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.”

WGBH July 05, 2024

The new Peabody power plant will soon start up for the first time, but it won’t be running on clean fuel as officials once assured. It will burn diesel and natural gas.

The Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company initially proposed using fossil fuels for the so-called “peaker plant.” The nonprofit utility said in its 2016 proposal that the $85 million project would only operate at peak times of energy demand, typically the coldest and warmest days of the year, when the energy grid is otherwise overdrawn. The goal was to keep the power on without having to raise energy prices on those high-demand days.

But after activists and healthcare providers raised concerns about increased air pollution and carbon emissions, MMWEC changed course. In 2021, the utility announced it would operate the plant with a blend of green hydrogen and natural gas fuel, and eventually shift fully to hydrogen.

That plan now seems to be on hold. Joe Anastasi, manager of the Peabody Municipal Light Plant, said the plant is equipped to burn natural gas, oil and hydrogen — but, in part due to supply chain issues, the utility has not been able to procure any green hydrogen to burn.

And the plant is near opening. Spokeswoman Kate Roy said in an email that it is waiting to be dispatched by the regional electric grid, which she said could happen “any day now.”

The news has disappointed climate activists.

“[Peabody] could have been the first in the state to say no to burning more fossil fuels,” said Sudi Smoller, the founder of Peabody environmental advocacy group Breathe Clean North Shore. “We would have found a way. That’s what people do.”

Apart from a brief notice MMWEC published in the local paper in 2016, the peaker went largely unnoticed by the public for five years.

Then, in March 2021, the local Sierra Club urged members to oppose the natural gas and diesel plant. Activists questioned the timing: By 2050, Massachusetts’ electric grid must reach net zero carbon emissions, according to a 2021 state law. They wondered why the utility would put a new fossil fuel plant on the grid when cleaner alternatives were available.

That May, 87 Massachusetts healthcare professionals signed a letter calling for “an end to this misguided project,” citing air quality concerns and health inequities. The plant would emit 51,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, the letter said, which would be equivalent to adding 11,000 cars on Massachusetts roads.

“The residents of Peabody currently have higher than state average rates of air-pollution related illnesses, and the air pollution associated with the new plant will increase mortality within the Peabody community,” the letter said.

State officials, climate activists and Peabody residents also spoke out against the plant, voicing anger about its proximity to a daycare and small businesses. 

In response, MMWEC announced a 30-day “pause” to address the concerns. MMWEC noted it was “an unusual step” for a project permitted years earlier, but they acknowledged technology had advanced since 2016. “Can we find a way to develop a needed capacity resource that isn’t fossil fuel-fired but still reliable in times of need?” said Ron DeCurzio, MMWEC’s chief executive, in the statement.

In June 2021, MMWEC announced a new plan. In a public meeting, Ed Krasinski, a project consultant, said the goal was to open the plant the following year with a blend of 75% natural gas and 25% green hydrogen. He said that Mitsubishi, the company that manufactured the plant’s turbine, was “aggressively pursuing” this target.

Krasinski also said that Mitsubishi hoped to increase its turbine’s capacity to a blend of 80% hydrogen by 2030.

“With regards to the project, we’re looking at converting to 100% green hydrogen post-construction,” said Brian Quinn, MMWEC’s director of engineering and generation assets. “The whole goal is to have green hydrogen refuel our future, and we’re on the way to doing that.”

On paper, MMWEC proposed a more measured shift. In a November 2021 bond offering, MMWEC stated the plant would begin operating with a 10% hydrogen blend, and achieve up to a 20% hydrogen blend by 2030, rather than the 80% suggested at the meeting. Depending on “advancements in technology,” the document said, “the green hydrogen mix may increase before and after 2030.”

Anastasi said MMWEC told him recently that the plant is equipped to accommodate a maximum 30% hydrogen fuel blend. 

When asked about the differences in projections, Roy said that because the technology and process was new, “expectations can change throughout the research and testing process.” 

Roy said that Mitsubishi was still testing the use of green hydrogen, so “we’re not exactly sure what percentage of green hydrogen will be incorporated and when.” She said MMWEC is committed to using green hydrogen “when it is feasible to do so.”

MMWEC recently updated its website to remove previous posts about the peaker plant and created a new page calling the plant the Northeast Reliability Center. The site says it will be online in 2024, and will be “fueled by natural gas, with oil as a backup, retro-fitted for green hydrogen.”

https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2024-07-05/new-peabody-peaker-power-plant-prepares-to-go-online-less-green-than-promised?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0XUmC5yitPYWVr9Kvr3rXoJi9cbMMi2OANUW5nmLwjKsXQtGCYnCuUTbA_aem_G3yz7nRMSUDn6NzywoYLSw

BCNS continues to call for a full environmental review and a comprehensive health study. The approvals the plant received did not consider the impact of a hydrogen mix.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/03/06/science/utility-plan-replace-gas-with-climate-friendly-fuels-is-deeply-flawed-according-new-report/?fbclid=IwAR3nLol1nL7gdfMCpZ-1ZOxK_ixW_IZbBKinndQwZ5yPyIYL2dP1pO8lZYc