Latest news with #Eversource
Yahoo
08-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Naugatuck Walmart loses power after lighting strikes
NAUGATUCK, Conn. (WTNH) — Transformers struck by lightning triggered a power outage at the Naugatuck Walmart, according to fire crews. At approximately 6 p.m., the fire department received a call from the local Walmart regarding an exposure and an outside fire. Naugatuck Fire Chief Ken Hanks said, 'We found a transformer that had failed. We believe it may have been related to a lightning strike in the area.' Eversource crews are on the scene, working to isolate power in the affected section, and Walmart remains without power. 'There have been some power outages due to the lightning strike. Apparently the lightning energy came back through the powerlines and into the transformers,' Hanks said. Fire crews are cutting the power through transformer paths and are doing their best to keep the power on for residents. Once the transformers stop smoking, Eversource will replace each one. This is a developing story, check back later for updates. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
WEC Energy (WEC) Down 3.6% Since Last Earnings Report: Can It Rebound?
It has been about a month since the last earnings report for WEC Energy Group (WEC). Shares have lost about 3.6% in that time frame, underperforming the S&P 500. Will the recent negative trend continue leading up to its next earnings release, or is WEC Energy due for a breakout? Before we dive into how investors and analysts have reacted as of late, let's take a quick look at the most recent earnings report in order to get a better handle on the important drivers. It turns out, fresh estimates have trended downward during the past month. The consensus estimate has shifted -7.11% due to these changes. At this time, WEC Energy has a nice Growth Score of B, though it is lagging a lot on the Momentum Score front with a D. Following the exact same course, the stock was allocated a grade of D on the value side, putting it in the bottom 40% for this investment strategy. Overall, the stock has an aggregate VGM Score of C. If you aren't focused on one strategy, this score is the one you should be interested in. Estimates have been broadly trending downward for the stock, and the magnitude of these revisions indicates a downward shift. Notably, WEC Energy has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). We expect an in-line return from the stock in the next few months. WEC Energy is part of the Zacks Utility - Electric Power industry. Over the past month, Eversource Energy (ES), a stock from the same industry, has gained 3.9%. The company reported its results for the quarter ended March 2025 more than a month ago. Eversource reported revenues of $4.12 billion in the last reported quarter, representing a year-over-year change of +23.6%. EPS of $1.50 for the same period compares with $1.49 a year ago. Eversource is expected to post earnings of $0.99 per share for the current quarter, representing a year-over-year change of +4.2%. Over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate has changed +0.3%. Eversource has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) based on the overall direction and magnitude of estimate revisions. Additionally, the stock has a VGM Score of B. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report WEC Energy Group, Inc. (WEC) : Free Stock Analysis Report Eversource Energy (ES) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Three guinea pigs abandoned at Granby Trailhead now safe, headed for adoption
GRANBY, Mass. (WWLP) – Three guinea pigs discovered abandoned at the entrance of the Batchelor Brook Trailhead in Granby are now safe. Eversource conducts 'Turtle-palooza' wildlife protection training in Agawam The guinea pigs have been brought to a rescue organization for veterinary care and adoption, according to Granby Animal Control. The animals were found by a couple out for a walk Wednesday morning, who spotted the small pets running loose near the trail entrance. As a result, Granby Animal Control took the guinea pigs into their care. 'They appear to be in good health and are currently safe in our care,' the department posted in an update on social media. After efforts to locate the owner yielded no leads, the guinea pigs were placed with Wheektopia Guinea Pig Rescue, a nonprofit rescue specializing in small animal care and adoption. Interested adopters can now contact the organization directly at to inquire about giving the animals a permanent home. Authorities emphasized the dangers of abandoning small pets outdoors, noting that guinea pigs are especially vulnerable. 'Please remember: small animals like guinea pigs are vulnerable to predators, weather, and stress— the outdoors are not a safe environment for them,' Granby Animal Control stated. Anyone with information about the guinea pigs or their previous owner is asked to call or text Granby Animal Control at (413) 575-1994. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Eversource conducts ‘Turtle-palooza' wildlife protection training in Agawam
