Vicinity Energy’s CEO Kevin Hagerty took part in an Energy Innovations panel, hosted by The Boston Globe and presented by the Museum of Science. The panel explored the past, present, and future of energy innovations, including what has shaped the current landscape and the groundbreaking advancements that are driving us toward a sustainable future. Climate reporter Sabrina Shankman moderated the dynamic conversation between Kevin and the Executive Director of HEETlabs, Audrey Schulman, and the Chief Technology Officer of Innovation at Schneider Electric, Scott Harden.
The Boston Globe Climate Club Explores: Climate Innovation
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[Music] and we [Music] hi thanks so much for joining us I'm Sabrina shankman and I report on climate change for the Boston Globe so frequently when we talk about climate change it is understandably a lot of Doom and Gloom but today we're going to be talking about Innovation and the clean energy transition which to me this is where the Hope lives and who better to talk about it than the three leaders I'm joined with today joined by today uh Audrey Schulman executive director of heat Labs a nonprofit looking for
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practical solutions to large climate problems and who can speak to some really exciting work in that space Scott Scott Harden Chief technology officer on Innovation at Schneider Electric where they're working with AI and interesting ways and tackling challenges in the energy grid and Kevin Hagerty president and CEO of vicinity energy where they're taking big swings on getting Boston's biggest buildings off fossil fuels in a pretty painless way welcome all all right well so for the conversation today uh Kevin I want to
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start off with you you know when I started at the Boston Globe someone said to me like oh sure you know you can get these small buildings off fossil fuels but what about like the big big buildings that are you know iconic in downtown Boston how are you going to get those on electricity but you know from what I understand it's a little less tricky than you might think can you talk a little bit about what vicinity is doing in the space absolutely uh one of the unique things that the city of Boston
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and the City of Cambridge really brings to the table is uh a lot of folks may not know about it but under the city streets of Boston and Cambridge uh is a district Energy System and District energy systems are something that are quite common in the older cities in the states uh under the city streets of Boston are 26 miles of steam piping that's been Place uh since shortly after the 19th or the 20th century uh and many of the highrises in downtown Boston many of the large buildings that you just
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referenc are connected to this District Energy System and that's where they get their heat they actually use steam that comes from these pipes uh to heat the building uh the steam generated in these pipes is generated from uh several large downtown steam generation facilities connected to the district Energy System so any building that's connected any of these large buildings that are connected to the district Energy System if they want to get off fossil fuels and decarbonize how they're heating that
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building they don't have to change something inside the building us a vicinity we simply need to change how we're making that steam back at the central plant uh and this is a project that we're currently uh well underway with uh we are converting from fossil fuel generating equipment or fossil fuel steam generating equipment over to equipment that uses electricity or specifically renewable electricity uh to generate steam so we have a large electric boiler that is going in place uh October this year will be online uh
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we'll be procuring renewable electricity off of the grid taking that renewable electricity into our PL and turning into steam we're also very excited we have a heat pump which is a uh a large piece of technology which allows us to turn the Charles River into a renewable energy source we can actually take heat out of the river and concentrate it into steam and put that zero carbon renewably generated steam into the steam pipes underneath the streets of Boston and Cambridge and then the buildings can use
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that as a heating source so it's a it's a really exciting way uh to be able to decarbonize some of the hardest buildings to decarbonize in these dense Urban cores as long as you have a district Energy System and Boston is very fortunate that uh uh we do have a a very large District energy system that we can leverage to decarbonize these large buildings quickly it's so cool I mean it seems kind of magical to me but um so so you mentioned it's already underway what is like what's the
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timeline for for this you know being something that's just happening so uh We've obligated to fully decarbonize the systems by 2050 so that's on our own internal uh our own internal goals but we're going to be much further along uh uh rather than 100% of 2050 so uh the electric boiler that's going in place uh in October is a 42 megawatt unit which is quite large to try to put that into context I think that is probably the equivalent of if you put one in your house uh it would
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probably be the equivalent of 4,000 5,000 home equivalent so it's a pretty large piece uh piece of equipment uh that large piece of equipment uh allows us to decarbonize upwards of 40% of the steam system just by itself now naturally it'll phase in over time um but we're starting with a large piece of equipment and then we've got a heat pump that's going in in 2028 also capable of decarbonize around 30% of our system uh so between those two pieces of equipment we are going to be quickly marching
