Where Is All That Electricity Going to Come From?
Many years ago, when I bought a second home in Methuen, Massachusetts, the house was heated entirely by electricity.
I learned fairly quickly what that meant when the heating bills started arriving.
Natural gas was available on my street, but the main did not extend far enough to reach my house. The gas company was willing to extend it if the prospective new customers were willing to pay the cost. There weren’t enough takers.
So I did what seemed economically rational at the time. I ripped out the electric heating system, installed an oil burner, and started burning oil.
My father, who was a master electrician, had a simple view of electric heat.
“Son, how do you think they’re generating the electricity?”
His point was straightforward. If a power plant was burning natural gas, oil or coal to produce electricity, which I then purchased to create resistance heat in my house, I was paying for a fairly circuitous way of producing heat.
Technology has changed considerably since then. Modern heat pumps are vastly more efficient than the electric resistance heating I had in that house. They move heat rather than simply converting electricity into heat, and they make electrification a much more credible economic and environmental proposition.
But my father’s question hasn’t become obsolete.
Where is all that electricity going to come from?
That question came back to me while reading a recent Boston Globe column by Jon Chesto about energy legislation now being negotiated on Beacon Hill.
Massachusetts Has Identified a Real Problem
The controversial provision involves a gas utility’s traditional “obligation to serve.”
Consider an aging natural gas main serving 100 homes. The pipe needs to be replaced. Ninety-five homeowners have converted to electric heat and no longer need gas.
Should utility customers spend millions of dollars replacing an entire gas main to continue serving five houses?
Probably not.
There is nothing irrational about confronting that problem. My own experience in Methuen illustrates the other side of essentially the same economic principle. The gas company wasn’t going to extend expensive infrastructure to a handful of prospective customers unless someone was prepared to pay for it.
Infrastructure has fixed costs. At some point, maintaining an entire system for a rapidly diminishing customer base stops making economic sense.
Where Massachusetts gets onto more questionable ground is in what comes next.
Under the Senate proposal, circumstances could eventually arise in which remaining gas customers are required to move to another energy source if regulators determine an alternative is safe, reliable and affordable.
The House and Senate have not agreed on the legislation; H.5175 remains before a conference committee after the House rejected the Senate amendment.
But the policy direction raises a much larger question.
Massachusetts is encouraging the electrification of heating and transportation while simultaneously contemplating circumstances under which portions of the natural gas distribution network could eventually disappear.
That means transferring still more energy demand onto the electric grid.
Before we do that on a massive scale, my father’s old question deserves an answer.
Demand Is Heading in the Other Direction
For years, New England electricity consumption was flat or declining.
That era appears to be ending.
Transportation is being electrified. Buildings are being electrified. Portions of industry are being electrified.
And then along came artificial intelligence and hyperscale data centers.
That last category is potentially enormous.
This isn’t simply my observation. At the September 30 New England Regional Nuclear Policy Summit at UMass Lowell, ISO-New England representatives discussed a return to increasing regional electricity consumption, with electrification and anticipated AI and data-center demand among the forces pushing demand upward.
Recent reporting from that conference put ISO-New England’s projected increase in annual electricity consumption at about 9 percent, with particular concern about winter peaks through 2035.
That creates a rather obvious tension.
We want more homes heated with electricity.
We want more vehicles powered by electricity.
We want economic development.
We want the enormous economic opportunity represented by AI.
We want to reduce fossil-fuel emissions.
We want affordable electricity.
And, most importantly, we expect the lights and heat to remain on during a bitter New England January.
None of those goals is unreasonable.
Achieving all of them simultaneously is the hard part.
What About New Nuclear?
Here the story gets particularly interesting.
Something rather remarkable is happening in New England. All six governors—Republicans and Democrats—are now working together to explore advanced nuclear energy. The UMass Lowell summit was itself the product of their joint call for a regional approach.
That renewed interest makes sense.
Nuclear generation offers something increasingly valuable: enormous amounts of electricity, around the clock, without the carbon emissions associated with fossil-fuel generation.
Small modular reactors and other advanced nuclear technologies are particularly exciting.
But excitement should not be confused with available generating capacity.
At the Lowell conference, MIT professor John Parsons praised the innovation occurring in SMRs while making the practical point that they aren’t going to put electricity onto New England’s grid tomorrow.
