The State of Massachusetts is supposed to be the US leader in renewable energy and climate action, yet is actually a flop; but no one is admitting it because the Commonwealth is supposed to be a national leader. That’s already after it’s having flipped and flopped for nearly thirty years. All that’s left of this simulacrum are a few Draconian, profoundly harmful policies to force utility-scale power facilities onto rural communities throughout the region, such as in our rural communities here in the Northampton-Amherst sphere of influence. Urban areas - the cause of energy demand - remain off limits. This pattern has been underway with large solar projects on farm fields and forests for some years now, and people are fed up. Now transmission lines and energy projects beyond the scale of the communities forced to host them, threaten to make it worse.
A very large grid battery array has been proposed in Wendell. Just across the border to the North, a massive new transmission line corridor is being forced on the voters of Maine, who voted against it, apparently thinking they were in charge of their state. Most disastrously, vastly expanded large hydro power is going to be imported into this country. The Governor and Legislature now cling to hydro, transmission and batteries as their climate solutions, happily obliging Massachusetts ratepayers to pay for this on our utility bills for the rest of our lives. We are made to pay to poison waterways and fish just over the border in Canada, where Quebec Indians - Cree and Inuit - have resisted their entire lives, facing yet more generations poisoned by the mercury, lead and arsenic that hydropower dams cause in rivers, lakes and bays (and all fish, their main food source), all around them. Do Red Lives matter? These Indians are the third layer of new sacrifice areas coming from above. Local impacts of conversion of wild lands and farms to grid scale “renewable” energy resources is second. Do Maine lives matter? All are being sacrificed in a compact to save the reputations of politicians and cover up the failure to decarbonize metro Boston and major urban areas - but also the failure of rural communities to get our acts together on climate.
New York has joined Massachusetts’ neocolonial move. On December 31, 2020, Quebec Minister of the Environment Benoît Charette used his discretionary power to change regulations that eliminated the obligation of the Quebec government to conduct an environmental assessment in cases of an increase in power generation at hydroelectric facilities. The hydroprojects can now increase the flow of water through their turbines to generate power for Boston and New York without considering the impact of such modifications on traditional First Nations territories, or even consulting them. “This action by Benoît Charette constitutes a major infringement of the constitutional rights of First Nations,” say the First Nation tribes, “but this does not seem to worry the Minister too much. The concerns lie rather with the Anishnabeg of Kitigan Zibi, Lac Simon and Pikogan (Abitibiwini). Since they no longer have a say in an issue that directly affects the exploitation and preservation of their ancestral territory (Nitakinan), where....they asked to be heard in the context of a consultation on the interconnection line project, since the electricity destined to supply the State and the City of New York is produced in part on their territory,” they stated plainly.
So rural Massachusetts is not alone in being oppressed by state preemption. Rural communities everywhere face being sacrificed to carbon-belching urban districts. The effort to preempt local community authority over permitting, and the promotion of high voltage power lines, are put forward as emergency measures following decades of federal, state and local inaction on climate. The Biden administration has pushed preemptive measures over Local Control; Massachusetts’ Democrats, presumed leaders in climate policy pretend to demonstrate Biden’s failed, very stupid, originally Republican, idea: that forcing transmission lines and centralized generation on communities is a climate pathway. It is not.
Democrats used to protect Indians; Republicans used to protect Local Control. That is over. The State’s policies about how to change the energy system have failed and have now gone postal, but few people realize this disturbing fact. Republicans don’t want to address climate change at all, and Dems won’t admit their efforts have failed. Both parties botched the electricity industry restructuring a quarter century ago, but no one ever bothered to address this “bipartisan” disaster. Slouching forward from 1997 until now, after thirty years, the Massachusetts electricity industry remains in the hands of allegedly deregulated ex-monopolies that continue to control everything, and less-than-scrupulous energy traders and brokers offering fake “consumer choice” under minimal state rules. Stiff-armed by regulators and discouraged from implementing real change through local control, even municipalities with Green Municipal Aggregation programs throughout the state are mostly asleep at the climate change wheel, dreaming of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). Meanwhile, the solar industry, dependent on utilities for subsidies and payments, remains functionally captive to, and imprisoned within a “capped” ghetto by deregulated utility monpoly megalyths.
The problem with living in a backward country, is that the most forward thinking people in such places also tend to be backward. A global climate nonperformer, U.S. makes Massachusetts look good. It has never been good. But given the megaproject “solutions” now being forced on rural areas, it’s crecendo of preemptive attack policies is actually harmful: worse than nothing. There’s no one in a void of looking busy who is actually seeking to decarbonize the buildings that are the source and cause of energy demand. Real change is a no man’s land in America. You cannot solve climate change without reducing grid and pipeline demand. To not go to this heart of climate crisis is this Original Sin that pervades all climate collapse: a lie made daily by captured state regulators and corrupted politicians.
When states collapses, the people are sacrificed. Denying their ongoing failure to reform utilities, state leaders now see no alternative but to develop power plants out in the farm lands instead of encouraging farmers to farm, and in the forests - the remaining carbon sink, the surviving ecology after sprawl, and the happiness of people here.
