Photo by IBEW: Lou Antonellis and colleagues always think “green on the job.”
IBEW Local 103 Business Manager Lou Antonellis has endorsed the Green New Deal resolution proposed by Senator Ed Markey and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, according to Jennifer Smith of the Dorchester Reporter.
Antonellis said the push for expanded renewable energy infrastructure and the jobs that could come with it is in line with their mission.
While Local 103 workers are “going to work on solar panel jobs, putting up wind farms, working on the crumbling infrastructure,” Antonellis said, it is still a gradual evolution. “The move is, it’s going glacially,” he said. “It’s moving slow and we’re hoping this helps it along.”
For Antonellis, the resolution is in line with the work his union has already been preparing for.
“I know some of my counterparts and other unions have concerns about the Green New Deal, and they have positions that are not our position,” he said. “So, we think it’s about time. We are all about green jobs. We’ve been promoting green technology for a long time. If you come down to our Dorchester offices, you’ll see a lot of green technology: A giant windmill that sits alongside the expressway, We’re putting up, on our main headquarters, 500 solar panels, 197 kilowatts, this spring. We already have a hundred kilowatts of solar on our apprenticeship school that’s across the parking lot.”
Even their parking lot lights are off the grid, he said, running purely on wind and solar energy and illuminated by motion-detectors to save power.
Something cool is coming down the line as well, Antonellis said: ice energy. “We’re going to be the first one in the country to do an Ice Bear energy storage system at Local 103,” he said, in a partnership with Eversource to cool their facility more efficiently and cheaply.