Even more interesting from my perspective was the response from NextEra Energy Resources, the owner of Seabrook Station. Michelle Gardner, NextEra’s executive director of regulatory affairs in the Northeast, echoed the concern about the near-term readiness of SMRs and indicated that NextEra is considering more traditional, larger-scale technologies for possible near-term development.
New Hampshire’s own position is similarly pragmatic.
Thomas Barrasso, the state’s Director of Energy Innovation, told the conference that New Hampshire does not want to deploy first-of-a-kind technology. As he put it, New Hampshire wants to be the “Nth of a kind,” not the first.
“We’re not an experimental state,” he said.
I think that’s sensible.
New nuclear may well be part of New England’s energy future.
But we shouldn’t balance today’s energy plans using electricity we hope someone will generate fifteen years from now.
Which Brings Me to Seabrook
I have a particular interest in this issue because I serve as Town Manager in Seabrook, New Hampshire.
Seabrook Station is one of only two remaining operating nuclear power stations in New England, along with Millstone in Connecticut.
Together, the two facilities currently provide roughly one-quarter of New England’s electricity.
That is an extraordinary fact in the context of everything else we’re discussing.
New Hampshire officials specifically identified Seabrook at the Lowell conference as one possible location for future nuclear development. Connecticut officials similarly identified Millstone.
Could additional nuclear generation someday be built at Seabrook?
Certainly it is possible, and it makes sense for New Hampshire to explore it.
The site already hosts a nuclear facility. It has major transmission infrastructure. It has an experienced nuclear workforce and an established host community.
But there is presently no new reactor project at Seabrook.
No SMR is about to arrive.
And even the people enthusiastically advocating for advanced nuclear acknowledge the substantial obstacles involving cost, technology readiness, regulation, construction and nuclear waste. The Lowell conference specifically discussed Seabrook’s own difficult construction history and the massive cost overruns at Georgia’s Vogtle project.
That leads to what I think is the more important point.
Before New England figures out how to build its next nuclear plant, it should understand the value of the nuclear plants it already has.
Seabrook Station already produces roughly 1,250 megawatts of electricity.
It already operates around the clock.
It already has transmission infrastructure.
It already provides carbon-free generation.
Nobody has to wait for a reactor design to mature before Seabrook produces electricity tomorrow morning.
AI Makes the Question Even More Urgent
The emerging AI economy puts this entire discussion into a different perspective.
Across the country, developers are contemplating data-center campuses whose electric requirements are measured not merely in megawatts but in gigawatts.
That means future competition for reliable electricity may become intense.
It also means that existing firm generating assets could become considerably more strategically valuable.
This is where I think some of the discussion about advanced nuclear gets backward.
People understandably become excited about what a future SMR might do at Seabrook.
I am increasingly interested in what the reactor already sitting in Seabrook can do for a region whose demand for electricity may be entering an entirely different era.
The existing plant may ultimately prove more important to New England’s near-term energy future than any advanced reactor currently on a drawing board.
Sequence Matters
I don’t oppose electrification. Modern heat pumps are remarkable technology.
I don’t oppose advanced nuclear. Quite the opposite: I think New England should seriously explore it.
And I don’t believe Massachusetts should require utilities to replace enormously expensive gas infrastructure indefinitely to serve a tiny number of remaining customers.
Those are all reasonable propositions.
My concern is sequence.
Before deliberately removing portions of one functioning energy-delivery system, policymakers should have a high degree of confidence that the system replacing it has sufficient generation, transmission and distribution capacity to carry the additional load—especially under the worst conditions New England weather can produce.
It is easy to enact policies that increase demand for electricity.
It is considerably harder to permit a transmission line.
Harder still to build a major generating facility.
And extraordinarily difficult to build a nuclear power plant.
New England’s governors deserve credit for recognizing that nuclear energy needs to be part of this discussion. The fact that all six states are now cooperating on the issue is itself notable; officials at the Lowell summit described a level of regional collaboration they had not previously seen.
But cooperation does not repeal engineering, economics or time.
New England may eventually build a new generation of nuclear plants. I hope we do.
Until then, we should be very careful about assuming tomorrow’s generating technology will solve today’s capacity problem.
My father wasn’t an energy economist. He was an electrician trying to explain an outrageous heating bill to his son.
But decades later, as Massachusetts considers moving still more of its energy consumption onto the electric grid, AI developers search for gigawatts of new power, and six New England governors consider the next generation of nuclear plants, his question seems more relevant than ever:
Where is all that electricity going to come from?