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towards uh decarbonizing more than half of our system by 2035 uh and then you know as you get out towards the tail end trying to take care of that you know the last 50% gets a little bit more complicated we'll be putting in additional electric boilers and additional heat pumps but we anticipate that we're going to be 80% decarbonized on the system somewhere around 2040 cool very cool you know there's interesting parallels I think between the work that vicinity is doing and the work that you were doing Audrey
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you know in your prior role with with heat where it's taking these kind of big existing pieces of infrastructure and just changing them wholesale as opposed to changing one of the kind of point locations along the way one by one by one can you talk a little bit about the work that you were doing with heat and kind of what heat is is innovating around in Massachusetts right now really as a pilot for the rest of the country sure I was a co-executive director at heat up until uh you you know almost six
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months ago um and they're the ones who have been pushing for a networked geothermal to be installed instead of new gas pipes uh both in Boston and around the state and around the country um and it's a you know a method of District energy Heating and Cooling that is the most efficient method uh known it has uh coefficient of performance of you know about six which means that for every one unit of energy you put into the system you get six units of energy put you know heating or cooling moved
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into your home um and so in comparison to for instance a gas boiler which you know any one unit of energy you put in some of it goes up the the chimney right so you get less than one unit of heat into your home so it's much much more efficient and these geothermal networks are being installed by you know there's one that's on currently in Framingham uh installed by eversource and there's two that are proposed by National Grid one in uh uh Dorchester and one in L um and you know it's just thrilling because this is a
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way for Gas Utilities to move forward into our decarbonized future and the reason why we want to work with utilities is because then we can deliver a you know a cleaner energy future renewable a healthier Energy Future in a cost you know an affordable way for everybody in an equitable way for everybody straight down the street and that's that's thrilling and so and since uh heat I've now moved to heat Labs where I'll just be doing Innovation uh all the time which is great yeah so just in case for those who
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might not be familiar with what network network geothermal is just to kind of set the Baseline um you know if I live on a street that is part of this pilot program what and I currently you know I'm heating my home with natural gas what does it what does it mean for me what what has changed what does it look like what happens thank thank you for making me uh explain that um so for instance on my street about two years ago they took that my gas pipes on my street were which is one block long uh
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uh was they were old uh and leaking so they came in and just replaced it with a new gas pipe instead of doing that they could have installed a a a loop of water pipe ambient temperature so somewhere between 40 and 90 degrees and they could put bore holes into the ground not deep ones just a few hundred feet um so we're not talking down into lava uh and that allows the temperature of the water to be brought back to that sort of range that keeps heat pumps super happy and where they live a long time um so it
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would be bore holes with a shared Loop of water there'd be uh pipe Loops that go to each building and in the building would be a heat pump which is basically all we're talking about here today it seems uh that would pull off heating or cooling whatever it is that you're building uh wanted at that moment all right very cool thank you for that explanation um okay so this moves us to Scott because Scott you're at Schneider Electric a lot of what we're talking about when talking about the clean
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energy transition revolves around electricity and what I think is really fascinating and I want to hear all about is the way that Schneider Electric is thinking about grid Innovation and AI um because we know there's so much potential and also pitfalls when it comes to AI so can you tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing and kind of how you're rethinking how the grid is going to work in the future yeah yeah glad to talk about that so you know for from from our perspective as a
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global energy management company we touch on lot of these different subjects and I I like the way that it was characterized by both Audrey and Kevin because the way we're thinking about it is similar we see this as a problem to solve for with a system of systems right and and the grid is certainly going to be what we would consider almost a platform in a system of systems um the way we are looking at you know how energy is delivered is going to have to change is you know the the grid has been
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around obviously for decades but it wasn't necessarily designed for the context of how energy needs to be delivered in the the future especially with a lot of the Renewables that are coming online you're moving from unidirectional power flows to multi-directional power flows and this is where computer technology is going to be absolutely essential and so the way we are starting to or the way we are really thinking about this is one you have to actually think about you know first off by definition what is the grid
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the grid right now you know for most people would think about it going from essentially Central generation to a meter and it's going well beyond the meter now right and so you have this huge ecosystem that requires a lot of advanced orchestration and so how we are thinking about this from a system of systems perspective is how do you start to leverage AI as you mentioned to build in autonomous operations into the grid you know because you're going from having you know thousands of points of
