Energy Shift Boston

Energy Shift Boston applied lessons learned from the 2018 Merrimack Valley Gas Disaster to pilot how communities can proactively develop resilience to energy system failures. The team engaged diverse communities across District 6 of Boston to identify and work with more than 100 households to screen their capacity to temporarily shift to electric heating and cooking in the event of a protracted gas outage, as occurred in the 2018 Merrimack Valley gas disaster.

Through the Energy Shift Boston project, the team discovered that the very starting point for an investigation of the ability of households to use temporary electric heating and cooking appliances—the main household electric service amperage—is both widely recorded and yet not readily accessible to emergency responders or city planners.

The key impact of this project is raising the opportunity for cities and towns to take advantage of discovering this data gap and to act to bring this crucial, simple piece of household information—for disaster resilience and long-term climate action—into a readily accessible manner. Moreover, because energy shift is a societal shift— in that short-term or long-term electrification of cooking and heating requires education and community engagement—this project has successfully piloted a grassroots, community-driven process for a transition to safer, cleaner, and more sustainable energy systems for all.