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Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
Massachusetts braces for clean energy layoffs amid Trump's cuts
The cuts could hit Massachusetts particularly hard. Massachusetts has developed one of the nation's leading clean energy sectors, supporting the industry with money and policies. For example, the state in 2020 set a legally binding goal to slash the state's greenhouse gas emissions in half (compared with 1990 levels) by 2030 and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Advertisement The number of people working in the clean energy industry has doubled since 2010, to an estimated 115,000, according to the Advertisement Some companies are already feeling the impact. New Leaf Energy, a renewable energy developer based in Lowell, recently laid off 41 workers, or about 20 percent of its employees, blaming the federal government's decision to end the investment tax credit for solar and wind energy. Dan Berwick, the company's chief executive, said in a statement that the layoffs were a necessary step to remain stable in the face of federal cutbacks. He said the company's projects will continue to be marketed and sold on schedule. 'The pathway to developing clean energy projects has narrowed,' Berwick said, 'but it has not vanished.' Wind turbine technicians and solar installers will grow faster than any other occupation from 2023 to 2033 nationally, according to US Labor Department projections. James Estrin/NYT In addition to losses in jobs and wages, the report by the research firm C2ES estimates that the cutbacks in federal clean energy incentives will shave about $6 billion, or 1 percent, from overall economic activity in Massachusetts. Rebecca Tepper, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said in an interview that the timing of the bill couldn't be worse. The federal government is withdrawing its support as the 'We need all the megawatt hours that we can get from solar and wind,' she said. 'Solar is the cheapest and fastest way for us to bring energy into the state. It's bipartisan and extremely popular with customers.' Nationally, the Frank Callahan, president of the Massachusetts Building Trade Union, said the 'big, beautiful' bill will eliminate thousands of job opportunities. Some offshore wind projects have already stalled, and more may be shelved, he said. Advertisement 'This seems to be the biggest job-killing bill in American history,' Callahan said. But state and industry officials say they are confident that Massachusetts and New England will find a way to continue the transition to clean energy. 'This is a resilient industry and economy,' said Joe Curtatone, the president of the Alliance for Climate Transition advocacy group and former mayor of Somerville. 'It has put billions of dollars into the Massachusetts economy for more than a decade.' The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that phasing out federal clean energy incentives will result in the loss of approximately 300,000 solar energy jobs, including 6,100 in Massachusetts over the next few years. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Without federal support, Massachusetts will rely on state programs sponsored by utility companies, such as net metering, which allows people to sell excess energy back to the grid, and Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources Commissioner Elizabeth Mahony said policymakers had taken the federal government's hostile approach to clean energy into account when creating state-funded programs. 'There will be some hard times, but [the industry] is going to come back,' Mahony said. 'We want to do everything we can for the next couple of years to be there for them.' Yogev Toby can be reached at
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Public hearing scheduled for proposed solar facility near Woodsboro
A virtual public hearing has been scheduled regarding a proposal to build a five-megawatt solar facility outside Woodsboro. The facility, named the Clyde Young Road Solar Project, would be built on about 21.4 acres of a 36.7-acre property at 12208 Clyde Young Road, northwest of Md. 194. It would include about 12,800 solar panels, The Frederick News-Post previously reported. New Leaf Energy, a Massachusetts-based company, applied for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity from the Maryland Public Service Commission for the solar project on Feb. 12. This certificate allows applicants to construct an energy-generating station or high-voltage transmission line, according to the commission's website. The virtual hearing is scheduled to take place on June 23 at 6:30 p.m. before Public Utility Law Judge Kristin Case Lawrence. Those who would like to speak at the hearing must sign up by June 20 through the Calendly app on the commission's website, which is People who register to speak will receive a Zoom link for the hearing. Others can watch the hearing on the Maryland Public Service Commission Public Utility Law Judge YouTube channel, which can be found at In addition to public comments, the virtual hearing will consist of a presentation by the applicant and brief statements by the parties, including the Maryland Department of Natural Resources' Power Plant Research Program and the commission's technical staff. Written comments can be sent through Nov. 7 electronically through the commission's online portal at or by mail. The mailing address is Jamie Bergin, Chief Clerk, Maryland Public Service Commission, William Donald Schaefer Tower, 6 St. Paul Street, 16th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21202. All written comments should reference case number 9780. People can review a copy of New Leaf Energy's application for the Clyde Young Road Solar Project at the Frederick County Zoning Administration building at 30 N. Market St. in Frederick.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Massachusetts grid breakthrough could benefit customers while boosting solar
