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.