EarlyBird News

It has been 22 years since 1997 when Massachusetts decided to break up power monopolies and separating generators, transmission owners, and distributors. The competitive market has done well for the New England region creating reductions in wholesale electricity prices and generating $16 in efficient investment. Recently, the markets’ structure has become more complicated given the […]

In January of 2018 Eversource won a Massachusetts state contract for the construction of the Northern Pass power line to work in conjunction with Hydro-Quebec to supply New England with a cleaner source of electricity, at a cost of $1.6 billion. For the project Eversource officials themselves helped draft bidding rules and select the winners, […]

H2@Scale is the Department of Energy’s newest initiative to incentivize and expand the exploration for hydrogen use for different applications. Among these are fuel cells for vehicles, metal refining, and natural gas production. the U.S. The funds will be destined to tackle the issues which make this process difficult like transport, generation, and storage methods. […]

On Tuesday, January 22, a bill was filed in Massachusetts to end competitive residential electric supply starting in 2020. Currently, residential (in addition to commercial and industrial) customers can get their electric supply competitively, from third-party competitive suppliers, rather than the utility. But bill HD 1204/SD 880, An Act Relative to Protecting Residential Electric Customers, […]

One person is dead and several others are injured after natural gas fires and explosions shook Lawrence and the surrounding area Thursday afternoon. A gas line pressure problem in the area has affected Lawrence, North Andover, and Andover. Firefighters and other emergency crews have responded to at least 70 addresses for fires, explosions, or the […]

NSTAR Electric Company d/b/a Eversource Energy recently filed new basic service rates for the Medium and Large Commercial and Industrial class in western Massachusetts (the WCMA Load Zone, formerly the Western Massachusetts Electric Company service area), for the three-month period beginning October 1, 2018. WCMA’s new basic service rates (in $/kWh) are below. The prices […]

As expected, the Massachusetts House and Senate approved a clean energy bill on Tuesday that seeks to boost the state’s reliance on renewable energy sources. The legislature (H 4857), which was unveiled on Monday, represents a compromise (it leaves most of the Senate provisions from a previous version of the bill behind) and a modest […]

According to U.S. intelligence officials and technology company executives, state-sponsored Russian hackers appear more focused in disrupting the U.S. power grid than midterm elections. Apart from attempts to infiltrate the online accounts of two Senate Democrats who are up for re-election, intelligence officials have seen relatively little effort by Russian hackers aimed at major U.S. […]

The hotly contested debate over whether New England needs a new pipeline infrastructure raged on at the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week. At the committee, Joe Kelliher, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and now executive vice president at NextEra Energy, questioned the need for a new pipeline. Kelliher […]

According to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), wind and solar power may comprise 50 percent of global electricity generation by 2050. 65 researchers from BNEF assembled data on the evolving cost of clean energy technologies across the globe and put together the 150-page New Energy Outlook (NEO) 2018 report. The researchers predict […]