A public meeting held Monday for a planned electrical substation in the East Boston neighborhood shined a light on the juxtaposition of long lead times for transmission planning and new energy transition goals.

Eversource Energy first identified a need for new transmission to accommodate increased demand in the East Boston area in 2014. Two new transmission lines were built between existing substations in the nearby cities of Chelsea and Everett as part of the utility’s Mystic-East Eagle-Chelsea Reliability Project.

But opponents of the new substation argue that renewable resources could meet that demand.

The substation was approved for construction by the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board (EFSB) in 2017, with the condition that Eversource and the city of Boston consider moving the substation away from a fish processing company and closer to a playground. The board held the meeting to determine whether to approve the change. Opponents of the project called on the board to reconsider the project based on public health and clean energy concerns.

Marcos Luna, a local resident and professor in the Geography and Sustainability Department of Salem State University, said during the meeting that the policies that allow for the approval of the substation “lag reality” given the state’s target for net-zero emissions by 2050.

An analysis led by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) found that installing rooftop solar panels in the East Boston neighborhood could meet increased electricity demand in the area while cutting customers’ electric bills and reducing emissions.

UCS conducted the study with GreenRoots, a local environmental justice organization, and found that deploying rooftop solar on a third of triple-decker buildings in the area could provide close to 10 MW of solar capacity and that the households identified in the study could save $60 to $120/month on their electricity bills.

Pairing those solar systems with a typical battery system could add more than 9 MWh of energy storage, the study said. Furthermore, the systems in aggregate could cost 40% less than the $50 million Eversource proposal.

The study also found that the solar systems could reduce emissions from electricity consumption in the buildings by 40% compared to using power generated by fossil fuels. With energy storage batteries, the solar could reduce emissions by 70%.

Demand Concerns

Patrick Woodcock, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, told attendees of the EFSB meeting that increasing electrification of buildings and transportation will drive up load, particularly for heating.

“We are increasingly seeing electrification as our long-term, upcoming plan” for reducing emissions in the state, he said, necessitating additional transmission infrastructure.

He noted that adding that solar and energy efficiency standards are also driving load down, but there is not a consensus on how that trend will manifest in the area around the planned substation.

Bryndis Woods, a senior researcher at the nonprofit consulting group Applied Economics Clinic, said that Eversource has not presented sufficient evidence for the need of the planned substation. The company is basing its load increase forecast on a 2015 ISO-NE Capacity, Energy, Loads and Transmission report, which predicted a 1% increase in load per year.

Woods testified that local load has only been growing by 0.4%/year, and load growth in the area is forecasted to be flat to negative.

Bob Clarke, director of transmission and citing for Eversource, told RTO Insider that while the utility does not expect load to increase as much as it originally predicted in East Boston, the Chelsea substation’s load will exceed system capacity by 2022, and there is no room to expand that substation.

Eversource’s forecasting is different from ISO-NE’s, said David Rosenzweig, the attorney representing the utility before the EFSB. Logan Airport, which is in East Boston, is expecting a 10-MW increase in demand because of expansion, and new planned development in the area will consist of 10.5 million square feet of mixed-use building space to be constructed over the next 20 years, Rosenzweig said.

With these significant load increases, East Boston is “in great vulnerability” of supply shortages or even outages if the substation is not built, he said.