Once considered the “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future, natural gas faces a rapidly diminishing role in New England’s electricity outlook as the region pivots to massive offshore wind buildouts to meet emissions goals, industry participants heard last week.

Massachusetts officials project 25 GW of offshore wind generation in the region by 2050, translating into a volume that could be exported to other parts of the country, applied to manufacturing carbon-neutral hydrogen or used along with storage to provide electric heating for homes and offices.

Participants at the 166th New England Electricity Restructuring Roundtable heard that and more on Friday as more than 400 people tuned into the webinar hosted by Raab Associates and the normal physical venue sponsor in Boston, Foley Hoag.

Modeling the Future

The Bay State is exploring more than half a dozen long-term, deep decarbonization pathways by which the commonwealth can efficiently and equitably achieve Gov. Charlie Baker’s commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050, said Massachusetts Undersecretary for Climate Change David Ismay.

“Our models are literally still running, and we’re looking for publication in the December time frame,” Ismay said.

One scenario includes the region’s pipeline system delivering a decarbonized gas, but as clean imports and offshore wind increase in the 2020s, the number of megawatt-hours delivered by gas plants decreases, he said.

“By 2030 the model is consistently selecting offshore wind as the least-cost, emissions-compliant resource for Massachusetts to access, and its share of megawatt-hours, as do those for solar, increases steadily through to 2050,” Ismay said.

“By 2050, across all the scenarios we’ve tested thus far, and unless it’s constrained artificially because of siting or construction delays, the model sees offshore wind becoming the dominant power provider for emissions-compliant electrons on the order of about 70% annually for Massachusetts,” Ismay said.

Gas turbine output drops to a de minimis level, providing less than 5% of the annual megawatt-hours over the course of the year in 2050, he said.

“Despite that low capacity factor, high-efficiency gas turbines burning a blended fuel that includes hydrogen have the potential to provide value to the electric system in 2050.”

Ismay showed an example of two hypothetical August days in the Massachusetts of 2050. On the first day, offshore wind begins to ramp up and provide 10 GWh of production, scaling from zero at about noon to no more than 5 GWh in the last hour.

Two days later, the model indicates as much as 25 GW of production in each hour of the day, so closer to 500 GWh of production that day.

“Here, if we were not looking across the economy, we might think we have to spill or curtail all that wind,” Ismay said. “Looking across the entire economy shows there is no need to spill offshore wind, that the state can become a net exporter of clean power within and outside of New England.”

Questioning the Era of Natural Gas

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey on June 4 petitioned the state’s Department of Public Utilities to open an investigation into the future of the natural gas industry as the state transitions away from fossil fuels and toward a clean renewable energy future by 2050.

Tom Kiley, CEO of the Northeast Gas Association, in March gave a review of the natural gas industry to the ISO-NE Planning Advisory Committee and cited Energy Information Administration data showing that U.S. natural gas consumption grew in the electric power sector by 2.0 Bcfd (7%) but remained relatively flat in the commercial, residential and industrial sectors. (See “Natural Gas Use Rises in NE,” ISO-NE Planning Advisory Committee: March 18, 2020.)

But Susan Tierney, senior adviser at Analysis Group, said she’s been thinking about how supply is changing in a world of flat demand and described how over the past two decades, coal and oil dropped from 34% to 0.5% of power production in the region.

“My research shows we’re going to see a continuing role for natural gas, but it’s going to be tough,” Tierney said. “There have been steep declines in CO2 emissions since 1991, but over the next 30 years, the pace is going to have to be much faster. Changes in the past 20 to 30 years pale in comparison to what’s ahead in New England.”

The economic and social shutdown resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced New England loads by 5 to 8% and has led to record unemployment claims, including job losses in the clean energy sector, which may slow progress to the 2050 goals, said Melanie Kenderdine, principal at the Energy Futures Initiative.

