Want to know the candidates’ opinions on environmental issues around zoning, gas infrastructure, and more? Green Newton & Newton 350 Mass asked the questions. Here are the candidates’ replies:
Candidates and the environment
by Jerry Reilly | Oct 13, 2021 | Newton | 31 comments
Thank you for sharing this and thank you to Green Newton. Some of the candidates have very thoughtful and well-articulated positions on steps that Newton can take to mitigate climate change and reading those has been influential in helping me make decisions on my votes. I’m happy that with a few exceptions there is general consensus on steps that city council must be taking to reduce Newton’s carbon footprint and the urgency of those actions.
I don’t understand this near consensus on all-electric heating for homes. So what happens when there’s a bad storm and power is knocked out for several days? We all freeze? Massive home damage due to frozen pipes? A small generator will provide enough power to get a gas furnace up and going, but it’s a different matter if you’re relying on electricity to heat the home.
Also, unless we have 100% renewable energy, electric heating is quite bad for the environment. You burn a fossil fuel, convert to electricity (losses occur), transmit over high voltage lines (more losses), and then convert the electricity back to heat. Or you simply burn the fossil fuel in your furnace and generate heat (much fewer losses and therefore less environmentally damaging). Also, solar power is weakest in the winter… when electricity demands for heating would be highest. So you will most likely need fossil fuels to generate the electricity needed for heating.
Tim,
Your question didn’t fit the narrative. Next!
But in all seriousness, i think its possible but VERY expensive for older new England homes.
– need to fully insulate a old house that was designed to breathe. So potential rot problems if not extremely carefully
– battery storage for solar to cover outrages. Very expensive
– can no longer use steam radiators. Very expensive to convert to baseboard or hvac pipes
– geothermal. Very expensive with a comlex pump system (maintenance)
New homes should be a no brainer
Tim: what happens currently when power is knocked out? Oil and gas boilers run on electricity. Eventually we will have distributed generation with energy stored in battery packs in our homes so during an outage you can rely on batteries, there is also the possibility of EVs powering the home for short periods of time during outages from their stored battery energy. Our current grid is not reliable nor resilient, we can not only clean up the grid but make it more resilient. Re the electric grid, indeed it is moving to all renewable. Mass. is called the “Saudi Arabia of wind” with huge offshore wind installations coming for example.
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/jennifer-chen/lost-transmission-worlds-biggest-machine-needs-update
We should also start to bury the lines when possible.
That way trees don’t have to be horribly pruned, and branches won’t fall on wires.
@ Emily – I understand the theory but I don’t see how the math works. It seems that a typical electric furnace consumes 10-50kw. Suppose the power goes out after a blizzard and we have to run the furnace off a backup battery. A Tesla Powerwall battery has a capacity of 13.5kwh. So assume in the best case scenario, you have a 10kw electric furnace (i.e., super efficient, small home). You get 1.35 hours of furnace time (13.5/10). A 30kw electric furnace would run for less than a half hour (13.5/30). That’s not enough for an extended outage. Heat pumps, which can bring down usage, are less effective in very cold weather.
In contrast, a blower for a gas furnace uses 0.4kw, so you can run it off a battery for much longer (34 hours: 13.5/0.4). Or use a portable generator.
Please let me know what I am missing here. I am concerned about this because climate change is leading to more extreme weather events, and I don’t think electric heat is a resilient solution for a community exposed to nor’easter blizzards.
Renewable natural gas sourced from captured landfill, food waste, agricultural, and wastewater methane has a place in the clean energy mix, alongside renewable electricity.
(disclaimer: i’m active in the industry)
Yes, it is possible for people to run a gas or oil furnace off a generator. How many people in Newton have ever done that? We are dependent on the electricity grid, and we need to fix it.
And that’s said as someone who is still concerned about the price differential between natural gas heating and “contractor special” electric heating. Contractors make decisions based on building price and home sale price, not ongoing homeowner’s costs, and they may saddle home buyers with a real cost burden far into the future. No one wants to rip out a new system just to incrementally improve its efficiency.
Adam B: your idea about waste methane is good. But how much comes from those sources? If we were starting from scratch, would it justify our natural gas physical plant? It seems that the use of waste methane will only perpetuate the use of natural gas from all sources. Again, I am a realist and I celebrate the closing of every dirty coal and oil plant, even if it means a short term increase in natural gas use. But our natural gas infrastructure is leaky, vulnerable, and dangerous (I didn’t use to believe it, but shocking stuff happened in our own state). NGrid finally fixed a ten year old leak in front of our house last night, took six guys most of the day. It isn’t scalable.
