Well, This Is Weird -- New England Is Now Burning Oil To Generate Electricity --

Link here.

I'm sure this is nothing new. If I have seen this before, I have forgotten.

Right now, electricity rates are dirt-cheap in New England, in fact, going "negative" earlier this morning -- meaning more electricity if being produced than is needed -- and yet, the region is now burning oil? No coal this morning, but rather, we now see oil.

Meanwhile, from Boston Globe's "Talking Points PM":

Natural gas pipeline expansion in New England:

Giving up on Access North -- the project to expand a major natural gas pipeline: When fires and explosions rocked Lawrence-area homes and businesses in September, the Columbia Gas incident was bound to hurt the already-tenuous political stature of the natural gas industry around here. [Lawrence, MA]

Now, Eversource Energy is paying a price for the damage to the industry's reputation: $32.9 million. That’s the pretax value of Eversource’s 40-percent stake in the proposed Access Northeast pipeline expansion project. Eversource just wrote off the full amount.

The company hasn’t officially given up on Access Northeast. But the utility’s accountants have decided, at least for now, that its share in the project is worthless. The reason? Eversource blamed the Merrimack Valley gas disaster, in a document filed Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, even though the incident didn’t take place in Eversource’s service territory.

Eversource and its partners in Access Northeast, National Grid and Enbridge, say the need to expand the Algonquin pipeline system's capacity in New England remains pressing. The $3 billion-plus project would provide gas for the region’s power plants on the coldest days of the year, when most of that fuel is used to heat homes and businesses, not to generate electricity.

However, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2016 that electric ratepayers couldn’t be forced to pay for gas pipelines. That was a major setback for Access Northeast at the time, one that could yet prove to be a fatal blow.

In 2017, Algonquin owner Enbridge notified the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that it was withdrawing its project application, essentially putting Access Northeast on the back burner.