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generation to literally millions of points of generation that are either behind the meter in front of the meter or somewhere in between and so we're thinking that ultimately you know it's really going to be a system that is going to be defined by software more than it ends up being defined by hardware and AI is going to play an absolute critical role in that um what we are seeing recently and it's just a fascinating Trend though is that with the Advent of generative AI which is a lot different than a lot of the AI that
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you know we've been utilizing you know for many many years with different types of systems is the absolute energy demands on the data centers that actually drive generative Ai and and what I think is really going to drive a conversation that we have been talking about about you know kind of essentially load increase on the system I think it's going to become more exponential and so what I like is it solves it doesn't solve for IT addresses a problem or it brings to light a problem around you
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know what could potentially be a situation for energy scarcity is now we have not only the demand for fueling AI driven data centers on top of all of the other electrification technologies that exist in commercial and Industrial infrastructure emobility Etc and so this is really how we're trying to think about this from a software perspective is how do you essentially create what could become an organizing layer for this complex ecosystem of energy participants and generation capabilities yeah I mean that's so fascinating
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because it it it does really highlight the challenge ahead too um you know I think that one thing when I talk to folks who are not working in the space but who are kind of interested there's not always a great awareness of the this idea that part of this transition means going from largely like power plants and you know hydroelectric dams and things like that that are creating energy and you can plot them on a map and there's you know red dots here and there around the iso New England grid to something
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where my electric vehicle in the driveway the solar panels on my roof everything has turned my home into a multiple point generator of electricity along with all of my neighbors and every Community solar farm and every offshore wind and every small onshore Wind Facility um so I mean the the the sheer volume I mean that's what you were getting at but I just wanted to pull it apart a little bit I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about kind of that that complexity and how you even wrap your
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head around what to expect five years 10 years 15 years down the line yeah yeah you know we the energy systems were all driven around movement of electrons right and as I said the movement in kind of a single Direction right now the energy systems of the future are really going to be driven by the movement of data right and how that data is going to be produced by so many different participants you know as you were describing what we call a prosumer right somebody who not only is going to be a consumer at home but actually they're
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going to be producing energy as well and they're going to become participants in this very complex dynamic system and I talk about the movement of data being so important because all of these different elements you know for them to actually be orchestrated you have to have data that gets Associated from all of these different components that are on the grid yeah and can I add a quick Point here one of the things that I hope will happen because you sort of have to understand that the the gas system
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currently delivers you know can can contain three times the amount of energy uh at Peak load that the Electric System currently can contain and so one of the biggest difficulties of moving our all of our energy needs to electricity as we decarbonize as we move to clean renewable energy uh will be how to deliver that much energy and so along with data and along with electricity moving everywhere and those being some of those critical components that Scott spoke about so well we can also consider
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water as one method so if we have water pipes underneath our our buildings underneath our streets um that temperature of the water can be delivering temperature as we need it both Heating and Cooling with load cancellations so you know at the same time so that ice rink is providing heating for 50 homes nearby Etc you get load cancellation and you can also have storage in that water of the thermal energy so I think all of these things will be uh needed to be figured out and become a sort of living system that
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delivers our energy in a really reliable resilient affordable way that uh doesn't have the sort of safe difficulties that gas currently has and that allows us to go forward into a into the future that our children need so when you're talking about these water pipes is that a technology that's being used is that a technology that's being considered like tell me a little more about it so you know uh District heating and cooling systems exist everywhere Toronto most of the big buildings are you know uh cooled
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using water from the lake in front of it as as happens in Chicago there's they're they're everywhere um the the question is how efficient can we make them uh and can we have them deliver both Heating and Cooling because we're going to need more and more cooling as we move forward um it's it's very as as Scott can talk about the technology is off the shelf uh it's you know americanmade uh you know and manufactured it can be delivered now especially with the inflation reduction
