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An electric Thursday
On Thursday last week, I was in a wildly disorienting spot: several stories under — yes, under — the high-tech heart of Kendall Square, walking around what will be the country’s largest underground electrical substation. There, I turned to some of the top minds at Eversource with a question so elemental, so foundational, I was embarrassed to be asking it to the people spearheading the expansive $1.84 billion utility project.
What is a substation?
Amid the dizzying distortion of the scale — you could look way up to ground level through a gigantic opening, and see part of Cambridge’s tallest building, an under-construction 450-foot-tall residential tower, stretching into the sky — Eversource’s Ken Roberts offered an anchoring answer.
The electric system is made up of two major systems, transmission and distribution. The high-voltage lines, which serve as the super highways from power plants, that’s transmission. The lower-voltage powerlines, which are like the smaller roads leading to your workplace and your house, that’s distribution. “The substation joins the two together,” Roberts said.
Made sense. So, why put such a facility underground in the middle of the most super competitive square mile of real estate in New England? That, I learned, is a longer, more complicated, and way more interesting answer.
We’re using more electricity in Cambridge and Somerville. A lot more. New towers, new businesses, new growth, yes. But also, the city governments are asking, and in some cases insisting, that new and renovated buildings have all-electric systems.
Eversource, the massive utility, plotted the trends some years ago and saw a need for a big new substation near Kendall. Substations need to be pretty close to the people using the electricity. So in 2017, the Fortune 500 firm bought a property on Fulkerson Street in East Cambridge to build a big one. Except that parcel is directly across the street from Ahern Field and a stone’s throw from the Kennedy-Longfellow School. Let us say for brevity, the neighborhood and city officials were EXTREMELY UPSET.
There were a lot of conversations. “Robust” and “very animated” discussions, as Eversource’s Maija Benjamins described them to me, emphasizing those words. Cambridge officials agreed that Eversource did, indeed, need a new substation, but, she said, they wanted it “to be in the area that’s being served, which is Kendall.”
The Cambridge Redevelopment Authority got involved, as did BXP, the developer building in a key swath of Kendall, including now putting up that 439-unit new residential tower, the tallest building in Cambridge. Everyone, officials said, was talking and musing in 2019 and 2020, sometimes pushing toward the edge of what seemed possible.
Tom Evans, who runs the redevelopment authority, remembered one set of ideas involved taking down an old garage, putting the parking underground, and putting the substation on top. “That was like plan C, or D, or whatever,” he said. “Then the designers and the planners got together: ‘Well, if we’re digging a big hole for a garage, could a substation go there, too?’ ”
The complexity of the deals that led to this underground substation is beyond my mortal ken. Maybe yours, too. But the outlines of it are as follows:
BXP agreed to knock down a garage, and build a 105-foot-deep facility on a parcel it owned, and then sell it to Eversource. In return, the city gave BXP the right to build two additional 400,000-square-foot commercial buildings, and the 38-story residential tower.
Eversource agreed to move its substation underground in the heart of Kendall and officials say the facility will be able to meet power demands for years to come. The utility is getting community celebration instead of condemnation. And Eversource is selling the parcel near the field and the school to the city (though another entity, a big local developer, is helping pay for it). The impact on electric rates won’t be known until the project is finished, officials said.
The city gets the infrastructure it needs to move away from fossil fuels, gets a public park in the heart of Kendall Square, and avoids having a substation by a school and a field.
Success on all fronts. But there’s another twist: Eversource also has to get the high-voltage power to Kendall.
To bring eight new underground 115-kilovolt transmission lines to Kendall required an Olympic amount of planning, over the course of about a decade. The sweep of the project really landed for me when Roberts, the Eversource leader who is directing the construction effort, uttered these words as he pointed to a map: “This one here under the river will be a directional drill that we’ll do from the Magazine Beach area.”
I interrupted. You are drilling under the Charles River for one of these lines?
Yes.
Benjamins, who led the project development, said figuring out the route for the transmission lines took years of coordination and more than 150 meetings with huge numbers of people representing many entities from the cities of Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston to MIT to community groups. She said Eversource looked at more than 70 transmission line routes before deciding on the current plan.
The reason for needing all these lines: resiliency. They’re building this substation to be resilient, to increase resiliency in the grid. In practice, I asked, that means what?
By one measure, said Benjamins, it means multiple lines that can feed the same area, so if there’s a problem with one, electricity from another can backstop. Resilience also means that as cleaner energy comes online — right now, more than half of New England’s energy comes from gas-powered plants — Eversource can better route it to Cambridge and environs.
On its current trajectory, the whole substation project, and all its transmission and distribution, aims to be fully in service by 2031.
Safely back above ground after the tour of the substation, my laptop alerted that it was low on battery. I unfurled the cord and went to plug the double prongs into an outlet.
Unlike the gazillion other times I’ve plugged something in, I stopped and thought about the magic of modernity, the unseen guts of the vast electric system I’ve relied on in Camberville for the duration. I felt appreciation for what lies beneath.
Then I heard the familiar computer chime: Power was flowing. I got back to work.
Joshua Miller can be reached at joshua.miller@globe.com.