AGAWAM, Mass. (WWLP) – As part of its commitment to environmental stewardship and supporting biodiversity, Eversource conducted its annual comprehensive wildlife protection training, which they call 'Turtle-palooza.' Injured person rescued from woods on Gale Road in Warwick This training is a day-long program to protect habitats for nesting species like Eastern Box Turtles. Wednesday's goal was to teach construction crews how to search for and relocate turtles to safe areas before trimming undergrowth beneath power lines. The areas create an ideal breeding ground for turtles, often leading to their eggs being laid while heavy equipment is being used. The training took place at Eversource's rights-of-way in Agawam. It started as a classroom portion, then a field portion. 'We believe it's our responsibility to care for this land that we manage, but also protect the species that call this right-of-way home,' said Matthew Waldrip, Manager of Environmental Licensing and Permitting at Eversource. Nearly 150 Eversource members worked alongside the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, as well as a dog named Mobie. Before noon, they found 16 box turtles. The team will be working near their substations and vegetated areas next. Every year, they update the training based on what they learn in the previous year. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Massachusetts grid breakthrough could benefit customers while boosting solar
A pesky question has long stalled efforts to expand U.S. power grids in the face of growing demand and surging renewable energy: Who should pay for the upgrades? An under-the-radar breakthrough in Massachusetts may finally provide a template for answering that question. Over the past year or so, the state's largest utilities and regulators have approved plans for dividing grid costs between customers and the companies that build solar arrays. It's been a long time coming. The plans in question have gone through numerous iterations since utilities, regulators, and solar developers started working on them about six years ago, making progress hard to track. And the name they settled on — "Capital Investment Projects,' or CIPs — isn't exactly an attention grabber. But behind the staid name lies a significant advance for a state striving to fairly allocate the costs of shifting to clean energy, said Kate Tohme, director of interconnection policy at Massachusetts-based community solar developer New Leaf Energy. In fact, advocates working on similar efforts in states from New York to California are 'all trying to use the Massachusetts framework as a model,' she said. The roughly $334 million in CIP grid projects from utilities Eversource and National Grid that have been approved or are being considered by regulators are doing something rare in the world of regulated utilities. Instead of forcing distributed solar and battery projects to pay up-front for grid improvements that allow them to connect to the utility system, the CIPs spread those costs onto customers' future utility bills. Under the old system, clean energy projects regularly died on the vine because up-front grid costs were prohibitively high. That doesn't mean developers are getting a free ride, however. They'll still have to pay a portion of those costs back as they're connected to the grid, reducing the burden on customers over time. And every project in question had to prove to regulators that the grid improvements at large also deliver customer benefits, whether through improved grid reliability, enabling access to cheaper community solar power, or both. Massachusetts can't avoid these kinds of grid investments if it's to meet its clean energy and electrification goals, according to Tohme, a former official at the state Department of Public Utilities who was directly involved in some of the earliest CIP work. The state has committed to cutting emissions 50% below 1990 levels by 2030, which will require building lots of renewable energy and electrifying vehicles and home heating. 'In the short term, it's going to increase our costs,' Tohme said. But 'once the grid is modernized and we get distributed energy interconnected, it's going to drastically decrease our electricity costs' by replacing expensive fossil-fueled power with cheaper renewable energy and batteries. The landmark plan emerged as a response to what might be seen as a clean-energy success story — Massachusetts had too much community solar trying to get onto an overly crowded grid. The launch of the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target program in 2018 had created lucrative incentives for community solar developers, spurring a rush of applications to connect to utility distribution grids. As available capacity was used up, the cost of upgrading those grids to accommodate more solar power started to rise. 'For a while, the cost to interconnect was tens of thousands of dollars, something a project could absorb,' said Mike Porcaro, director of innovative grid solutions at National Grid, one of the state's largest utilities. 