About 10 percent of New England’s electrical power now comes from renewables and it’s growing at a good clip, mostly thanks to wind and solar power. That means less reliance on fossil fuel from outside the region, including the gas produced by fracking (that kind of drilling does poison some water supplies, by the way.)
The big problems in accelerating this push toward clean power are that the region’s 20th Century power grid is not set up well for the variability of electricity from solar and wind; it lacks large-scale ways to store electric power from such fluctuating sources.
If engineers and scientists can figure out how to efficiently store massive quantities of electric energy from renewables, aided by, for example, better forecasts of sunshine and wind, the region could finally become electricity-independent. Until then, we’ll have to take the natural gas that we can, despite the complaints of gas-pipeline NIMBYs who offer no plausible suggestions on how to keep the lights on and a functioning local economy without it.
