Page 8 - BusinessWest October 12, 2020

methane leaks, reducing line losses in the electric system, investing in renewable resources, and off- setting any remaining emissions with other earth- friendly emissions.
“We have a plan to do this,” he explained.
“It’s about 2 million tons of CO2 that we need to reduce or offset, and we have people throughout our company working on that implementation strategy.”
For this issue, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at Eversource’s ambitious carbon-neutrality goals and what it will take to reach them before the countdown clock on Hunt’s computer reads all zeroes, but also the many initiatives to help homeowners, businesses, municipalities, and the Commonwealth as a whole reduce their own car- bon footprints.
Hour Town
‘Range anxiety.’
That’s a phrase Hunt summoned as he dis- cussed why electric vehicles have not become as prevalent as some experts thought they might by this time — and in this place.
Range anxiety is just what it sounds like, he said, adding that some have a persistent fear that they could be on a long drive with no place to charge up. And this helps explain why, while the state has made significant progress in reducing carbon emissions and growing the ‘green econo- my’ in such realms as energy efficiency, cleaning up power plants, and bringing more solar and wind power onto the grid, the broad transporta- tion sector is lagging behind in terms of overall impact.
“Roughly 43% of greenhouse-gas emissions in Massachusetts come from the transportation
sector — the cars that are on our roads, the long- haul vehicles that are bringing commerce ... that’s a real challenge,” said Hunt. “Great strides have been made to improve fuel economy, and we’re seeing more and more electrification of vehicles as a valuable solution.
“But while you can go buy an electric vehicle right off the lot, the challenge has been ensur- ing that there’s enough charging infrastructure throughout our roadway network,” he went on. “Not just in the urban core like Springfield and
destination.”
The Make Ready program, which has helped
add thousands of charge points across the Com- monwealth, including ones at the parking garages at Union Station and MGM Springfield, is just one of the ways Eversource has become a catalyst for clean energy, said Hunt, adding that perhaps the biggest component of this broad strategy is per- haps the simplest — helping both residential and commercial customers use less energy through higher efficiency.
“If you’re commuting to work, if you’re going to visit family, if you’re traveling to the Berkshires, you want to have that confidence that you’ll have a charge to get back home or to your destination.”
Boston and Worcester, but to get people to the more remote places, like those in Western Mass.”
To this end, Eversource has created what it calls the Make Ready program, through which Eversource will pay the wiring infrastructure costs for thousands of new charging stations across the Commonwealth.
“We work with our customers who are inter- ested in putting in charging stations but can’t
pay the cost of that infrastructure,” he explained. “We’ll put in that infrastructure if they’ll agree to put in the charger and make it publicly accessible. This has been a great solution to deal with range anxiety — if you’re commuting to work, if you’re going to visit family, if you’re traveling to the Berkshires, you want to have that confidence that you’ll have a charge to get back home or to your
“We’ve been consistently ranked the number- one energy-efficiency provider in the nation,”
he noted, due in large part to an effective part- nership with the Bay State, which, along with California, traditionally has the strongest energy- efficiency policies in the nation, and Connecticut and New Hampshire as well. “We try to reach
out to all our customers — residential, indus- trial, commercial, and communities as well — to espouse the values of energy efficiency; it really is the first fuel. If you can reduce your energy con- sumption, you’re cutting down on your own bill, but that also provides great benefits for the envi- ronment and clean-energy strategy.
“That’s the foundation of our clean-energy strategy,” he went on, adding that, for every dol- lar invested in energy-efficiency initiatives, the
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8 OCTOBER 12, 2020
FEATURE
BusinessWest