Final heresy: nuclear power is our best hope for carbon neutrality. France is the closest major country to it because they turn their back on the technology. Germany shifted back to coal.
Thanks for this discussion, which is refreshingly long on substance and short on vitriol. I must express my resistance to a return to nuclear power though it has many honorable adherents. It’s not just the danger of nuclear accident a la Chernobyl. Until we develop a fail-safe means of storing spent nuclear fuel, renewables seem a better bet to me. I wonder, nonetheless, if the reliance on lithium, from automobiles to storage batteries to be used during power outages, compromises somewhat the push towards electrification.
My home, by the way, is 100% electricity, with mini-splits, electric stove, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, and hot water heater. The basement dehumidifier probably consumes more electricity than anything else! It helps that we have 25 solar panels on our roof. Our electric bills are minimal, and much of the year we generate more energy than we use…and we drive an electric car!
Thanks for posting this– just catching up on this post, I get the questions about electric heat (it it too soon to goo all-in? It’s worth asking the questions), but to the general questions, to me it is telling who responded and who didn’t (understanding there could be legitimate reasons answers did not get in)
All who did are generally progressive in some manner, and I appreciated John Oliver’s policy-centric response., to cherrypick but one example.
Tim makes a very good point regarding heating during power outages or forced brownouts. If we moved as fast as some want, before a lot of electric generation capacity is put in place, you can expect brownouts and higher rates.
That said – heading toward fewer combustion sources makes sense.
Nuclear can do so much to help. Compare the deaths from combustion generation pollution, harm to ecosystems from pollution and spills, fracking, global warming etc. Nuclear shines. Yet, it has a bogey man aspect to it.
Spent fuel is nasty stuff but there are places to put it. Can anyone guarantee nothing bad will happen for 10,000 plus years? No. Yet that seems to be the hurdle in place.
Depending exclusively on any highly centralized vertically integrated infrastructure is risky.
Decentralized distributed renewable energy and storage provides resilience and climate mitigation simultaneously. These complement & alleviate outage risk from the large scale clean energy infrastructure we also need. I call this scale diversity.
I like Nathan’s idea of distributed energy generation and storage. I remember the first time I saw it, in a 1960’s Popular Science magazine that was lying around the family house when I was growing up. They, however, thought we’d have neighborhood nuclear reactors.
Those innocent times, those dangerous dreams.
We should recognize (and I know Nathan does) the scale and complexity of converting to such a system, though. Renewables themselves can’t just be local if we want them resilient. Community solar and community wind need to get power from elsewhere on cloudy, still days and at night. Power demand is also not well-correlated to the location of power supply.
So we need distributed energy storage (potentially on a massive scale) and multi-scale interconnection and supply, all working around things as arcane as synchronized alternating current and local zoning codes. All possible, but all hugely challenging in a country that seems to have forgotten how to build and maintain infrastructure. That the grid even begins to work right now is a miracle.
Even though it’s really a place we should get, I don’t know how we get there in this country.
My sister lives out near Gardener, and has horses and a couple of goats and when the power goes out she has a gas generator for 1/2 the house and the barn. Her well has an electric pump so if the power goes out she has no water( and neither do the animals). I believe she checked her house for solar capability a few years ago but decided that she was going to retire and move in the next 10 years and the generator was the simpler solution in the long run. She has had to use the generator at least once a year for the last 5 years.
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People on the MWRA water system (not to mention sewer) don’t know how lucky they are. Just a generation ago, when my grandfather moved out to the “farm” ( they thought the clean air would improve his health) the well would sometimes run dry in August, and my mom would get water for him a mile away at a fresh water spring. This was in the late 40s.
My parents owned a house in the Adirondacks that was all electric. And yes, it was an older home with steam radiators and an electric furnace. Older homes are not an impediment to electric heating systems.
Margaret albright,
Would be interested to know the size and cost(including maintenance and montly bills during peak winter) for the electric conversion.
If the council could help residents avoid the “newton” contractors markup, it would help immensely.
Bugek, the furnace is extremely small – hangs on the wall. They had a separate water heater, but newer units supply both heat and hot water. It is safe, clean and quiet.
