The Gulf of Maine is an international watershed in the North Atlantic stretching north from Provincetown at the tip of Massachusetts Bay in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to Cape Sable on the Bay of Fundy in the province of Nova Scotia in Canada. For over 13,000 years, the Gulf has been developed around access to the coast for fishing, trading, and recreation. Today, these coastal development patterns put the cultural landscapes, economies, communities, and aging infrastructure systems along the Gulf at risk.
Climate Futures on the Gulf of Maine uses place-based scenario planning to illustrate the risks, vulnerabilities, and plausible futures for ten infrastructure systems along the rim of the Gulf. Place-based scenario planning is a method of long-term strategic planning that creates representations of multiple, plausible futures that are used to inform decision-making in the present. While complementary to probabilistic models used to forecast future vulnerabilities, scenario-based planning shifts emphasis from statistical probability to ways of thinking about the future. The goal of place-based scenario planning is not to predict the most likely outcome, but to reveal biases and blind spots in complex and non-linear situations.
Climate Futures uses the medium of landscape representation to surface the cultural value systems embedded in existing infrastructural systems, and position landscape as a driver when evaluating design from individual infrastructures to the Gulf of Maine watershed.
Systems > Power
POWER
Energy systems on the Gulf of Maine include nuclear, coal, oil, gas, and wood power plants, nuclear reactors, hydroelectric plants, thermal energy facilities, electric distribution systems, electrical substations, switch houses, transformers, and transmission lines.
Energy systems are vulnerable to direct impacts from extreme weather, storm surge, and sea level inundation, including transmission facilities and petroleum storage tanks, and also indirect impacts like climate-inducted changes in energy demand and water shortages in reservoirs used for cooling. 1 There are specific mitigation measures to reduce the risks of impacts to centralized power systems in the event of cold weather, extreme heat, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and wind, there are also strategies to build redundancy into systems as part of a transitioned to a decentralized energy grid. These include installing microgrids, 2 battery storage, heat pumps, and backup generators. 3
While technological innovation and the adoption of renewable energy sources 4 has increased across the globe and in the Gulf, these advancements have not resolved larger debates over land use for power generation and transmission, including questions around offshore wind farms 5 and solar farms in former forest and agricultural landscapes. 6 These conflicts highlight the challenges of a just transition in a watershed where power generation has centered around historic structures like dams previously built for logging and milling that transitioned to hydropower, and centralized power plants built in undeveloped areas with transmission corridors that are fragment wildlife habitats and are difficult to maintain.
1 United States Department of Homeland Security, “Casco Bay Region Climate Change Resiliency Assessment” (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Homeland Security, 2016): 2, www.digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1192&context=cbep-publications.
2 The State of Maine has pursued funding for microgrid projects in rural and island areas. The United States Department of Energy defines microgrids as “a group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources that act as a single controllable entity with respect to the grid. Microgrids can improve customer reliability and resilience to grid disturbances.” These systems can integrate renewable energy sources, like wind and solar panels, while maintaining a connection to the larger grid in the event of failure. U.S. Department of Energy, “State Energy Security Plan Optional Drop-In: Energy Sector Risk Mitigation Measures” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Energy, May 2022), www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-06/DOE%20CESER%20SESP%20Drop-in_Risk%20Mitigation%20Measures_FINAL_508.pdf.
3 See U.S. Department of Energy, “State Energy Security Plan Optional Drop-In: Energy Sector Risk Mitigation Measures” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Energy, May 2022), www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-06/DOE%20CESER%20SESP%20Drop-in_Risk%20Mitigation%20Measures_FINAL_508.pdf.
4 Renewable energy sources, including hydroelectric power, fueled 67% of Maine’s total electricity net generation, 18% of New Hampshire, and 24% of Massachusetts in 2023. In 2022, renewable sources provided 23% of electricity generation in Nova Scotia, and 33% in New Brunswick. New Hampshire and New Brunswick both produce the majority of their power from nuclear energy. See “State Profiles,” United States Energy Information Administration 2023, www.eia.gov/state/?sid=US and “Canada’s Renewable Power,” Canada Energy Regulator, 2022, www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-commodities/electricity/report/canadas-renewable-power.
5 There are currently five offshore wind leases in the Gulf of Maine. These leases have the potential to generate 6.8 GW of power over 400,000 acres. “Gulf of Maine,” Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, October 29, 2024, www.boem.gov/renewable-energy/state-activities/maine/gulf-maine.
6 Michelle Manion et al., “Growing Solar, Protecting Nature” (Petersham, MA: Mass Audubon and Harvard Forest, 2023), www.storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/932be293f1af43c8b776fdad24d9f071.