How Will Future Energy Needs Be Met, Now That Kinder Morgan Pipeline Has Gone Belly Up?

Jean Atwater-Williams is happy for the people who no longer have to worry about the Texas-based Kinder Morgan company tearing up their yards to bury a new natural gas pipeline.

“Yes, it is great,” she says, “but it doesn’t really change our situation.”

Last week financial problems forced Kinder Morgan to retire its controversial proposal for a vast multi-state pipeline to bring more natural gas to the region. But it and other companies still have smaller proposed pipelines in the works. Some haven’t attracted as much attention because they run along existing corridors, like Atwater-Williams yard in Sandisfield, in southwestern Massachusetts.

“I’m standing at my dining room window, and when I look beyond my pond, there’s a clear area,” Atwater-Williams says. “The area is fairly wooded and this is a scar that runs across the land that’s kept clear of vegetation.”

Two parallel pipelines are already buried in that clearing, next to Atwater-Williams’ late 1700s-era farmhouse. She never thought about them until Kinder Morgan wanted to put in a third pipeline.

“We really didn’t understand what the dangers were – not only to us personally, but just environmentally,” Atwater-Williams says.

She and a group of nearby residents have vigorously opposed the new line. But state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Matthew Beaton says Massachusetts still needs new pipelines.

“We are becoming more and more reliant, every year that passes, on natural gas to provide our baseload generation of electricity,” he says.

The legislature is considering Governor Charlie Baker’s proposal to bring more hydropower down from Canada and invest more in wind-power projects. But those won’t come fast enough, Beaton says. He points to the high local cost of energy, and to areas where utilities have placed moratoriums on new natural gas hookups because they’ve run out of supply, or existing lines are inadequate. He says there’s also new demand from natural gas power plants coming online to make up for retiring coal and oil plants, and the Pilgrim Nuclear power station.

“We’re not going to be able to meet our baseload energy requirements through an immediate transition to renewables,” Beaton says. “We need to certainly reduce our contribution of greenhouse gases, but do it in an economically smart way that gets us out of the top five ranking that we are in right now for the most costly energy in the nation.”

To that end the administration has proposed a new way to fund pipelines. It would place a line on customers' electric bills to pay for them. On May 5 the State Supreme Judicial Court will decide if that method is legal. Peter Shattuck of the environmental group the Acadia Center says if we fund projects that way, it essentially puts the risk on the public.

“Risks including that projects run over their multi-billion dollar initial estimates; risk that pipelines serve export markets and actually drive our prices up, and risk that growing climate concerns and cheaper renewables will leave us with expensive fossil fuel infrastructure that we just can’t afford to keep using,” he says.

Environmental advocates like David Ismay of the Conservation Law Foundation say gas was never meant to be more than a so-called “bridge” fuel; a backup as the region transitions to carbon-neutral renewable energy sources.  

“Our bridge to renewables has been built,” Ismay says. “If we invest more in natural gas at this point we’re threatening the reliability of our system rather than helping it.”

Spectra Energy is the company behind the biggest remaining proposed pipeline – most of which would run along existing pipeline corridors. Spokesman Phil West argues natural gas is still needed to complement renewable energy sources.

“The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine,” West says. “For a considerable time in the future it’s going to be necessary to provide electricity and heating on cold winter nights where other sources just can’t do it right now.”

So, despite the collapse of the biggest pipeline proposal, the basic point of contention hasn’t changed: whether renewables are ready to shoulder the region’s energy future. Instead of waiting for someone else to resolve the debate, Massachusetts should take charge of the discussion, says Congressman Jim McGovern. The pipeline proposal Kinder Morgan just dropped would have passed through his district.

“We need a plan,” he says. “Up to this point all we do is react. We’re told we have to take it our leave it – it’s this or nothing.’ And ‘if we don’t do this, energy costs are going to rise’ and on and on and on. Rather than being in that situation, let us put forth a proposal on our own and go out and solicit the companies that can build what we want, rather than rely on the same old, same old.”

Governor Baker’s taking a step toward that with his energy bill, which would bring in more wind, and make major utilities seek long-term hydro contracts from Hydro Quebec in Canada. Critics, like Dan Dolan and the New England Power Generators Association, say hydropower would undercut some existing local power sources, driving them out of business. He also says ratepayers would end up paying for costly new transmission lines that would have to be built to bring more hydropower south.

“Our belief is that the contracting being proposed with provinicially owned hydropower  – to give it a third of all the electricity consumed in Massachusetts for 25 years -- would add $777 million dollars per year in above market electric costs onto ratepayers bills,” Dolan says.

But Baker’s legislation also has its supporters. Janet Besser of the Northeast Clean Energy Council says combining hydro and on-shore wind power could make the cost of transmission more cost-effective. She’d also like to see the bill include a program for off-shore wind development.

“This is a real opportunity to take our largest resource that we’ve got here in New England, with the most potential to meet our needs, which is off-shore wind,” she says.

The legislature will probably include something like that in the bill it eventually passes, Secretary Beaton says. And the administration will support that addition, he says, as long as it doesn’t commit the state to procuring wind power.

“So we’re not overcommitting ourselves before we know the true cost of any resource,” Beaton says. “If it is strictly to basically test the market.”