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act uh uh it's a really good time uh to be doing it and here in Massachusetts given that we have a lot of leak prone aging gas infrastructure this is the time to be thinking about that future and what we'd like to install next yeah Kevin is this something you'd want to chime in on yeah absolutely uh I think both Audrey and Scott are touching on something that's very important uh Scott is talking about on a home level how we have going to have homes that generate electricity and feed that back into the grid uh and this
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is something that uh we're doing on a district scale or Citywide scale so you look at some of the the technologies that we're putting into Boston and Cambridge like I talk about the heat pump so the heat pump is currently being configured where it is is is going to be taking heat out of the Charles River and concentrating that heat and sending it out of steam uh so the buildings in Boston and Cambridge can use that decarbonized steam to heat the building uh we're also configuring the system so
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that we can integrate it with other waste heat sources so Scott talked about data and we've all probably heard about the uptick or the utilization of data centers there's enormous demand that's coming on to the grid for data centers who are asking for additional electricity data centers also create quite a bit of waste so that's something that that uh we're looking at from an integration standpoint now that we have a piece of equipment that collects lowgrade heat and concentrates it into
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heat that people can use what types of heat sources can we collocate with can we collocate next to a data center which spins off a lot of waste heat so we can take that waste heat and concentrate that in use that to heat the cities of Boston and Cambridge uh lab space spends off a lot of waste heat uh a lot of these large buildings spend off a lot of wasting so uh it's it's very similar to what Audrey was talking about and what Scott was talking about with the moment electric uh is we need to find a way to
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integrate all these different sources um to uh to find decarbonized or lowcost decarbonized sources of being able to um keep our cities and cool our cities um so that uh so that we can decarbonize quickly leverage existing infrastructure to it very economically yeah so you're all describing these big changes big systemic changes and oftentimes when we're talking about those changes we also need big systemic changes in policies in order to allow these these Innovations and these Technologies to
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thrive and go as far as they need to so I'm curious like for from for each of you from where you sit are we there do you have the policies on the books that you need to bring these Visions to fruition and if not like where's the rub where's the what needs to happen and and and kind of where where are we kind of hitting some stumbling blocks um Scott maybe you want to start us off yeah you know it's one of the observations that I had from Reading Bill Gates book around climate change was how I'm critical it's
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going to be to have full alignment between technology markets and policy right to be able to support you know the overall decarbonization of the energy systems and I think we've made a lot of progress there you know there are some obvious examples where more prog ress needs to be made around permitting around transmission buildout interconnections and things like that but I think that the what I would like to highlight at least with one example is there there are going to be regulatory changes that are going to be
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needed that perhaps aren't so obvious and you know one example is you know we agree and many are aware of a lot of the new technologies and software are being deployed on cloud systems we talked about AI for that right and yet if you look at how the energy commissions are set up on a state-by-state basis the the accounting rules make it very difficult for utility to be able to essentially capitalize investments in Cloud software and so here we have a catch 22 that really does require some attention
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because as the utility industry is moving more and more towards Cloud adoption and to utilize you know the elasticity of that resource they're going to have to be able to make these types of Investments and so it's just one example and I'm sure you know colleagues here have others as well but it's one that you know I like to highlight only because it's kind of a wild card that could in my perspective actually become a barrier you know truly to the overall transition oh that's
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really interesting yeah and not one I would have thought of so yeah I appreciate you raising that one um Audrey you want to chime in yeah so many things one uh heat Labs as heat was uh and still is is a nonprofit and I think that's one essential point to bring up that as we as in order to react fast enough uh to uh the scale and the threat of climate change I think we need to not only innovate in terms of for-profit companies but also nonprofits so that the information can be shared widely and
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uh without having to worry about profit and investors and that's just that's part I believe of the whole policy landscape um secondly I worry about uh equity with all of this we cannot many people cannot afford new heat pumps they are not connected to vicinity the in order for us to move forward where everybody can interconnect on a street uh in the past we've used utilities um both Gas and Electric because and water because they uh are basically they socialize the cost of the transition across everyone in over
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decades so it's not too much for any one of us and there's a series of legislative and Regulatory changes that need to be enabled to to allow that to happen including uh paying for all the C the building retrofits that need to have to happen need to happen such as weatherization uh heat pumps electric panel upgrades in every building um and to make it the least expensive for everyone um and uh finally I will wor slightly about uh keeping a lot of our utility information in the cloud and
