Connecticut had high hopes for wind and solar energy. Changes at the federal level have cast clouds over those plans.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Jan Ellen Spiegel to discuss her article, “CT needs to plan for its energy future, but the view is cloudy,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Jan’s story here.
WSHU: Hello, Jan. This summer, the Trump administration issued a stop-work order on Revolution Wind, the offshore wind project, which is backed by Connecticut and Rhode Island. Is that what prompted you to explore this issue more?
JES: Actually, no. It was one, certainly one factor. But this was already well underway. There have been a series of moves by Donald Trump in the second administration, starting from day one, that clearly were designed to, shall we say, impede, if not outright kill, certain types of renewable energy, most prominently offshore wind, to some degree, onshore wind and solar. And we were all forewarned. He slow walked this stuff in the first administration, and with a variety of executive orders on day one, you could see he was coming for him again, and he was coming for them much stronger.
The stop-work order on Revolution Wind, which didn't come until the end of August, and the subsequent stop-work order on another offshore project in New York, are more closely symptoms of all the other things he'd done, and he had done a number of things.
WSHU: Let's take a step back. What are Connecticut's plans for its energy future?
JES: Well, what they are and maybe going forward could be very different. First of all, there was a lot of emphasis being put on offshore wind, and certainly getting this project up and running was critical. If you may recall, there was an earlier offshore wind project that eventually got canceled as a result of the pandemic and increased prices and whatnot, and Connecticut had backed off on any additional stuff. Whether there would be more remains to be seen. The state itself, like almost every other state in New England and many other states in the northeast, has clean energy goals, as does Connecticut, and there are different ways that those can be attained. But offshore wind in particular was a huge component, because you can get massive amounts of energy and energy akin to one of the units in the Millstone nuclear power station.
Plus, there were some other things underway designed to get onshore wind down from Maine, which has been a goal now for 15 years; it just hasn't really materialized. And the transmission line to do that had been seriously delayed for years. That is actually almost done as well. The concern broadly on all this stuff, is that the Trump administration, which does not like renewable power, especially offshore wind, he doesn't like onshore wind all that much either, but he has a little less control over it, because unless it's on federal land, offshore wind, because it is in federally controlled waters that he has a lot of control over.
He doesn't like solar much either. Solar, of course, also would not necessarily end up on federal land, but it has enjoyed some very, very robust energy tax credits, federal tax credits on the order of 30% which is a big tax credit for a number of years now, and that for certain systems, most residential purchase systems, that ends at the end of this year. That was another action by the Trump administration. It came in early July, and for commercial systems and lease systems, it has another year to go. Bottom line, you pile all these together, you've got an absolute target on offshore wind. You have a financial target on solar that can make it a lot more expensive. You have the prospect of having to deal with federal permitting on certain things. And if you and the Trump administration don't like it, they can slow that down or kill that, which is part of what they've done with other offshore wind. It's not the kind of perfect storm you want to see if you're, if you're the Department of Energy Environmental protection.
WSHU: Now, the Trump administration has been pushing clean coal. We got rid of all our coal-fired power stations in Connecticut. Is there any future there?
JES: First of all, let's just be clear, there is no such thing as clean coal. People need to understand that Donald Trump may use that terminology, but what he is loosely referring to is a coal plant that will capture the emissions from it and store them. It's a technology that has never been perfected. It is barely in use. It is not something that exists. New England has no more coal plants. The last one, which was in New Hampshire, closed recently, which was a year earlier than expected. Coal is worldwide and in the U.S. a dying industry at the moment. I mean, I can't speak for financial people, but would investors reinvest in coal plants? Hard to say. But if I were a betting person, I would bet not. He has issued permits to extend the use of coal plants in other parts of the country for longer periods. But will that happen in New England? No. I mean, they're basically shut down. It's not stuff that is due to shut down. Where New England has to worry about coal is the emissions coming from it, because we are located where we are located, we get all kinds of pollution from that, from greenhouse gases to, you know, standard pollutants that cause all kinds of health problems here.
WSHU: Now, energy prices aren't coming down. So what is the future? What are regulators and policymakers looking at right now?
JES: What is being looked at right now at the federal level? The feds, yes, they want to keep coal going. They are also doing more oil and gas leasing, which has either been eliminated or tamped down in some ways. Will that impact folks here in Connecticut? Potentially, natural gas plants could stay open longer than had been intended. The likelihood of building another natural gas plant is very expensive, and the materials for them have been in very short supply for years to come. We also don't know what tariffs are going to do to various materials. We don't know what is going to happen in terms of needed minerals for that kind of thing. So that's one bucket. A lot of folks look at the millstone plant, which has a lot of power. It's 2100 megawatts more or less together, can run 24/7, and it supplies about a little less than a third of the power along with the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. It supplies about a third of the power in New England. It's already extended its license.
Again, nuclear plants can run for quite a while. There's a lot of discussion about advanced nuclear plants and whatnot, and there's a lot of misconceptions and misinformation out there in terms of what is actually available in terms of that advanced nuclear, and the bottom line is, it's not available. In some cases, the technology doesn't fully exist yet, and it's many, it's, you know, you're talking 2030, at the earliest. And I will have more details on that in the future.
WSHU: Okay. But basically, can we say that there is a glimmer of a silver lining to the dark clouds for our energy future?
JES: Oh, there are a couple of yin and yangs to them. Look at one of the reasons everybody is scrambling for power; presumably, we're going to have all this AI. We're going to have all these data centers, not many of which have ever ended up in New England, for a lot of economic reasons. Land is expensive. There's not all that much space. And it's unclear whether it's going to pan out to the levels that some people think it will, and I've heard that from some, you know, pretty high-end economists who are a little skeptical, we're going to need that much power. Also, if you're pulling tax credits off things like electric vehicles, which are gone, that was going to be kind of a power suck. Will those tax credits being gone then diminish the demand for EVs so you won't need as much power as possible?
The flip side of that is, if people aren't building as much solar, then you are taking away that great hedge of not needing enough power. So it's hard to say. What people in New England and Connecticut don't always realize is that power demand in the region for 10-15 years has been flat, if not lower than it was expected. The independent system operator that runs the grid expects that in the next 10 years, it'll increase by about 11% but that was before all this happened. Will it continue to increase like that? Unclear. In a sense, the biggest issue here is that you have all kinds of entities preparing for future power needs. There are so many wrinkles and so many uncertainties and so many outright hand grenades being thrown into this thing. I keep asking people, well, how do you plan? And it's hard. These guys just don't totally know now how to plan for a future where the power plant they were expecting, just like Revolution Wind, might get stopped. And now, what do we do? It's very, very difficult for that future. We can say what's out there, you know, maybe more nuclear way down the road, you know, would someone build another gas plant? Unclear. Will people keep investing in solar because it will help their own personal electric rates? It's possible, but we don't know. So the trajectory we have been on, the odds of the region, because we are a regional grid staying on. That could be anybody's guess at this point.
WSHU: So, bottom line, it's much more difficult for policymakers to try and figure this out.
JES: Yes, if their goal is to keep energy rates low, boy, this is about the biggest wrinkle that could have been thrown at them.
WSHU: Well, it's a great way to go into the winter when we’re thinking about our energy costs. Thank you so much, Jan.