A pesky question has long stalled efforts to expand U.S. power grids in the face of growing demand and surging renewable energy: Who should pay for the upgrades? An under-the-radar breakthrough in Massachusetts may finally provide a template for answering that question. Over the past year or so, the state's largest utilities and regulators have approved plans for dividing grid costs between customers and the companies that build solar arrays. It's been a long time coming. The plans in question have gone through numerous iterations since utilities, regulators, and solar developers started working on them about six years ago, making progress hard to track. And the name they settled on — "Capital Investment Projects,' or CIPs — isn't exactly an attention grabber. But behind the staid name lies a significant advance for a state striving to fairly allocate the costs of shifting to clean energy, said Kate Tohme, director of interconnection policy at Massachusetts-based community solar developer New Leaf Energy. In fact, advocates working on similar efforts in states from New York to California are 'all trying to use the Massachusetts framework as a model,' she said. The roughly $334 million in CIP grid projects from utilities Eversource and National Grid that have been approved or are being considered by regulators are doing something rare in the world of regulated utilities. Instead of forcing distributed solar and battery projects to pay up-front for grid improvements that allow them to connect to the utility system, the CIPs spread those costs onto customers' future utility bills. Under the old system, clean energy projects regularly died on the vine because up-front grid costs were prohibitively high. That doesn't mean developers are getting a free ride, however. They'll still have to pay a portion of those costs back as they're connected to the grid, reducing the burden on customers over time. And every project in question had to prove to regulators that the grid improvements at large also deliver customer benefits, whether through improved grid reliability, enabling access to cheaper community solar power, or both. Massachusetts can't avoid these kinds of grid investments if it's to meet its clean energy and electrification goals, according to Tohme, a former official at the state Department of Public Utilities who was directly involved in some of the earliest CIP work. The state has committed to cutting emissions 50% below 1990 levels by 2030, which will require building lots of renewable energy and electrifying vehicles and home heating. 'In the short term, it's going to increase our costs,' Tohme said. But 'once the grid is modernized and we get distributed energy interconnected, it's going to drastically decrease our electricity costs' by replacing expensive fossil-fueled power with cheaper renewable energy and batteries. The landmark plan emerged as a response to what might be seen as a clean-energy success story — Massachusetts had too much community solar trying to get onto an overly crowded grid. The launch of the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target program in 2018 had created lucrative incentives for community solar developers, spurring a rush of applications to connect to utility distribution grids. As available capacity was used up, the cost of upgrading those grids to accommodate more solar power started to rise. 'For a while, the cost to interconnect was tens of thousands of dollars, something a project could absorb,' said Mike Porcaro, director of innovative grid solutions at National Grid, one of the state's largest utilities. 'But eventually the modifications grew so large — hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars — that it was hard for projects to move forward.' National Grid was encountering the same kind of interconnection backlog and upgrade cost challenges that have tied up utility-scale solar and wind projects on high-voltage transmission grids across the country. The main difference is that community solar projects connect to lower-voltage grids that carry power from big substations to end customers. Similar backlogs have dogged other states with lots of community solar, including Minnesota and New York. One of the best-established ways to relieve interconnection stresses is for utilities and grid operators to stop painstakingly studying each project one at a time and batch them instead. Such 'group' or 'cluster' studies of multiple projects seeking interconnection in a particular region allow utilities to conduct a speedier and more holistic assessment of the impacts they'll cause and upgrades that will solve them. It also allows grid-upgrade costs to be shared among the projects in the cluster, rather than foisting them on whichever project engineers determined would push that part of the grid over its existing capacity limit, thus triggering an upgrade, Porcaro said. But the approach has its limits. 'You're still sharing the costs among that group,' he said — and forcing projects to pay even a portion of those costs up front can still make them too expensive to move forward. To deal with that disconnect, the Department of Public Utilities launched its 'provisional system planning program,' the precursor to the CIPs, in 2021. The idea, Porcaro said, was to allow utilities to move faster on solving the fundamental problem for all of those community solar projects — a grid that wasn't being built out quickly enough to match the exploding demand for capacity. National Grid and other utilities already plan ahead to accommodate growing electricity demand from customers or to serve big new developments like housing subdivisions or factories, Porcaro noted. The goal of the provisional system planning approach was to find a way to similarly pay in advance for proactive grid investments to bring community solar projects online. 'The review and discovery to get these CIPs approved was no small feat,' Porcaro said. 'It wasn't a quick decision.' In late 2022, the Department of Public Utilities approved its first test case for CIPs — a cluster of projects put forward by utility Eversource, known as the 'Marion-Fairhaven Study Group' after two of the Southeastern Massachusetts towns in the area being considered for upgrades. Eversource estimated at the time that it would cost about $116 million in distribution grid upgrades to enable roughly 140 megawatts of community solar to connect to the grid. To avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of requiring projects to pay up front for the upgrades — something they couldn't afford to do — Eversource proposed charging them about $370 per kilowatt of solar they connected once the grid work was done. The risk of this approach is that some of the projects involved in the group study would end up dropping out, leaving customers on the hook for their unpaid share, Lavelle Freeman, Eversource's vice president of distribution system planning, told Canary Media in a 2023 interview. That put the burden on Eversource to plan a grid upgrade that didn't just make room for the solar projects but benefited customers as well. Fortunately, the same kinds of upgrades that expand capacity for community solar also improve customer reliability and provide headroom for growing electrical loads. 