MAINE MONITOR • January 20, 2023
If you've ever taken the Amtrak between New England and New York, you may have noticed a lot of power plants — or facilities that resemble power plants. It can be hard to differentiate all those big smokestack-topped buildings flashing by in the Northeast corridor. Nuclear? Gas? A shuttered coal plant? Who owns them? Are they running now? These are facilities we pay to use every month, that keep our lights on, that can be major sources of planet-warming greenhouse gases and air pollution. It seems much harder than it should be to know where these plants are and what they're up to. E&E News found the region got more of its electricity from oil during the winter storm that began just before Christmas, at 29% of the fuel mix, than on any day since January 2018. Episodes like this don't happen in vacuum — they have real implications for New England's climate efforts. The more details we can access about how our grid works in these moments, the better we may be able to adapt.