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McKinsey

Climate change conference highlights challenges ahead

By Doug Fraser
Posted Oct 10, 2019

Wind energy, alternative transportation among options offered to curb greenhouse gas emissions

HYANNIS — Weather is not climate, but the conditions Thursday were certainly a stage-setter for a climate change conference in Hyannis.

On the Cape, a multiday nor’easter ground away, chewing up the shoreline and downing tree limbs. Elsewhere, strong dry winds roared over a parched California landscape, and over a million people sat in the dark as Pacific Gas & Electric shut down power in an effort to prevent a repeat of the monster fires that ravaged large portions of the state last year, killing over 70 people. In Colorado, residents exchanged shorts for snowsuits after temperatures dropped 50 degrees in a day.

“I think one of the big differences between today and a couple of years ago is that today, at least three nights a week on all the national news, the lead story is some weather-related issue hitting some part of the United States, including tornadoes on the Cape,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who spoke to the Net Zero Cape & Islands roundtable conference on dealing with climate change in Hyannis Thursday.

Thursday’s gathering was the second annual conference investigating how the region could reduce its carbon footprint to zero. Panels spoke to the goals and realities of various technologies and strategies, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions through offshore wind power, electric vehicles, better mass transit and alternative transportation and renewable energy options like photovoltaics and heat pumps in addressing residential power needs.

“There’s no single answer,” said Steven Tupper, transportation program manager for the Cape Cod Commission.

The state Global Warming Solutions Act of 2008 established the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% from the baseline year of 1990 by 2020, and by at least 80% by 2050. A 10-year progress report released last year said Massachusetts had reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 21%, meeting the first benchmark.

But obstacles remain as mass transit, particularly the MBTA, hasn’t quite become an alternative to the car, and the state still does not have an offshore wind farm 16 years after Cape Wind sought to become the first in the nation.

Vineyard Wind’s planned wind farm, with 800 megawatts from 84 turbines, could power the Cape & Islands twice over, said Nate Mayo, the project’s manager of development and policy. But it sits in limbo as the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, in a move many decried as politically motivated, decided at the last minute this August to delay permitting at least six months while it studies further impacts.

“We can’t meet any of the (emissions reduction) goals we are talking about without offshore wind,” said Bruce Carlisle, senior director of offshore wind at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

The good news from panelists Thursday was that the state’s wind resources have too much potential, and the industry is too evolved, for the project not to happen. Larger, more efficient turbines and established federal lease areas have helped drive the per kilowatt-hour price down to one-third of the price of the electricity generated by Cape Wind, Mayo said. Plus, he said, offshore wind is no longer an experimental technology. The European offshore wind industry is time-tested, with over 4,000 turbines in service.

“The economics have been turned on their head,” said Mayo, who believes his project will get done irrespective of who is in the White House.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency put the transportation sector as the top emitter of greenhouse gases, just barely edging out electricity generation. Statewide progress toward emissions reductions for vehicles has been hampered by a rise in vehicle miles due to population trends and economic growth, the state’s 2018 progress report concluded.

Larry Chretien, executive director of the Green Energy Consumers Alliance, pointed out that the transportation sector now surpasses electric power generation after the state retired old coal-fired plants and introduced a nine-state cap-and-trade initiative. That resulted in a 40% reduction in emissions from electric power generation since 2009.

Cape Light Compact Administrator Maggie Downey said her agency was looking into ways to encourage low- and moderate-income homeowners to participate in renewable energy programs. High upfront costs to purchase products like solar panels, storage batteries and heat pumps proved a prohibitive bar to those income groups, Downey said, and her agency is in the process of developing a program to underwrite 100% of those costs to 250 low- and moderate-income households.

On the Cape, with tourism and relatively little mass transit, the transportation sector was an even bigger player, at 48 to 50% of emissions, according to Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority Administrator Thomas Cahir. He said some of these emissions could be offset with solar panel installations and encouraging more ridership through education and better route planning.

“With 1.6 million [people] on public transportation on the Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority last year, we took a lot of people out of their cars,” Cahir said.

Tupper said that road design and linking routes with destinations could improve use of alternative transportation like walking and bicycling. Cahir said his agency had studied how to locate stops or make improvements to encourage both walking and cycling to catch a bus. Tupper pointed to multiple road projects coming on line for Route 28 that would add both sidewalks and bike lanes.

Most on the panel held the goal of electrifying not only the mass transit fleet but industrial and residential vehicles as well. State incentives of $35 million helped the residential electric vehicle fleet grow from a little over 3,000 in 2015 to around 14,000 vehicles this year, said Steven Russell, alternative transportation manager with the state Department of Energy Resources. He’s hoping to shift 3,000 state vehicles over to electric vehicles.

As the owner of the country’s largest commuter air service, Dan Wolf, chief executive officer of Cape Air, would also like to be the first in the country to convert to electric planes. But he worries that may be a long time coming given the extended permitting process he’s seen for offshore wind, which is widely considered a proven technology.

“We need to force the federal government to use these technologies,” Wolf said, adding that he worried that all climate change initiatives would fall short if voters let things evolve without a sense of urgency.

“We need to get special interests that are blocking it out of the way,” he said. “This isn’t going to happen without an activist government.”

Markey was hopeful.

“The momentum is definitely on our side,” he said. “These are huge crowds showing up in cities across America (in support of the recent Climate Strike initiative) in a way they didn’t 10 years ago, and with it is coming the political power that will demand the change that is necessary in America.”