Most Adirondack communities have a municipal light plant – mostly hydro – and it is the cheapest form of energy available. There is no natural gas utility so the only alternatives to electric are oil or propane.
Going all electric is an admirable goal and need to be done.
But until Technology catches up, all were really doing is moving where the pollution is created from our homes to the power plants (and all the good reasons above).
When the technology catches up, I’ll be the first in line for both our cars and home. Promise.
@Rick Frank. You are absolutely right about how fortunate we are to be on the MWRA water and sewer systems. I worked on projects all over the country while at EPA and I was appalled at how horrible the drinking water was in so many (if not most) of the states and cities I visited. The water from the Potomac River in Washington D.C where I spent most of my time was particularly gross, particularly during the long summer months. One Newton resident who deserves a lot of credit for the current quality of our drinking water is former Mayor David Cohen. While a state rep, David chaired the committee that had oversight for implementing a program to protect the Wachusetts Reservoir watershed that was threatened by development and faulty septic systems. Wachusetts Reservoir is the connecting point between Quabbin Reservoir and the MWRA communities. David deftly worked with affected municipalities, residents and interests to forge agreement on a watershed protection program that actually enhanced the quality of the water that ultimately gets to Newton. People who lived here before the mid 1980s will remember how foul the water was beginning to taste before these improvements came on line. David still gets criticism for some of the things he did as Mayor, but he was one hell of a great and highly respected state legislator
Margret albright,
Would be awesome if the city could help facilitate bulk purchases of green conversions.
Ie work with contracters for bulk discounts to residents and fast track any permitting issues
For example, geothermal would be extremely cost efficient if houses abutting to mine could also take advantage of the same underground pipes.
At the very least, make the process as pain/stress free as possible for residents. For some, its not the cost but thr headaches of dealing with unreliable/untrustworthy contractors
@Matt Lai, the time is now! It’s easy and fairly priced to go all renewable for your electricity in Newton.
@John – that part I already did
Just not ready to goto solar panels for the house and electric vehicles. But as soon as the tech is there, we’re in!
Bugek, I see that Mass Save is providing rebates for heat pump conversions. I would guess they are for other conversions as well. We could do with more promotion of the Mass Save incentives.
Not to dredge up election-related stuff, but this is relevant to the discussion we were having here:
https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/12/11/rolling-blackouts-possible-this-winter-regional-grid-warns
This is basically the downside of electric heat. Extended cold snap leads to rolling blackouts, and if you heat your home with electric heat, your house cannot be heated. During a “cold snap” no less… which would be very bad.
@Tim – true …. but my oil based heat will also not work if the power is out
@Jerry – true, but a modest-sized home battery or a small generator provides sufficient power to turn on your furnace. Not the case if you’re using electric to heat your entire home.
Yes, definitely do’able but not simple or cheap – i.e. adding a backup power system to your home for the occasional blackout looks like a $5K -$10K job …. though not a pratical option if you have electric heat
You need electricity to both turn on and run a blower fan if your house has forced air heat. Not insignificant electricity use. Very few people have such a thing in their home.
I completely agree that the current state of the electric grid is a major concern going forward. But it’s one we simply have to address regardless.
From personal experience: In 1987 we built a new house in Worcester using electric heat at a time when the electric company had a 2 meter system that allowed for cheaper night use of electric. We sold the house in 1990 in the midst of a corporate move, and then the winter of 1990/91 struck the new owners in full force. The house is located in an area of Worcester that is very rural with a heavy old growth tree canopy. The intense cold wave that struck and accompanying storms knocking out power for over a week, caused massive and expensive damage to the house. The new owners were hopeless as the water damage ravaged the house. A very hard lesson learned: In New England with an old electric grid, and tough winters, do not rely only on electricity for your heat.
I think it’s less about the kind of heat (electric vs gas) and more about the scale of the utility system. Large scale, centralized systems, whether the gas network or the grid, are inherently vulnerable to failure, and increasingly so with extreme weather events and proliferating cyber threats. We are societal sitting ducks to depend exclusively on the investor owned utilities. Like many cities and towns, Newton needs a Climate Action Plan 2.0, which goes beyond decarbonization to build local back up generation and storage systems (energy, food, water) to provide a subsistence level of self-sufficiency in the event of prolonged outages in the large scale utility systems. These will give us resilience and help mitigate climate – a win/win.