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Scott you might know about this much better than I do but uh that's if we're all depending only on electricity for energy we really want to make sure that that information and those capabilities are are secure in a in a really thoughtful way yeah we've definitely uh experienced the worst of uh how just how bad it in terms of security leaks recently with everything that's been going on so Scott I mean do you want to do you want to follow that up and then Kevin I want to ask this question to you
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too about policy yeah yeah I know it's it's a very valid concern you know and it's one actually I I full full transparency I was at Microsoft actually before coming to Schneider Electric and you know we talk about this a lot but at the end of the day uh you know there there's a real responsibility there when they create a technology uh like the cloud or AI because then you know Microsoft and the others hypers scalers like them also become responsible for the world that they create right and so
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I think that there is reason to be encouraged from my perspective and I'm speaking you know for Schneider and and the work that we're doing at least in partnership with the cloud providers that they are making the Investments uh to secure data to secure you know the privacy of information within the cloud systems that are probably going to be well beyond you know what any given utility is going to be able to invest and so I would say that you know it's not necessarily an either or what I have
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found you know encouraging and the work that I've been doing are the Partnerships that are emerging uh we are working you know very closely with P gen for example in California and so as Microsoft and it's that kind of three-party collaboration where we're addressing some of these topics you know just like that and I would hope that you know for concerns like this as they continue to come up perhaps it's going to be those partnership conversations that are kind of surface these things
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and help address them yep I I would be super concerned if heard about Quantum Computing and that that at that point all security goes away um and and a variety of other things so I think that that really has to be done with a lot of diligence but that's that's my own worry constantly so um well I think government oversight is always a question too of like like whe When does the government step in to make make sure that there are guard rails around this transition when it comes to to that that in particular like our
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Reliance on the cloud for for that yeah yeah and and is is there something that is is there a step change here in terms of speed of response and can government or uh you know utilities or for-profit companies or nonprofits or anybody how do you know meet that uh speed um H how do we deal with all of this it's a really interesting question and I would only add that it's not an either or proposition it's not that the world of computing is going to move too exclusively Cloud nor is it going to
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retract from it either right and so very similar to kind of what we're seeing happen in the energy systems that are becoming much more distributed much more integrated I truly believe that when it comes to Computing it's also going to be a very hybrid model that ultimately emerges whereas there will be distributed computing that'll end up being data centers that are you know like within the utility as well as cloud and whatever that balance might you know however that Tak shape I think is going
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to be on a jurisdictional basis but it certainly will not be you know a wholesale change you know just to utilizing V yeah super interesting so Kevin I want to throw the the earlier question to you which to to remind you was you know look where where do we need changes in policy to help allow organization groups like like vicinity kind of bring their their technology to the next next level so I think if you look at the policy front I think I think Boston and Cambridge should be very proud where
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they currently are on on some of the sustainability policy that they're putting in place we own and operate District systems in 12 different cities across the United States uh and Boston and Cambridge are some of the most advanced cities that we see as far as sustainability and climate legislation uh so you look at the burto legislation that Boston has in place and the buo legislation that Cambridge is currently uh getting finished uh those types of legislation create it creates a demand for decarbonized products it creates a
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demand for a product that needs to be sustainable and when you have legislation that creates that kind of demand uh it allows for it encourages private private Capital private Investments fact if you look at the electric oil that we're putting in place the heat pump we're putting in place the Citys scale decarbonization that we're doing right now for Boston and Cambridge that's being done with private private investment and that's being done because good legislation in Boston and Cambridge
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now can can the legislation be improved absolutely I mean we could always we could always improve upon it I think when we start looking at some of the things we were talking about earlier better ways to integrate right better ways to encourage some of the different players to provide waste heed or collect waste heed uh or to encourage cooling with you know sustainable sources so things like that I think uh will we start to look at it uh not just creating a demand for a decarbonized product but encourage some of the uh areas where
