In a Feb. 5 cover story of the Boston Globe Magazine, Neil Swidey’s “What if the Lights Go Out?” paints a bleak picture of the state of our regional electric grid. And all of his reasons are quite valid: we are overly-reliant on natural gas fired electricity generation; we have an aging electricity and natural gas infrastructure that is vulnerable to failures on its own and attacks from those intent on crippling our power system; and we are increasingly facing extreme weather events that challenge both that system and our resolve.
Swidey largely dismisses renewable energy resources, focusing on their intermittent nature rather than their promise to deliver clean energy from sources that, unlike fossil fuels, are not finite.
But his biggest disservice to readers is his complete omission of a solution that is quickly deployed, clean, reliable, affordable and indigenous to our region: energy efficiency.
Swidey makes no mention of the fact that cost-effective energy efficiency has the potential to save New England about 31,800 gigaWatt-hours of electricity, or the equivalent to the amount of energy produced each year by about four large coal-fired power plants. The electricity saved could power 4 million homes for one year – about equal to the households in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont combined.