'We're also improving the substations, adding new capacity, adding new transformers and feeders, making the system more robust,' Freeman said. 'We developed a very rigorous algorithm to calculate the reliability benefits,' which ended up showing a roughly 50-50 split in the benefits between customers and solar developers. 'That went a long way toward convincing regulators that the cost-allocation principle would work.' To be clear, there are significant risks to committing utility customers' money to building out grid infrastructure to serve the needs of community solar projects. In Massachusetts, the state Attorney General's Office is tasked with protecting utility customers' interests in regulatory proceedings like these. A senior official at the Attorney General's Office who was involved with the CIP process told Canary Media that the office 'took serious issue' with how Eversource first proposed splitting grid-upgrade costs. 'Not only were ratepayers paying more than they should have, it created a lot of risk for ratepayers,' said the person, who was granted anonymity to discuss matters outside the official regulatory process. On the other hand, the official said, 'being able to have more homegrown generation is going to be important for Massachusetts. It is a cost risk. But how do we minimize those cost risks to ratepayers, and maximize those benefits to ratepayers, as we bring this solar online?' These concerns from the Attorney General's Office pushed the finalized version of CIP to shift more of the cost of new grid investments onto community solar projects as opposed to utility customers. That's not ideal from the perspective of solar developers, obviously, but it's far better than being stuck with the unaffordable upgrade costs they faced before. Having a known per-kilowatt cost locked in well in advance is also helpful, said Mike Judge, currently undersecretary of energy for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, who spoke to Canary Media in 2023 when he was vice president of policy for the trade group Coalition for Community Solar Access. Developers often need to secure interconnection rights before they can secure the financing and start signing up subscribers that allow them to move forward with projects, he said. 'There's so much value for a developer to know I'm going to pay $370 a kilowatt to connect,' Judge said. 'You're not waiting a year, year and a half for a utility to come back with study results to say, it's $5 million — and you have to cancel your project.' The model that Eversource established for the Marion-Fairhaven project is largely mirrored in the 10 other CIPs that it and National Grid have submitted to regulators. All told, Eversource has identified six groups with more than 250 MW of community solar or battery storage capacity. Porcaro said that National Grid has five CIPs that will enable about 300 MW of new projects — 'that's huge.' Massachusetts isn't the only state working on policies that aim to spur grid expansion while keeping customers' power costs in check, Tohme said. Similar efforts are now underway in states including California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, and New York. But to Tohme's knowledge, no other state has accomplished what Massachusetts has with its CIP structure. New York is closest, she said, with a cost-sharing framework that allows community solar developers to split up the costs of necessary upgrades rather than bearing them alone. But that still doesn't include the same 'build in advance, pay later' structure that the CIPs have, she said. At the same time, Tohme pointed out, the CIPs remain a response to a problem that's been hounding the state for years now: projects stuck behind an inadequately upgraded grid. The next logical step is to figure out where grid upgrades should be made before that kind of situation happens again. That's one of the goals laid out for the state's three major investor-owned utilities under a sprawling grid-modernization mandate created as part of a major energy and climate law passed in 2022. It's called the Electric Sector Modernization Plans process, and the Department of Public Utilities is now reviewing the proposals submitted by utilities last year to determine next steps, Porcaro said. CIPs are a part of that broader plan, he said. But the modernization plans are 'going above that and saying, 'plan for everything' — for everyone having an EV, and electrifying their homes, and specific goals for how much energy storage we need. It's a tall order.' Given how long it took to figure out CIPs, clean energy developers have reason to worry that this even more sweeping and complicated planning task could take even longer. Clean-energy industry group Advanced Energy United has urged state regulators to keep doing CIPs while it undertakes this broader new effort. Porcaro highlighted other work that can help get more clean energy connected even before the grid gets built out. He pointed to National Grid's Active Resource Integration pilot, launching this year, which is looking at ways community solar and battery projects can connect to grids that can safely absorb their power output during all but a handful of hours of the year. If those solar farms can curtail their output during those hours, they could connect years ahead of utility grid upgrades. These kinds of 'flexible interconnection' structures, as they're generally known, could help 'get us through now to when the full system could be built, or to get through certain areas where you don't need a full buildout,' Porcaro said. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on building out a grid that can support Massachusetts' clean energy and electrification ambitions. Later this year, the Department of Public Utilities is expected to issue its ground rules on how utilities should start to calculate the fair sharing of costs between their customers and the community solar and battery projects trying to connect to their grids under the Electric Sector Modernization Plans, Tohme said. Once that's done, utilities and other stakeholder groups will bring cost-sharing proposals to the regulator and start to hash them out, she said. 'So we have a long way to go before we have proactive proposals.' But just because it's going to be hard doesn't mean it isn't worth doing, she said. 'We have to modernize our grid. Right now we're doing it anyway — we're just reacting. We're just doing it non-strategically. And that's just as expensive,' Tohme said — if not more so.