Each state in the region ranks in the top 10 nationwide in terms of one or another area of energy sector employment as a percentage of the total workforce, while three New England states rank in the top 10 in terms of unemployment claims as a percentage of the total workforce, Kenderdine said.

Reframing the Issue

Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the industry needs to reframe the idea of natural gas as a bridge to future needs, perhaps as stepping stones, and showed an animation of someone jumping from one stone to another before splashing in the water where the stones ran out.

“Natural gas is not going to get us to the net-zero world that we need to be in, even though it will make some contribution in that regard,” Kimmell said.

“We hear a lot of arguments about preserving the optionality that gas affords us, and we actually agree with that argument, but sometimes it is transformed into a different argument of, ‘Let’s keep going with our natural gas system being dominant until we figure out and put in place the entire replacement of it.’

“That is an argument that actually ensures the dominance of the natural gas system, which we can’t do if we’re serious about getting to net zero,” Kimmell said.

“We for the last six or seven years have focused on putting a meaningful price on carbon emissions and trying to use that as the enabling, financing, and consumer-driving and investment-driving tool to make this shift within the region,” said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association.

“What we’ve engaged in the last few months is trying to take the next steps for us as an organization and as a group of generators in identifying what that needs, which we’re looking forward to making public in the next few weeks,” Dolan said.

Gas in the Region’s Buildings

In the petition filed with the DPU, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office recognized the state’s findings that the heating sector must cut its use of fossil fuels to achieve the state’s mandate of net-zero GHG emissions by 2050.

“In addition to its request to the DPU for detailed gas planning, the Mass. AGO has to rule in July whether to allow [the town of] Brookline’s gas ban law to be enacted, with probably a lot of impact on what other towns and cities do in Massachusetts,” said Jonathan Raab of Raab Associates.

“Do we really need to get much more active in state planning and utility planning on the gas side as we have done with, say, grid modernization on the electricity side?” Raab said.

“I would say it’s similar to some of the conversations we’re having in the transportation sector, in the Transportation Climate Initiative, learning from what led to the success in the electric sector, [which] I think we need to deploy in the building sector,” said Commissioner Patrick Woodcock of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources.

“That means from a construct of a renewable portfolio standard or a Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or state caps that decline over time to give predictability,” Woodcock said. “I think we need to have that dialogue this decade, and that’s one of the reasons we initiated the 2050 pathways study.”

For example, at some point, baseline efficiency improvements may preclude some of the state’s electrification rebate and funding programs, Woodcock said.

The utilities are doing their part to reduce natural gas consumption, sometimes in surprising ways, as Eversource Energy’s president of gas operations, Bill Akley, said when describing a program to shave the gas peak, especially in supply-constrained areas.

Akley said he did not want to steal the thunder from Zeyneb Magavi, co-executive director of Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET), a Cambridge-based environmental group that designed the networked geothermal concept that Eversource has proposed to pilot in their current rate case.

“My hope is that this pandemic we’re all in teaches us that failure to act is a lost opportunity to have the courage to reimagine, redesign and rebuild our energy system,” Magavi said.

HEET is proposing a new way to heat buildings where old gas pipe is dug up, through the “Geo-Micro-District,” an ambient temperature, shared-water loop connecting many customers for both heating and cooling.

“Some of the gas pipelines in Boston date to the Civil War. … Is this the infrastructure we want for the coming century?” Magavi said.

Sheri Givens, vice president for U.S. regulatory affairs and customer strategy at National Grid, shared how her company is “really looking at decarbonizing our gas system.”

“We announced our own internal net-zero goal for 2050 and are already at 70%,” Givens said.

She also described how National Grid is trying to meet the gas demand needs of New Yorkers, as well as the demands from state regulators and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

More than 130 New Yorkers gathered in an online forum at the end of May to protest the possibility of National Grid increasing the state’s supply of natural gas with additional infrastructure or increased shipping. (See Online Protesters Reject NY Gas Supply Plans.)