PEABODY ― Six members of climate group 350 Massachusetts have begun a hunger strike in opposition to ongoing plans to build a gas-powered peaker plant on Pulaski Street.
“We’re really just trying to kick it up a notch and see if doing this will at least get some attention to the urgency of this problem,” said Sue Donaldson, a striker who joined 350 Massachusetts (350 Mass) in 2013. “It’s just hard to know what else to do.”
Donaldson added that she and the other strikers have been involved in climate activism for years. On Thursday, the six hunger strikers converged on Marblehead’s Downtown Commons with a cast of about 40 supporters to collect signatures calling for the town ― one of 14 communities in contract with the plant ― to divest from the project.
“We’ve marched and we’ve lobbied and we’ve protested and we’ve sat in and we’ve gotten arrested and it doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in business as usual,” she said.
The strikers’ opposition to the peaker plant ― an initiative of the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company (MMWEC) known as Project 2015A ― stems from its reliance on oil and natural gas to provide energy at “peak times,” which climate groups see as an environmentally-unstable alternative to energy infrastructure such as battery storage.
MMWEC has declined to comment on the actions of the hunger strikers.
“The peaker plant really involves all levels of governments that have enabled this process,” Donaldson said. “There are the municipal light boards that signed onto this contract without any kind of public vetting or discussion and then MMWEC went ahead and proposed it. And ISO-New England has recently blocked more renewables from being part of the grid.”
Correspondingly, the strikers have a list of demands that range in scope from municipal to national. On the local level, 350 Mass members wanted the 14 municipal electric companies involved with Project 2015A to rescind their contracts with MMWEC.
Statewide, the strikers want Gov. Charlie Baker and Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Kathleen Theoharidis to order health- and environmental-impact reviews of Project 2015A (which were not required by law when the project began), and for MMWEC CEO Ronald DeCurzio to cancel the project and revisit battery storage. They also want Sen. Cynthia Creem, chair of the Senate Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change, to order an investigative hearing into MMWEC’s contracts for Project 2015A and the battery-storage plan that 350 Mass said was passed over in favor of the peaker plant.
The strikers demanded that regional-grid provider ISO-New England CEO Gordon van Welie “order an immediate re-hearing of his backroom decision to intentionally suppress renewable energy across New England for two years” and, federally, for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to reverse its concurrence allowing ISO-New England (ISO-NE) to rely on non-renewable gas for two more years. Finally, the hunger strikers at 350 Mass demanded that “President Joe Biden… support a European and North American transition to clean energy, so that no nation is at the mercy of gas and oil oligarchs.”
350 Mass member Judith Black, whom Donaldson gave partial credit for the idea of the hunger strike, was trying to look at the demands pragmatically.
“Nobody here has a death wish, but we’re all pretty committed. I don’t fool myself that we’re going to get everything we’re demanding, but some movement would be nice,” she said. “For instance, if the state said ‘yes, we will do those two health and safety studies that we are required by law to do,’ we’d be happy little clams here.”
Black was also discouraged by MMWEC’s pursuit of Project 2015A over gas- and oil-free alternatives.
“MMWEC … said ‘yeah, we looked at batteries and it just won’t work,'” she said. “Well, just two months before, they proposed a 100-megawatt battery facility near where their office is, and ISO-NE, which determines all the forward capacity, said you can’t do that because it would make energy too cheap.”
ISO-NE Lead Communications Specialist Matt Kakley wished to dispel some of 350 Mass’ claims about the energy market and how his organization operates.
“I think there’s some incorrect information floating around about the minimum offer price rule,” he said. “The way it works is, any resource looking to enter the capacity market is given what’s called an ‘offer review trigger price’ based on technology type.
“Resources looking to bid below that price are required to submit documentation to prove that their resource specifics can justify that and those prices. What the minimum offer price rule does is say that resources can’t use revenues from long-term state contracts to lower their bids.”
Furthermore, Kakley added, ISO-NE recently filed a stakeholder-supported plan to eliminate the minimum offer price rule, which he said would help more state-sponsored renewables gain entry into the market. Kakley added he was unaware of any ISO-NE proposals regarding methane. However, on March 15, two renewable-energy groups filed a complaint against ISO-NE before the FERC, claiming in a 95-page document that the regional energy favored “gas-fired generation resources.”
Meanwhile, the strikers are hungry for action. Instead of resting and trying to conserve their own energy capacities, the six activists have a full roster of events around the commonwealth, like Thursday’s demonstration in Marblehead. They will culminate in a protest in front of the Project 2015A site in Peabody on March 22. Donaldson and Black hope to attend as many of the events as they can.
“No one does this for fun and entertainment ― it’s even sort of extreme for weight loss,” Black said. “The idea of an oil and gas facility in 2022, when we completely understand that these pipelines leak, they destroy property, they destroy water, they pollute the air and then they add to greenhouse gasses that are suffocating the entire planet, it’s like, ‘what are you thinking?'”
