Officials from New England’s six states on Friday described their efforts to advance renewable energy goals despite the coronavirus pandemic.

“We’re really lucky to live in this region where so many states are pushing for clean energy,” said Catherine Finneran, vice president for sustainability and environmental affairs at Eversource Energy, who introduced speakers at the webinar hosted by the Environmental Business Council of New England.

Following is some of what we heard at the meeting.

Room to Grow on the Grid

Eric Johnson, director of external affairs at ISO-NE, focused on the changing resource mix in the region.

“The region has room for about 6,000 MW of additional wind resources without the need for significant transmission upgrades,” Johnson said, referring to the RTO’s 2019 Economic Study Offshore Wind Transmission Interconnection Analysis, presented at last month’s Planning Advisory Committee meeting. (See ISO-NE Planning Advisory Committee Briefs: June 17, 2020.)

The analysis summarized findings from three studies requested last year by the New England States Committee on Electricity (NESCOE), Anbaric Development Partners and RENEW Northeast. (See related story, Panel: Much More Tx Needed for New England OSW.)

“While renewables are only about 9% of our resource mix in 2019, with what the states are looking to do with the renewable portfolio standard, those numbers will grow dramatically,” Johnson said.

Small States, Big Goals

Riley Allen, deputy commissioner of the Vermont Department of Public Service, said his state has about 720 MW of renewable energy resources meeting a peak load approaching 900 MW.

“In the past, the peak load used to be well above 1,000 MW, but Vermont is following the path of the region, and our loads have been declining, including peak loads,” Allen said.

Vermont’s RPS started at 55% in 2017 and will increase to 75% by 2032, Allen said. “There’s legislation that was moving forward to update that to 100% by 2030, but the COVID-19 pandemic intervened and that’s been pushed to a later session.”

The DPS is involved in a rate design initiative, an eight-month process sponsored by the Department of Energy to look at dynamic rates, flexible load management, subscription services and gaining adoption of more advanced rate designs.

“We focused on several areas of emerging technologies: the heat pump, electric vehicle load, customer-sited generation and energy storage,” Allen said. “These are broadly recognized as loads that are pretty impactful if they’re left unmanaged, but with management, there’s a great deal of potential to essentially mitigate their potential adverse effects on the system.”

He characterized Vermont as having a roughly $800 million electric system today, “and in the next 20 years, we can expect an additional bill of $500 million on top of that with the addition of these new technologies.”

Carrie Gill, chief of program development in the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources, highlighted her state’s push to meet 100% of electricity needs with renewables by 2030 and decarbonize the heating sector, and its continued leadership in energy efficiency.

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo signed an executive order in January committing the state to be powered by 100% renewable electricity by the end of the decade and directing the OER to conduct economic and energy market analyses in order to develop workable policies and programs. (See RI Seeks to Lead with 100% Renewable Goal.)

“We recognize that we must keep energy supply and energy delivery rates affordable,” Gill said. “Fortunately, we’re seeing that many renewable energy resources are not only cost competitive, but sometimes represent the lowest-cost resources available.”

The heating sector is an important target because looking at decarbonization just in terms of electricity would be shortsighted, she said.

“We do not recommend that Rhode Island depend on one technology; [it should] look to multiple pathways. But either way, our fuel becomes decarbonized,” Gill said.

Rhode Island has been ranked among the top three states for energy efficiency for the past few years and is proud of it, she said.

“We lost 3,900 of 17,000 clean energy jobs in the state since March … but even though we have challenges related to COVID, we’re not going to take our foot off the gas pedal,” Gill said. “We see this as an opportunity to move forward and to advance the clean energy industry.”

Dale Raczynski of Epsilon Associates asked how the state will meet peak demand with a 100% renewable mix during periods of low wind or solar.

“We will see storage as a critical technology … so we’re working on understanding where the market barriers are and removing them,” Gill responded.

Hank Webster of Acadia Center asked if the state would offer incentives allowing gas heating customers to transition to heat pumps. “There are many benefits to getting off gas because methane is a very harmful climate pollutant and presents a public health and safety risk,” Webster said. “Recent reports about indoor cooking show terrible health impacts.”

“We are trying to look holistically across sectors. … We don’t want to foreclose any options to us,” Gill said. She also added that improving the energy efficiency of HVAC systems reduces the risk of spreading pathogens.

Gulf of Maine

Dan Burgess, director of the Maine Governor’s Energy Office, said that growing the clean energy economy is even more important now in the pandemic.

