Salem News, Caroline Enos, Aug. 15, 2024, Page 1

PEABODY — A controversial 60 megawatt peaker plant is now online on Pulaski Street. But developers behind the $85 million plant won’t share how often it’s running — or if it’s running at all.
      The natural gas and oil-powered plant is operated by the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Energy Company and sits on a Peabody Municipal Light Plant site at 58R Pulaski St. The site is owned by the city of Peabody.
    It’s meant to operate only during “peak” energy use times. Typically, to prevent the power grid from becoming overstressed on especially hot or cold days.
    The plant is expected to run for 239 hours annually, well below the cap of 1,250 hours per year as regulated by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, according to PMLP’s website. It supplies capacity to 14 municipalities across the state who signed on to the project, including Peabody, Marblehead and Wakefield locally.
    The peaker went online June 1.
    When asked by The Salem News how often the peaker has run since then, or if it has operated at all, developers behind the project said they cannot say. Doing so violates rules designed to protect “competitively sensitive information” by grid operator ISO New England, MMWEC spokesperson Kate Roy said.
    “It is not that MMWEC ‘won’t release the data,’ it is that MMWEC can’t release the data,” she wrote in an email. “The electricity market is competitive and … the (peaker) can be called upon by the ISO when needed.
    “If suppliers of electricity to the competitive market knew what units were supplying power when, then there is the clear danger of market price manipulation,” Roy continued. “So the ISO requires the confidentiality of this information.”
      ISO does release aggregated data on the types of fuel used to power New England’s grid each day and how many megawatt hours of energy they produce. Just nothing on individual generators.
    “This policy is designed to maintain a fair and competitive energy market by protecting generator-specific data to prevent unfair advantages and by ensuring electricity prices are driven by supply and demand — not strategic exploitation,” ISO spokesperson Mary Cate Colapietro said.
    The Peabody Lighting Commission itself is not privy to when the peaker runs as it is an MMWEC owned and operated project, Commission Chair Raymond Melvin said.
    “It might have started once or twice, but I don’t believe it’s fully operational,” he told The Salem News Wednesday. “When it does run, I’ll issue a press release.”
      Peabody resident Susan “Sudi” Smoller, founder of Breathe Clean North Shore and one of the loudest voices against the project, said the ISO’s rule “is a convenient way to not tell people what’s going on.
      “Do I have to organize a viewing party to see when the smokestack is running? At this point, yes,” she said.
      Smoller already hosted a handful of protests against the plant in 2021 and 2022, around the time construction started on the project, with other environmental groups in the state and was featured in the documentary “#StopPeabodyPeaker,” released over the winter.
    Facilities such as the Peabody peaker are typically required to submit annual CO2 emission reports to the DEP each January, a MassDEP spokesperson said.
      Peabody Health Director Sharon Cameron asked MMWEC this spring if the city’s Board of Health will receive air quality testing results from the peaker, along with notice of when the plant will run.
      Revealing when the plant operates violates “trade secrets,” Cameron was told, and emission data would later become available through MassDEP and also Form EIA-923 reports on the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s website.
      MMWEC is required to report operation data through this form annually for its plants that provide capacity to the grid and can produce at least 1 megawatt of power, according to the EIA. These plants can also be selected to submit this data for less comprehensive, monthly versions of this report released throughout the year, as was the case for MMWEC’s Stony Brook Plant in June.
      Purple Air monitors operated by the city track air quality data around Peabody. However, the one on Pulaski Street near the peaker hasn’t been working properly and Cameron had to apply for a new device from MassDEP in May. She has yet to hear back on the request, she said.
    As of now, there’s no public source for real-time data about Peabody’s new peaker.
    “You’d think (plant developers) would be eager for people to know how well it’s going, right?” state Rep. Sally Kerans said.
    Kerans, the Peabody Board of Health, state Sen. Joan Lovely and Wakefield Town Councilor Julie Smith-Galvin have been critical of a fossil fuel plant being built in an environmental justice area with higher rates of health disparities among residents and without any environmental or health impact studies done before the construction of the plant.
    The project wasn’t required to conduct the studies during its approval process, though it would have to if it sought approval today under the state’s Climate Policy Roadmap passed in 2021.
    The peaker is more energy efficient than the two existing generators at PMLP’s Pulaski Street substation. The oldest, built in the 1970s, will be delisted by June 1, 2026, PMLP General Manager Joe Anastasi said.
      The peaker is also capable of burning hydrogen, a green energy source. But the original equipment manufacturer is still testing the use of hydrogen in similar units and it is unclear when or how much hydrogen will be used in the peaker, Roy said.
    “MMWEC has supported efforts at the federal level to develop green hydrogen sources in the region,” she said. “Unfortunately, the federal government has not selected the region for a green hydrogen hub.”
      Nearly a decade on, the approval process of the plant itself remains a sore spot for opponents.
    Originally named Project 2015A for the year it went into development, discussions about the peaker started locally in executive sessions of the Peabody Lighting Commission in June 2015.
    The peaker’s name was changed to the Northeast Reliability Center earlier this year.
    The commission voted unanimously in late 2015 during one of these executive sessions for Peabody to participate in the project’s early development stages. The project was brought before the public by the commission for the first time at a regular meeting in October 2016.
    This was to keep the bidding process and other aspects of the deal that could be considered trade secrets confidential, Commissioner William Aylward, who was on the commission at the time of the vote, told The Salem News last year after the minutes of these 2015-2016 executive sessions were released.
    “(MMWEC) was still in the process of getting bids on who was going to do the build and who was going to do the equipment, where they were buying all this stuff from,” he said at the time. “That’s why some of these things have to happen in executive session.”
    Outcry against the project began in late 2020, when the state issued an air quality permit for 2015A. While the project had been discussed in general Lighting Commission meetings prior, residents hadn’t been adequately notified of the project, Ward 3 Councilor Stephanie Peach said.
    Peach represents the neighborhood where the peaker is situated and lives nearby. She told The Salem News she didn’t know until a reporter’s phone call this week that the peaker had been operational as of June 1.
    “We should be able to know when it’s running, not just as neighbors to the plant but as consumers in general,” Peach said.
      “People who pay PMLP for these services, it’s good for us to know when we’re peaking so that we know to conserve energy.”