
“The big lesson there is there no need for new fossil fuel plants and I don't think you’ll see any in the near future,” Elmer said.
New Connecticut solar facility to benefit Ocean State
Rhode Island is fulfilling one of its renewable-energy goals by acquiring power from a Connecticut solar facility.
To help reach 1,000 megawatts of renewable power by 2020, the state is making another deal with New York City-based hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. In 2008, D. E. Shaw was the financial backer of Deepwater Wind, the Providence-based developer that won the contract to build the Block Island Wind Farm.
D. E. Shaw sold Deepwater Wind to Danish energy company Ørsted in October 2018 for $510 million.
This time, D. E. Shaw Renewable Investments, a division of D. E. Shaw, has won a contract for a 50-megawatt solar facility at a gravel mine in East Windsor, Conn. The state will not release the precise location of the project, called Gravel Pit Solar II LLC.
Without offering specifics, D. E. Shaw has offered to pay $300,000 for renewable-energy workforce development in Rhode Island.
Although it’s promoted by the state as a deal for Rhode Island’s three electric utilities, the agreement awards 99 percent of the energy generated to National Grid. The remaining 1 percent, or 0.5 megawatts, is credited to the Pascoag Utility District and the Block Island Utility District.
The 20-year contract must be reviewed and approved by Rhode Island’s Public Utilities Commission.
National Grid is asking the state to buy renewable-energy credits (RECs) for 5.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, the state is paying between 24 and 50 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity from the 30-megawatt Block Island Wind Farm.
National Grid selected D. E. Shaw from 41 bids. The Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources and the Rhode Island Division of Public Utilities and Carriers served as advisors for the selection process. Of the 19 projects that offered to sell the electricity below market rates, none were based in Rhode Island.
Ratepayers are expected to pay $30.8 million for the electricity over 20 years. Based on energy price forecasting models, ratepayers will save $101 million over the term of the contract.
Gravel Pit Solar II LLC is expected to be commercially operational by March 31, 2023. More details of the project can be found in the PUC docket. The proposed ground-mounted solar facility is estimated to displace 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.
Ferry funds
Rhode Island Fast Ferry Inc. recently received up to $30,000 from the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation to expand its offshore wind shuttle services at the Port of Quonset and along the East Coast.
The grant pays for costs associated with acquiring permits from the Coastal Resources Management Council, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Tim Faulkner is an ecoRI News journalist.
Proper places for gossip
Dan & Whit’s general store, in Norwich. Vt. It’s one of the rural area’s best known meeting places.
“I see no truth at all in the myth that rural New Englanders are taciturn — they love gossip as well as anyone I ever knew — the talk takes place mostly on neutral ground: in stores and barnyards, at auctions and church suppers. Your home is private”
— From The Amateur Sugar Maker (1973), by Noel Perrin