'But eventually the modifications grew so large — hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars — that it was hard for projects to move forward.' National Grid was encountering the same kind of interconnection backlog and upgrade cost challenges that have tied up utility-scale solar and wind projects on high-voltage transmission grids across the country. The main difference is that community solar projects connect to lower-voltage grids that carry power from big substations to end customers. Similar backlogs have dogged other states with lots of community solar, including Minnesota and New York. One of the best-established ways to relieve interconnection stresses is for utilities and grid operators to stop painstakingly studying each project one at a time and batch them instead. Such 'group' or 'cluster' studies of multiple projects seeking interconnection in a particular region allow utilities to conduct a speedier and more holistic assessment of the impacts they'll cause and upgrades that will solve them. It also allows grid-upgrade costs to be shared among the projects in the cluster, rather than foisting them on whichever project engineers determined would push that part of the grid over its existing capacity limit, thus triggering an upgrade, Porcaro said. But the approach has its limits. 'You're still sharing the costs among that group,' he said — and forcing projects to pay even a portion of those costs up front can still make them too expensive to move forward. To deal with that disconnect, the Department of Public Utilities launched its 'provisional system planning program,' the precursor to the CIPs, in 2021. The idea, Porcaro said, was to allow utilities to move faster on solving the fundamental problem for all of those community solar projects — a grid that wasn't being built out quickly enough to match the exploding demand for capacity. National Grid and other utilities already plan ahead to accommodate growing electricity demand from customers or to serve big new developments like housing subdivisions or factories, Porcaro noted. The goal of the provisional system planning approach was to find a way to similarly pay in advance for proactive grid investments to bring community solar projects online. 'The review and discovery to get these CIPs approved was no small feat,' Porcaro said. 'It wasn't a quick decision.' In late 2022, the Department of Public Utilities approved its first test case for CIPs — a cluster of projects put forward by utility Eversource, known as the 'Marion-Fairhaven Study Group' after two of the Southeastern Massachusetts towns in the area being considered for upgrades. Eversource estimated at the time that it would cost about $116 million in distribution grid upgrades to enable roughly 140 megawatts of community solar to connect to the grid. To avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of requiring projects to pay up front for the upgrades — something they couldn't afford to do — Eversource proposed charging them about $370 per kilowatt of solar they connected once the grid work was done. The risk of this approach is that some of the projects involved in the group study would end up dropping out, leaving customers on the hook for their unpaid share, Lavelle Freeman, Eversource's vice president of distribution system planning, told Canary Media in a 2023 interview. That put the burden on Eversource to plan a grid upgrade that didn't just make room for the solar projects but benefited customers as well. Fortunately, the same kinds of upgrades that expand capacity for community solar also improve customer reliability and provide headroom for growing electrical loads. 'We're also improving the substations, adding new capacity, adding new transformers and feeders, making the system more robust,' Freeman said. 'We developed a very rigorous algorithm to calculate the reliability benefits,' which ended up showing a roughly 50-50 split in the benefits between customers and solar developers. 'That went a long way toward convincing regulators that the cost-allocation principle would work.' To be clear, there are significant risks to committing utility customers' money to building out grid infrastructure to serve the needs of community solar projects. In Massachusetts, the state Attorney General's Office is tasked with protecting utility customers' interests in regulatory proceedings like these. A senior official at the Attorney General's Office who was involved with the CIP process told Canary Media that the office 'took serious issue' with how Eversource first proposed splitting grid-upgrade costs. 