What it’s going to take to keep New England’s lights on

 

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What it’s going to take to keep New England’s lights on   August 3, 2026 By Commonwealth beacon staff

Imagine that you are responsible for managing the electric grid serving New England’s six states 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, through 100-degree heatwaves, blanketing blizzards, and everything in between.

Now not only are you operating that power system, you are in charge of keeping it reliable 10 years from now.

That’s what Vamsi Chadalavada does.

An immigrant from India who moved to the US for graduate school, Chadalavada leads our region’s grid operator known as ISO New England. He might not be well known to the general public, but Chadalavada is an energy sector insider who worked for 21 years at the organization before assuming the role of president and CEO this past January.

While Chadalavada is keeping the lights on, he’s also navigating the need to bring on new sources of electricity to meet rising power demand, work toward ambitious state-level clean energy targets, deal with an affordability crisis, and now think through a little something called data centers — facilities that could consume massive amounts of energy.

“I’ve never seen a period of time where there are so many uncertainties, any of which could undo your entire solution set if you’re not careful,” Chadalavada said in a live in-person interview for The Codcast from the organization’s Holyoke offices.

To keep things simple(r), Chadalavada is focused first and foremost on ensuring adequate power supply for the next few years while he also keeps an eye on the more unsettled longer-term horizon.

“It’s hard for me at this point to have the same level of emphasis on 2040 or 2050,” he said. “I just want to make sure we have the confidence to (get to) 2034 first.”

Right now, about half of New England’s energy supply is generated by natural gas. Massachusetts has placed two big bets to cut into that: hydropower imported from Canada and offshore wind.

Yet Chadalavada isn’t sure yet how those two initiatives will pencil out. The New England Clean Energy Connect, which brings hydropower from Canada into the region, has been paused twice since it started in January — and relying on Canada for energy “may not have the same return on investment as investing within New England,” he said.

For offshore wind, the industry first faced setbacks associated with supply chain snafus and inflation. Then it was all but stopped in its tracks when President Trump returned to power last year, save for Vineyard Wind, Massachusetts’s lone operating offshore wind project.

That has had a direct impact on the amount of oil New England has had to burn in winter months during particularly cold snaps, driving up power sector emissions during those times.

“That was the promise of offshore wind several years ago, which would have been a game changer in the winter,” Chadalavada said. Offshore wind would have made a meaningful difference, a very impactful difference, in the resource stack and where the energy would be coming from.”

On data centers, don’t mistake the relative lack of them in New England at the moment for thinking that they’ll never come, he warned.

Still, he’s not necessarily complaining that the region isn’t yet a booming hub for the tech facilities, saying that New England is “going to be better positioned” to handle data centers as they arrive because we can “learn from the lessons of the rest of the nation.”

Bottom line: Threading the energy needle is going to take a “batten down the hatches” mindset, meticulous planning, and some kumbaya.

“This is the time to be pragmatic,” Chadalavada said. “This is where communication, relationships, solidarity, consensus, durability all come into play.”

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MORE CONTEXT

Two-week pause of Canadian hydropower exposes frailty of Mass. plan to wean off natural gas (June 2026) Cold weather threatens to take bite out of Healey’s energy savings bid (January 2026)

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