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there's good synergies on how to decarbon as a city working together I think there could definitely be some improvement there um but overall I think that the legislation out of Boston and Cambridge I think is legislation that many cities around the states are looking at is to how to do it yeah and just in case anyone who's listening isn't familiar with it uh Berto which Kevin referenced and the the Cambridge equivalent is an ordinance that requires large buildings to decarbonize by certain amounts incrementally over time
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to get to Net Zero by 2050 um and it's already you know started I think was it just last year I think that it started requ it's been in place to measure for some time now yeah I the car carbon limbo bar the carbon limbo bar starts in 2025 and then every five years so limbo bar I like that right okay all right well we are um unfortunately running out of time so I'm gonna uh just have one last question that I'd love to ask all of you um a decade or two ago we would have never probably dreamed of the
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kinds of innovations that we're talking about today so where do you think we might be a decade or two from now like where's the space to get really weird and think big when it comes to tackling climate change um Scott let's start with you okay you know I think that if we look back at you know the the rise and the true adoption of Internet Technologies right I think energy is going to go through a similar Paradigm and I think that there are going to be some key requirements and maybe it's
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going to be AI That's going to provide some of the support there but just truly to establish a foundational understanding of all of the different elements that are going to merge in the system you know and we've talked in this conversation about not only electricity but other types of energy as well gas and others and I truly believe that the future will be multi-energy orchestration and there's going to be needs for decarbonization there but I think that as I mentioned earlier data
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is going to play a key role and so how are we going to support this how are we going to support autonomous Energy Systems well it's truly going to be to establish what will be a found a understanding of all of those different elements in the system and so if I was to say what's going to be a key technology that'll merge it'll be some type of a data system that provides like a ro Rosetta Stone for energy Rosetta Stone for energy all right I like that we'll check back in a 102 years and see see if it came true um
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Kevin how about you so I'm not sure my answer is going to be you know on the weird Spectrum I think uh I think 10 years out we can expect to see I think offshore wind is definitely going to get speed underneath it by then so I think we can expect to see a lot more offshore wind penetration in do ISO grid uh I think we can expect to see the heat pumps continue to go the direction they're going which they're just going to get bigger and more efficient which is exciting for us I think also if we look 10 years out uh
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you know 10 years ago if somebody would have told me we're going to be putting an electric boiler into our system I'm not sure I would have believed them but you know here we are putting an electric boiler in uh so I I try to think of the things that if somebody told me today what we be doing 10 years from now uh so interesting technologies that I think will probably be a lot more U possible 10 years from now I think definitely we'll start seeing some more hydrogen I think there's some good hydrogen
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technology out there as we start to decarbonize our electric thread I think we'll start to play out uh and also one of the more interesting ones is small modulo nuclear reactors so not sure how that's going to play out but that's a technology that's always been kind of circling in the background uh that there's some really interesting pilot projects that are now taking place across the world so if that was uh so if you look at my bingo card I think uh offshore winds heat pumps small Mao
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nuclear reactors and hydrogen all right well and I think that concept of like the bingo card with all the different things that's obviously we know that's where our Energy Future is going it's just going to get bigger and more Diversified as we go um Audrey I know Innovation is kind of your that's your wheelhouse right so so what do you think so I'm gonna go more weird um I think the way we've always gotten energy uh has involved some sort of Destruction to the planet um and uh we can't do that
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anymore uh and we can't even go towards just Renewables where we're minimizing the damage in instead I think in 10 years what's going to happen is we're going to start to figure out how to get energy from helping the the ecos system in some way um so for instance uh by by pulling in carbon by increasing biodiversity by increasing the balance and the diversity of the the living systems on this planet and I know that that's a really weird outside concept but I think given what's happening with
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climate change given the potential you know phase changes that we might be looking at in terms of uh what could happen uh with the climate we might be forced to do that um and it might be better for all of us in a incredible way that's I'm glad you raised that yeah especially I mean so many of the coolest technologies that we have exist in the natural world right so um I love that that you raised that well um thank you to all of you I'm sorry that we've run out of time but uh this was a really
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interesting conversation I really appreciate you taking the time to to speak with us today thanks for everybody who tuned in there's other great programming from the climate club that you can check out online as well and uh yeah thanks so much
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