To the Editor:
Along New England Avenue in Dorchester, among family homes, trees, apartment buildings, and a few junk yards and auto body shops, a local debate is playing out that has huge implications for the future of the energy systems that power our homes and businesses, for our electric bills, and for our state’s efforts at curbing climate change.
Three years ago, Eversource, our electric utility, proposed building a new electric power station on a site wedged between a diverse residential neighborhood and the train tracks that carry the MBTA’s Fairmount Indigo line. The substation would feed additional electric power into our local grid, which is currently served by two substations, one in Hyde Park and the other in Savin Hill.
Those two stations are strained during times of peak demand – mainly between 6-10 p.m. on hot summer days when homes and businesses are still running AC to stay cool but solar panels across the area are no longer feeding power into the local grid.
In many ways, this is business as usual. Power demand increases, and the utility proposes an expensive infrastructure project to meet that increasing demand. The result? Our electric bills keep going up but the lights stay on, and the cycle continues as it has for generations.
In fact, a similar story just played out across the water in East Boston, where Eversource proposed a similar substation project in a different environmental justice community.
Over there, and now here in Dorchester, Eversource has run into fierce local opposition. Residents who have long had to put up with industrial infrastructure in their communities are starting to push back and assert their own vision for the place they call home.
Communities are welcoming investment in their power grid, but at the same time demanding that utilities think beyond old solutions and embrace new technologies that can reduce costs to customers and provide more benefits to local residents.
Eversource argues that our neighborhood will need more electric power as we replace polluting gas and diesel vehicles with clean EVs and swap out oil and gas boilers for efficient electric heat pumps, and they are probably right. However, for the vast majority of the year, our current electric infrastructure is actually operating safely below capacity and can handle this new load just fine.
It is only during peak demand times – a few hours a day on the hottest few summer evenings of the year – that capacity is an issue.
So, this substation, which is expected to cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars and be paid for by all of us through higher rates on our electric bills, is a year-round solution to a problem that only exists for several hundred hours a year.
What if there is another way? What if we could meet that increasing peak demand faster, while putting less pressure on our already too-high electric bills, all while building a power grid that is better at keeping the lights on as our weather gets more extreme? The good news is that that better way already exists, and that’s exactly what our community is fighting for. Let’s invest in modern technologies that cost less and actually make our lives, and our grid better:
Batteries can soak up solar power when demand is lower and feed that power back into the grid when demand spikes on those hot summer evenings. Insulating old buildings, and replacing loud, inefficient window ACs with heat pumps, can help people stay cool while shrinking demand spikes in the summer, and reducing our over-dependence on increasingly expensive natural gas in the winter. Managed EV charging, smart thermostats, and other demand response measures can help, too.
Dorchester welcomes investment in our infrastructure, but that investment must serve the needs of our community, too – not just Eversource’s shareholders.
As politicians on Beacon Hill and beyond grapple with the challenges of meeting rising electric demand driven by data center growth, and the electrification of our buildings, industries, and vehicles, we hope that Eversource chooses innovation over conflict and partners with our neighborhood to embrace new technologies and get to work building the clean, affordable, resilient energy system of the future by starting right here amid the three-deckers of Dorchester.
Submitted by Maridena Rojas, director of Community Engagement at Talbot-Norfolk Triangle Neighbors United; Mike Prokosch and Winston Vaughan, co-coordinators of the community’s Substation Alternatives Working Group.
