Acadia Center

Energy Efficiency and Building Decarbonization:Acadia Center advocates for policies and programs to upgrade buildings to make them more efficient and healthier. The project advances energy efficiency programs that provide incentives and support to consumers to weatherize and improve the efficiency of their homes and businesses by substituting old energy-hogging equipment for new, more efficient ones. This effort is supported by shifting billions of utility dollars from purchasing expensive power plant contracts into low-cost energy efficiency programs, including through state energy efficiency planning bodies across the region and building energy codes. More efficient housing improves indoor air quality and public health. Using cleaner, efficient systems reduces energy bills. By improving the efficient use of electricity and fossil gas, reductions result in needing costly infrastructure. The project focuses on transitioning buildings to clean, efficient, all-electric heating and cooling systems, and it pursues this work through coalitions, state policies, a building-science approach, and innovative methods that make energy efficiency programs easier for consumers to participate in, specifically in environmental justice, rural and other historically underserved communities. These efforts encompass improving weatherization and addressing pre-weatherization barriers for the region's aging building stock, driving flexible loads and grid-interactive buildings, and synchronizing in-building electrification strategies with broader community- and neighborhood-level solutions like networked geothermal. The project further works to sustain and advance energy efficiency as a resource at a regional level, where it contributes some 12-14% of the region's power needs.

Clean Energy and Infrastructure:Acadia Center advocates for accelerating the deployment of clean energy on the power grid, from large-scale resources like offshore wind to local, distributed renewables like community and rooftop solar. This work extends to the complex area of reforms to remove barriers to clean power in the regional electricity grid, where our goals include articulating the consumer, health, environmental justice, and climate case against persistent reliance on fossil fuel for electricity in the region. In addition to overarching power grid reform work, the organization is pursuing a suite of grid- and infrastructure-focused projects intended to improve the responsiveness of power grids to consumer, climate, and equity goals detailed below: the Northeast Grid Planning Project (NGPF) is promoting a dialogue among stakeholders and power grid operators in a large area of the northeastern U.S. (New York and New England) with Eastern Canada (Ontario, Quebec and eastern provinces); the Communities and Clean Grid project is a novel effort to plug municipalities into the important work of the regional grid operator and help raise their voices and participation in influencing decisions made in the power grid that advance local and state policy priorities; and developing a set of analyses on the barriers to and solutions for harmonious siting, financing, and community engagement around large-scale grid infrastructure projects.Clean Energy:Shifting electric power generation to zero and low-carbon resources is central to Acadia Center's core program work. As building and transportation sectors electrify, securing renewables and clean energy resources on the grid is vital to ensuring adequate renewable supply to keep pace with rising demand, power vehicles and heat pumps with clean electrons, and deliver economic and public health benefits to local communities. Acadia Center is focused on accelerating the deployment of diverse renewable resources that are and will be part of an optimized renewable portfolio for the region, including offshore wind, onshore wind, utility-scale solar, community solar, rooftop solar, clean hydropower, and beyond. The program undertakes policy advocacy and market reforms needed to remove barriers and spur adoption at the local, state, and regional levels from renewable portfolio standards to net energy metering rules, solar incentive programs, and large-scale procurements.Acadia Center has long advocated for the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) program, which has delivered over $6 billion in funds to invest in clean energy and consumer benefits in 11 participating states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region. We lead regional advocacy calls on RGGI, develop recommendations to the states and RGGI, Inc., and prepare analyses and reports on both the program's benefits and ways to improve it.Clean Grid:Acadia Center has long played an important advocacy role before ISO-NE, NEPOOL, and their respective stakeholder committees and bodies, such as the Consumer Liaison Group (CLG). In conjunction with this work, the organization launched a new Communities and Clean Grid project focused on providing energy education resource material about the power grid to municipalities in the region. The objective of this project is to equip and empower local communities to understand better and potentially engage in and influence deliberative ISO New England grid planning and management processes, aiming to 1) place local communities on an equal footing with other stakeholders seeking to influence ISO-NE grid planning and management, and 2) enlist them in the region-wide effort to implement equitable, affordable clean energy solutions. Acadia Center is also advocating for the creation of an Independent Transmission Monitor (ITM), to provide necessary review of billions of dollars in transmission upgrade projects that currently receive little or no public oversight yet are funded by ratepayers. We are advancing the concept of using modern technology to improve the grid, called Grid Enhancing Technologies or GETs. GETs can increase the capacity of the current grid in low-cost ways that avoid building high priced new transmission lines. GETs cost a fraction of new lines yet are not deployed because there is (1) no mandate and (2) they do not provide the same level of financial return to utilities and transmission owners. Northeast Grid Planning Forum:The Northeast Grid Planning Forum (NGPF) is a deliberative stakeholder dialogue designed to formalize and deepen collaboration across northeast U.S. states and Canadian provinces around interregional energy systems and grid coordination. Acadia Center and Nergica, independent US and Canada-based non-profit corporations serve as co-convenors for this effort. The dialogue will be convened via three distinct roundtable processes: 1) environmental justice and community mobilization, 2) interregional planning, and 3) clean energy procurement and market development. Interregional grid coordination in this context includes a range of planning, investment, market design, community benefits, and operational approaches. Northeast states already share electrical connections with their Canadian neighbors, but a more holistic approach to planning and implementing improvements to the regional energy system will deliver significant value to New England ratepayers.Infrastructure and Community Engagement:Acadia Center is addressing the issue that to meet climate goals successfully, a large increase in renewable generation will require sufficient transmission and other infrastructure to be built. That increase will occur when communities and stakeholders value and support infrastructure development. This will require improvements in permitting processes to be inclusive and trustworthy of community and stakeholder participation. One project Acadia Center is undertaking to understand better community needs in infrastructure siting and permitting is a partnership with colleagues at the Clean Air Task Force (CATF). Acadia Center and CATF are working together to design and understand better and help overcome barriers to the responsible siting and development of clean infrastructure in the region, including barriers related to community engagement and needs in permitting and siting processes and ways to finance infrastructure needs so the financial burden does not always fall on ratepayers.