Kevin Rennie: Why CT is in a man-made wind power jam - Hartford Courant
Kevin Rennie: Why CT is in a man-made wind power jam
Plans for offshore wind power generation continue to defeat Gov. Ned Lamont and his administration’s plans for an all-electric Connecticut.
Connecticut-based Avangrid has announced it was withdrawing from its agreement to provide electricity from wind turbines it had agreed to build off the coast of Massachusetts.
The Park City Wind project was to provide enough electricity to power 400,000 homes. Avangrid, a subsidiary of Spanish energy giant Iberdola, made many promises to the people of Bridgeport, which was to be the staging area for the construction of giant turbines to be assembled in the ocean (not visible from Connecticut, the company emphasized).
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Iberdola’s website boasted that the project “will completely change the area around Bridgeport, as an operations and maintenance center will be installed there for the next 25 years.” It pledged to create thousand of jobs, provide technical training “to ensure a long-term labor force” to work on wind projects, invest in affordable housing, and “integrate existing businesses in Connecticut into the offshore wind power industry.”
Inflation and supply issues intervened, as did changes in energy costs. Those factors combined, according to Avangrid, to make it impossible for the company to obtain financing for the project. The price that Avangrid was going to receive for the power its not-visible-from-Connecticut turbines was negotiated in 2019. It was not high enough four years later to convince financiers that they would make their money back. Energy prices are famously subject to changes. The suppliers pay for it from a variety of sources; today it is far less expensive than the fixed price of the wind generated power.
Connecticut consumers pay among the highest rates in the nation for electricity. The high cost of wind power will add to the burdens of working people and businesses that employ them.
We are in a man-made jam.
Natural gas reduces our carbon emissions compared to oil, but absolutists see it as a menace not a bridge to a carbon-free state. Natural gas is plentiful and less expensive than wind. Lamont and his energy brain trust have committed us to an economy powered by renewable sources of electric energy. Their policies will require a vast increase in the reliable supply of electricity for cars and home heating.
Assembling those wind turbines requires a staging area. The State Pier in New London was one of two places that can be done in Connecticut. Its initial cost to build was estimated at around $90 million several years ago. The price escalated to around $300 million.
To this day, no one has provided a credible explanation for the dizzying increase in the tab.
The State Pier construction project was so murky that it has attracted the attention of federal criminal investigators. Establishing a reliable supply of electricity in one of the nation’s wealthiest states should not be accompanied by subpoenas from the FBI.
Lamont often notes, usually as an election approaches, that he is the state’s first businessman to serve as governor in modern memory, implying he knows about debits and credits, cash flow, and returns on investment. The Yale School of Management graduate appears as befuddled as everyone else clinging to the wreckage of their plans to defy world energy markets.
The environmentalists who see ocean-based wind turbines as a solution to carbon emissions avert their gaze from the damage they do. Evidence grows in the early days of this new industry that aquatic life is at risk from the shadows the enormous turbine blades cast over the water and the disruption of the seabed by buried transmission cables.
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The governor scurried Wednesday to distract attention from the Park City project collapse, He traveled to the State Pier — rather than Bridgeport — to announce Connecticut will join Massachusetts and Rhode Island in coordinating wind farms, allowing, they hope, for bigger development projects. This will likely be a better deal for Massachusetts than the two smaller states.
The state Lamont should be making a deal with is New York for expanded natural gas pipelines into New England. New York’s leaders have refused to help us. New Hampshire rejected the construction of a hydropower line from Canada in 2018. Residents of this “small landlocked state,” as Lamont once called Connecticut in a meeting with business lobbyists in Washington, D.C., need help.
Lamont’s new plan wind power plan emphasized equity for “historically disadvantaged communities.”
The best equity remains what he continues to fail to deliver: affordable and reliable energy for all Connecticut ratepayers, especially the poor.
Kevin F. Rennie of South Windsor is a lawyer and a former Republican state senator and representative.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.