White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Electricity Future for New England: Uncertainty and High Prices

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These days, in terms of resources, New England is poorly positioned to make electricity. As Gregg Cornett, president of Rhode Island Energy, told me in an interview, it doesn’t sit on abundant coal reserves and natural gas — the critical fuel in today’s electricity generating mix — or hide beneath the surface, waiting for the gasman’s drill.

Going forward the prognosis is that New England will make it through without electricity disruption unless there is severe cold, in which case the system will be stretched and blackouts could result.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the industry-supported, not-for-profit authority that studies electricity supply and predicts problems, says New England is at “moderate risk” this summer, but sees changes and stress in consumption patterns as the region shifts from summer peaking to winter peaking. This will put further pressure on the delivery of gas into the region.

Winters are going to be tough for the New England electric grid and the collective transmission organization that distributes power from and between the region’s utilities, the New England Independent System Operator (ISO-NE).

Rhode Island Energy’s Cornett points out that the area has continued to grow, but the infrastructure to support that growth — especially of pipelines bringing in natural gas — has languished.

In part, environmentalists have been responsible because of their desire to restrict all fossil fuels. Times of crisis, though, lead to the burning of oil — a much greater environmental challenge.

Also, because of the lack of pipeline capacity, New England imports liquified natural gas (LNG) from as far away as Norway, adding to the cost of electricity throughout the region. It also imports electricity from Canada.

This means that New England has some of the highest electricity rates in the country. Inaction has consequences.

The bright spots for the future are renewables, wind and solar.

At present they contribute only 12 to 15 percent of the total New England mix, but they represent the one resource that the region has aplenty, especially offshore wind. Currently, this is hamstrung by opposition from President Donald Trump, but the future is hopeful in years to come.

Cornett says Rhode Island Energy is enthusiastic about solar and expects this to grow, although power from rooftop installations now represents a decided challenge for the utility. It is by law obliged to pay top dollar for this electricity, and that is more than the power is worth in the market.

The law guaranteeing the high rate was passed by the Rhode Island General Assembly in 2014 to encourage solar installations, not to hobble Rhode Island Energy with high costs. Cornett says the utility, which is the dominant one in the state, gets no gain from the solar power which it has to buy under this arrangement.

There is irony in the energy shortage in New England because twice in its history, it has led the nation in energy production.

According to the 1840 U.S. census, there were 5,000 water-powered log mills in the region and many other mills, making cloth and grinding corn. New England had dominance in milling of all kinds, thanks to its abundance of rivers on which mills were granted “privileges.”

Rhode Island — with five rivers that had sufficient flow for mills — was a beneficiary of the boom. Most of the mills that survived were converted to steam and those that survived after that, mostly textile mills, turned to electricity.

In the 1990s, there were six operational nuclear power plants with eight reactors. Today there are just two: Millstone in Waterford, Connecticut, with two reactors, and Seabrook in Seabrook, New Hampshire, with one reactor.

All six New England governors have signed a commitment to investigate the deployment of small modular reactors (SMRs), but at present there are no commitments to build. This may reflect a national uncertainty about which of the many competing SMR designs with their various technologies will eventually be market-dominant and lead the way to a nuclear renaissance.

Meantime, power executives across the region are grateful they aren’t feeling pressure from data center developers and are hoping for mild winters ahead.

Electric utility executives used to list cybersecurity as their No. 1 worry. Now they say it is the weather.

You can engineer defenses against cyberattack, but when it comes to the weather, the answer is to hope for the best and respond quickly if there is an outage. The supply future is cloudy.

Old New England Mills — Where Profit and Beauty Entwined

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Across New England they stand as testaments to a time when the United States was a place of untrammeled confidence. The air was infinite, the water clean and abundant. At least for those in the ownership class, life was good and getting better.

They are the great textile mills of New England; magnificent stone and brick structures, in their way as beautiful as basilicas, found along the streams of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and elsewhere.

Water, as a motive power source, drew them to the streams. Then they added steam, hence the mills’ magnificent smokestacks: sentries standing lonely guard over the memories of a more confident time.

Mostly the mills are abandoned now, waiting a new use or the wrecker’s ball. Some have been saved by being converted into residential lofts and art centers. None will again make cloth, or provide thousands of jobs.

Before critics and designers began linking form to function, the mill architects of New England, these designers of castles of production, did so, using great stonework and imaginative engineering. They are stunningly handsome, the way that great bridges are; the spirit of enterprise encased in stone and brick lovingly.

So when and why did we develop a penchant for ugly buildings? Was it the downside of cost accounting? Why are so many modern schools dumpy and deformed? Why must we put our children to study the classics in structures that implicitly deny the classics?

Winston Churchill said, “We shape buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Indubitably.

In the second half of the 20th century, did we hand human aspiration over to cost-cutters, put it through a calculating machine and turn it out bent and spindled? Must we learn to appreciate the economics of urban blight, the strips of chain outlets that presage our arrival in any town or city?

One can weep now over the beauty of a mill in Rhode Island or a grain elevator on a Virginia farm. But will we weep in a century over the golden arches? Shed a tear for the mall? Swallow hard for Public School 19 somewhere?

If the abandoned mills of the Industrial Revolution were just a little older, we would characterize them as archeological sites — perhaps U.N. World Heritage Sites — and assure their survival for generations to come to marvel at.

Of course the history of New England industrialized weaving was not without strife and folly, greed and cruelty.

The loom technology was smuggled out of Britain by industrial espionage, labor conditions wereterrible for much of the life of the mills, and labor unrest continued through all the days of the textile industry. Royal Mills in West Warwick, R.I., for example, the former home of Fruit of the Loom, was the scene of a bitter strike in 1922.

 

Powering yesterday, charming today

 

Incidentally, this giant mill has been preserved. In a stunning piece of imaginative restoration, it has been converted into 250 apartments, keeping the feel and preserving some of the artifacts of the old mill. It is a restoration that deserves global recognition for showing how the 19th century’s relics can find life in the 21st century, just as the restored power plant on the South Bank of the River Thames in London now houses the Tate Modern art gallery.

When old beauty meets new high purpose, something thrilling happens.

The trick in urban architecture is to remember the people who are outside of the buildings as well as inside; those who can glory in the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower by looking up as well as going in.

For this full enjoyment, great architecture needs great public space.

Would the skyscrapers of New York be as glorious without Central Park to view them from? Would the new "Shard," the extraordinary glass-clad building in London, the tallest in Europe, be as great if it could not be viewed from the city’s abundant public spaces?

Yet urban design today, in an age of public austerity, makes no allowance for public space and has come accept the myth that economics are at odds with great city design.

I am comforted to know that the great squares of London, the avenues of Paris and the mills of New England were built for profit. It can be done. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate