Nuclear power should be part of New England's energy mix

Democrats and Republicans rarely agree on energy policy in New England. But in late March, they did. In a joint press release, the region's six governors — Ds and Rs alike — endorsed nuclear power, calling it "a pillar of New England’s electric system."

Still, some respected voices in the climate movement, including the Sierra Club, argue that nuclear power is a losing proposition, and a few years ago, I agreed. But changing conditions have made me less certain that renewables alone can do the job.

With the advent of data centers and the electrification of heating and transportation, energy demand in New England is projected to rise sharply in the coming decades. I now see nuclear as an enabling technology for renewables — solar and wind are the lead singers; nuclear is the rhythm section.

While the case for a 100% renewable grid is strong in the sunny Southwest and the windy Plains, the case for a nuclear component is compelling in the Northeast. Our grid must hold up under the most demanding conditions — long stretches of cloudy, windless weather. Meeting that benchmark with weather-dependent power alone is a high bar. It would require outsized storage systems and the addition of substantial excess generation capacity to keep batteries charged when conditions cause wind and solar to underperform.

Solar is cheap and fast to deploy, but its output is constrained by our high latitude and often gloomy weather. And land for utility-scale solar is limited — clear-cutting forests and repurposing agricultural lands are both politically and environmentally difficult.

Offshore wind is poised to play a critical role. Remember winter storm Fern this past January? Offshore wind delivered admirably, helping to keep the lights on. Vineyard Wind and Revolution Wind are now success stories after a turbulent few years.

But other planned large-scale wind farms are in jeopardy. The Trump administration has created regulatory uncertainty that investors hate. Resistance to siting of cable landings and protests from the fishing industry are additional hindrances.

The wind-solar-storage strategy remains the gold standard for clean energy. But even if you overcome the obstacles that solar and wind must confront in our region, a grid built on only renewables and storage still faces onerous overbuild and storage requirements that make it uneconomic on its own.

For the New England grid, nuclear power could mitigate the overbuild burden. It effectively shrinks the size of the problem that renewables and storage have to solve, making the total system cheaper and physically smaller than a fully weather-dependent one. During nighttime lulls when demand falls, the nuclear system could help recharge the storage system.

An economic study by ISO-NE, the New England grid operator, advocates for an energy mix that includes dispatchable next-generation small modular reactors. Their analysis concluded that a nuclear component would deliver decarbonization more efficiently than an all-renewables grid.

By 2050, New England should aim for an energy mix that relies heavily on solar and wind, is buffered by storage, and is stabilized by a flexible nuclear backbone that can ramp up when the weather doesn't cooperate. This is a highly practical decarbonization strategy. And while hydropower will be significant, we should have mostly phased out fossil-fuel power generation by 2050.

I concede that a successful nuclear strategy hinges on keeping costs down, something that the industry hasn't yet convincingly proven it can do. There are encouraging signs, however. Standardizing designs, streamlining licensing, and technological innovations offer hope that the cost of nuclear power can be contained. In any case, the cost has to be compared with the overbuild penalty and the cost of other emerging technologies that address wintertime resilience, such as long-duration batteries, whose costs are as yet speculative.

There are other visions for our future energy mix. A radically different take on our energy future was offered this past winter by a conservative research firm, Always On Energy Research (AOER), which also advocates for new nuclear power in the region. In a widely publicized study titled "Alternatives to New England's Energy Affordability Crisis," the authors concluded that the optimal compromise between cost and emissions reduction is a grid where roughly half of the generation is from nuclear and the other half from natural gas. There are some fundamental problems in this analysis.

The AOER plan isn't a full decarbonization plan. Their proposal for nuclear growth is a very expensive halfway measure to modestly decrease carbon emissions. It leaves ratepayers on the hook for gas power plants and pipelines that will become obsolete as legally mandated emissions reductions take effect. In the meantime, the grid remains even more vulnerable to the global volatility inherent in importing hydrocarbons. We've seen what the war in Iran has done to global oil and gas prices; the AOER plan would keep us tethered to geopolitical chaos.

Gov. Maura Healey's administration advocates an "all-of-the-above" energy approach, including gas pipeline expansion, which is politically pragmatic in the age of affordability. She has also called for massive additions to the state's generation and storage capacity, downplaying the role of natural gas. But the joint press release on nuclear with the other New England governors offers hope that Healey's thinking may signal a trajectory toward a combination of nuclear, renewables and storage for power generation.

That's the right move. The New England climate and political logjams are the reality on the ground. Flexible nuclear power, with its bipartisan support, is a key to enabling renewable energy to flourish. We need that rhythm section to hold the band together.