“Fortunately, the pandemic started during a shoulder season for heating … and Gov. Janet Mills has convened an Economic Recovery Council,” Burgess said. “There’s certainly some energy overlap, and we see an opportunity for clean energy and energy efficiency to play a role in the economic recovery.”

Mills signed an executive order last year setting a 2045 goal for achieving carbon neutrality and creating the state’s Climate Council to put it on a path for 45% emissions reduction by 2030 and 80% by 2050, he said.

“We’re on target to reaching those emissions goals,” Burgess said. “The electric power sector represents only 7% of emissions in the state, but we’ll have to keep working on that sector as we electrify transportation and heating in the state, where 60% of homes use heating oil.”

Burgess said heat pumps, which Efficiency Maine Trust has been promoting for 10 years, offer both environmental benefits and jobs, adding that “also there’s a huge opportunity in electric water heaters.”

He touted the first floating offshore wind turbine in the country, now under development by the University of Maine in the Gulf of Maine.

Matthew Mailloux, energy adviser in the New Hampshire Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI), also serves as the state’s adviser to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for the tri-state offshore wind task force.

“We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and obviously some work has slowed down as a result, but OSI, especially in the early days of COVID, was working to understand what the landscape was for the energy sector broadly to make sure that critical infrastructure was still able to perform,” Mailloux said.

Gov. Chris Sununu declared a moratorium on evictions and utility shutoffs, which was done through the OSI, he said.

“The Gulf of Maine has some of the best offshore wind resources of anywhere in the world, not only some of the best wind speeds in the country,” Mailloux said. “New Hampshire is a relatively small piece of the pie when it comes to actual federal waters off our coast, but we also have some great transmission interconnection assets.”

One challenge is that northern New England is an export-constrained region for ISO-NE, he said.

“As we continue to inject more power into the grid at those locations, there [are challenges to] exporting that power to load centers in southern New England, such as Boston or Hartford,” Mailloux said.

New Hampshire also has seen “a contentious debate about net metering over the past year or so,” and “we won’t see much progress on net metering this year but will if Gov. Sununu is re-elected in November,” he said. (See related story, FERC Rejects Net Metering Challenge.)

Environmental Justice

Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources Commissioner Patrick Woodcock said 2020 is “an inflection year for” his state, which is attempting set an interim 2030 goal on the way to meeting Gov. Charlie Baker’s 2050 date for reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. He referred to a decarbonization study being led by Undersecretary for Climate Change David Ismay to guide the state’s effort to meet the 2050 target. (See “Bay State Net-zero Overview,” NEPOOL Markets/Reliability Committee Briefs: July 1, 2020.)

Woodcock said the pandemic highlights the importance of a resilient electric system and the disparity of air quality across the state. “We are refocusing on how electrification may provide benefits for air quality and have started to contemplate either targeting incentives to environmental justice municipalities [or] targeting commercial medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, to ensure that our EV policies also have the co-benefits of improving air quality.”

The busy regulatory agenda included new regulations, which double the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target program to 3,200 MW, and mandate that any solar installation over 500 kW needs to be paired with storage, he said.

“The policy does include some limitations on eligibility for land that has been identified as priority habitat … so that our solar policy has co-benefits of managing our open space,” Woodcock said.

Massachusetts also is finalizing its Clean Peak Standard. “We’re trying to harness storage and other resources to ensure that clean energy growth starts addressing the shifting peak that has been contributing to high electricity prices,” he said.

Implemented last year, the standard mandates that a minimum percentage of retail electricity sales be met with clean generation resources or load reductions during seasonal peak periods. (See Mass. Inaugurates Clean Peak Standard.)

Susannah Hatch of the Environmental League of Massachusetts asked about regional collaboration on offshore wind and transmission.

Woodcock said officials are working on it and referred to a technical conference his agency held in March to explore whether the state should solicit proposals for a coordinated independent transmission network for offshore wind generation. (See Mass. DOER Explores Transmission for OSW.)

Victoria Hackett, deputy commissioner for energy in the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, agreed with Woodcock that environmental justice is important to protect those people most affected by polluting energy resources.

DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes instituted a policy that all the agency’s work has to be viewed through the lens of environmental justice, Hackett said.

Last August, about 40 environmental activists marched in front of DEEP headquarters in Hartford to protest state regulators’ approval of a new 650-MW gas-fired power plant in the town of Killingly. (See Connecticut Activists Protest Gas-fired Plant.)