'Not only were ratepayers paying more than they should have, it created a lot of risk for ratepayers,' said the person, who was granted anonymity to discuss matters outside the official regulatory process. On the other hand, the official said, 'being able to have more homegrown generation is going to be important for Massachusetts. It is a cost risk. But how do we minimize those cost risks to ratepayers, and maximize those benefits to ratepayers, as we bring this solar online?' These concerns from the Attorney General's Office pushed the finalized version of CIP to shift more of the cost of new grid investments onto community solar projects as opposed to utility customers. That's not ideal from the perspective of solar developers, obviously, but it's far better than being stuck with the unaffordable upgrade costs they faced before. Having a known per-kilowatt cost locked in well in advance is also helpful, said Mike Judge, currently undersecretary of energy for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, who spoke to Canary Media in 2023 when he was vice president of policy for the trade group Coalition for Community Solar Access. Developers often need to secure interconnection rights before they can secure the financing and start signing up subscribers that allow them to move forward with projects, he said. 'There's so much value for a developer to know I'm going to pay $370 a kilowatt to connect,' Judge said. 'You're not waiting a year, year and a half for a utility to come back with study results to say, it's $5 million — and you have to cancel your project.' The model that Eversource established for the Marion-Fairhaven project is largely mirrored in the 10 other CIPs that it and National Grid have submitted to regulators. All told, Eversource has identified six groups with more than 250 MW of community solar or battery storage capacity. Porcaro said that National Grid has five CIPs that will enable about 300 MW of new projects — 'that's huge.' Massachusetts isn't the only state working on policies that aim to spur grid expansion while keeping customers' power costs in check, Tohme said. Similar efforts are now underway in states including California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, and New York. But to Tohme's knowledge, no other state has accomplished what Massachusetts has with its CIP structure. New York is closest, she said, with a cost-sharing framework that allows community solar developers to split up the costs of necessary upgrades rather than bearing them alone. But that still doesn't include the same 'build in advance, pay later' structure that the CIPs have, she said. At the same time, Tohme pointed out, the CIPs remain a response to a problem that's been hounding the state for years now: projects stuck behind an inadequately upgraded grid. The next logical step is to figure out where grid upgrades should be made before that kind of situation happens again. That's one of the goals laid out for the state's three major investor-owned utilities under a sprawling grid-modernization mandate created as part of a major energy and climate law passed in 2022. It's called the Electric Sector Modernization Plans process, and the Department of Public Utilities is now reviewing the proposals submitted by utilities last year to determine next steps, Porcaro said. CIPs are a part of that broader plan, he said. But the modernization plans are 'going above that and saying, 'plan for everything' — for everyone having an EV, and electrifying their homes, and specific goals for how much energy storage we need. It's a tall order.' Given how long it took to figure out CIPs, clean energy developers have reason to worry that this even more sweeping and complicated planning task could take even longer. Clean-energy industry group Advanced Energy United has urged state regulators to keep doing CIPs while it undertakes this broader new effort. Porcaro highlighted other work that can help get more clean energy connected even before the grid gets built out. He pointed to National Grid's Active Resource Integration pilot, launching this year, which is looking at ways community solar and battery projects can connect to grids that can safely absorb their power output during all but a handful of hours of the year. If those solar farms can curtail their output during those hours, they could connect years ahead of utility grid upgrades. These kinds of 'flexible interconnection' structures, as they're generally known, could help 'get us through now to when the full system could be built, or to get through certain areas where you don't need a full buildout,' Porcaro said. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on building out a grid that can support Massachusetts' clean energy and electrification ambitions. Later this year, the Department of Public Utilities is expected to issue its ground rules on how utilities should start to calculate the fair sharing of costs between their customers and the community solar and battery projects trying to connect to their grids under the Electric Sector Modernization Plans, Tohme said. Once that's done, utilities and other stakeholder groups will bring cost-sharing proposals to the regulator and start to hash them out, she said. 'So we have a long way to go before we have proactive proposals.' But just because it's going to be hard doesn't mean it isn't worth doing, she said. 'We have to modernize our grid. Right now we're doing it anyway — we're just reacting. We're just doing it non-strategically. And that's just as expensive,' Tohme said — if not more so.