The First nations of Quebec have it worse. Situated in a huge area where Cree and Inuit live 620 mi north of Montreal, the La Grande River watershed, the Phase II multiterminal is 1,200–1,400 MW will deliver power from Québec’s Baie-James region to Sandy Pond substation just outside Boston. Massachusetts’ Governor and Legislature authorized two long-term power contracts to leverage bank financing to build the transmission lines in Maine. Similarly, Western Massachusetts towns targeted by lithium battery farm developers are ecologically sensitive sites with very small communities using very little electricity. They have no need for this scale of power. It is not for local towns, not for Quebec or Canada, but for metro Boston. And it is for show: by ostensibly “progressive” political elites seeking to prove climate leadership by the darkest, dirtiest, meanest path. Governor Maura Healey will set bad examples for other states to follow. First Nation tribes in Quebec has sued the provincial government to stop construction of the massive powerlines that will bring electricity from dams through Maine into Boston, because it will leverage the further poisoning of their lands and waterways by the Canadian and Quebec government. Similarly, Western Massachusetts towns like Wendell and Shutesbury are adopting local bylaws to block unwelcome large energy facility developers. Both towns are actively opposed by the Governor, Legislature and State Attorney General. Both the people of Wendell and the Tribes continue to fight. Maine seems at a loss what to do anymore after voting against it. We share a common oppressor.
The sacrifice policy of Massachusetts is cannibalistic, It all goes back to electric industry restructuring 25 years ago and the imperative to transition the business model of energy for rapid decarbonization to work. Regulation failed, then deregulation failed, too, except for Community Choice Aggregation (“CCA”), which could introduce an authentic decarbonization pathway, and a few have tried under state regulators obstructing their way as these handmaidens to utility control have long done. In the policy stupor on Commonwealth energy hooch, municipalities have been slow to take responsibility, act locally, and really lead.
CCA is the green elephant in the room that could make dams, transmission lines and megabatteries obsolete. CCAs are taking big leaps in some places, like in California, smashing national renewable power records of the utilities. But not Massachusetts. A new game is possible in which technologies to decarbonize power, heat, vehicles and waste generate energy at the point of use, not with mega-facilities or new transmission lines. Distributed Energy Resources can be built anywhere, and energy users can own them: not just the utilities and Wall Street. This is what a real energy transition looks like. The falseness of electric restructuring results in a falseness of renewable energy for citizens of the Commonwealth, many of the communities already being CCAs, among them several megabattery-threatened communities. Buying RECs, and well-intentioned, they are fooled by the State’s fictitious certificate trading system. These communities believe they are receiving actual renewable energy supply, when they are, in simple fact, not. They have merely paid for certificates that the State allows them commercially to call renewable energy, legally. It is simply not true, a state-sanctioned lie, another ineffective “market incentive.” The two prevailing methods of buying renewable enegy, solar net metering and RECs, conceal a true deception.
Captured by the utility monpolies, the State continues to ignore the basic challenge of climate action, which is getting into the high density areas where people and businesses are, and decarbonizing those places with onsite renewable technologies that shrink grid and pipeline dependency. The State’s solar net metering system pretends that everyone may bank and sell their solar power back to neighbors using the grid, but eligiblity is radically limited to a small minority by both caps and an inherently limited funding source: ratepayers. Not everyone can be on welfare, because then there is no money to hand out. Blindly, a subsidy poses as a physical measure, as if that were a pathway to energy transition. It has brough severely diluted climate benefits. A mental sclerosis of electric restructuring, net metering and RECs define renewable policy today, and both produce a fictional environment with no pathway to energy transition. Change is becoming impossible.
Carbon reductions must be physical, not theoretical. They have to be real. They have to actually occur! RECs and incentives, like carbon credits, all amount to carbon fraud, now well into the feared climate crisis. Those municipalities that have sought to administer ratepayer energy efficiency funds controlled by the utilities, have been body blocked by State regulators protecting utility control of the funds in spite of restructuring law provisions for CCAs to control them - not to mention protecting utility control over solar tariffs and other climate-related programs. The resulting failure to reduce energy demand now “requires” self-defeating, destructive megaprojects. In its self-inflicted paralysis, Massachusetts leaders have learned nothing, but instead seek “emergency” powers to force transmission and megabatteries on rural areas: the logic of sacrifice.We are not learning from what was taught by other states with CCA, Massachusetts having the oldest municipal aggregation law, it was called, so have the oldest dumbest version of the idea. If you just look at the landscape of energy policy and climate policy here, typical of US-wide failure, the failure of restructuring has led to a poisoned environment in which actual climate action becomes intellectually difficult. Instead rural towns across the state face these Draconian measures. People need to recognize the destructiveness and threat level of failed states to democracy and meeting addressable carbon by the UN 2030 deadline. That is different. Just not the Same Old Thing turned up to ten: what Governor Healey, Democratic legislators are doing, often with bipartisan support. Not white lies. Real Change.
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