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CT Mirror: Can New England’s Vision for Its Electric Grid Survive Trump 2.0?

Posted by Jan Ellen Spiegel on Jan 16, 2025

CT Mirror discusses the potential challenges that Connecticut and the broader New England region may face in advancing their clean energy initiatives under the second Trump Administration. United's Jeremy McDiarmid spoke to the progress of offshore wind projects in Connecticut, highlighting that New England states will have to continue to lead to meet their energy goals, amidst shifts in political power.

Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection commissioner will not engage in a guessing game about what a second Trump administration might defund, deregulate or flat-out kill when it comes to clean energy, including plans to modernize and expand power on the six-state New England grid. She is happy, however, to talk about transmission in the grid.

“The New England states have reached a historic agreement about ways to share the costs of transmission for accessing some of these resources that are meeting our public policy goals, growing our energy supply,” she said.

Whether that agreement or other energy initiatives will survive another Trump administration remains to be seen.

So how can Connecticut, and the rest of New England move ahead with ambitious energy goals and plans, including the new transmission, it has worked toward for years in the face of so many unknowns from the federal government?

“The states in ISO-New England are going to be a lot more important,” said Jeremy McDiarmid, managing director and general counsel at Advanced Energy United, a group that advocates for clean power. “And they’re not going to have the federal government and the Grid Deployment Office providing wind at their backs.”

On-again, off-again offshore wind

Connecticut’s stated reason for bailing on the offshore wind multi-state procurement it had championed and helped create was cost. But among the clean energy options, offshore wind has come in for particular enmity from Trump.

Trump has vowed to halt all wind projects. The betting is he’ll have the best shot of that with projects just getting started — which would have been the case for the one Connecticut was eyeing. It could be harder to stop ones that are well into the permitting process or under construction, like Connecticut’s Revolution Wind project, that have too much momentum — especially if they carry economic benefits and power that is desperately needed for anticipated AI capacity, data centers and increasing electrification of the grid overall.

“It is going to be hard to un-ring that bell, even if the Trump administration was to mute it,” said McDiarmid, noting that offshore wind is a lot bigger and more robust than it was in Trump’s first term. “It still faces challenges and the regulatory uncertainty that the Trump administration and their rhetoric bring to Washington. … You’ve got a federal government that may play games with the permitting process.”

The first Trump administration did just that, slow-walking permitting for offshore wind and also scaling back tax credits and other programs for renewable energy — big, small, commercial, residential. He’s also talked about ending all subsidies for renewable energy and rolling back funding and other incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act.

States still face daunting challenges figuring out things like where transmission is needed if there’s no guarantee the offshore wind power, for example, is going to be approved. Or whether a huge ramp-up in power will be needed as quickly as expected if the Trump administration cuts off funding for things like electric vehicles and heat pumps.

United’s McDiarmid said first you need the states and regions to continue to lead. He points to the legislation in Massachusetts, calling it “a perfect example of states not waiting for a federal administration to decide what they can or cannot do.”

Energy planners are always fine-tuning projects and their financing, based on the facts on the ground, which can change. “I think that we’re going to need to probably adapt on the fly a little bit,” he said.

And get creative with financing – something that perpetually trips up Connecticut’s clean energy efforts.

It’s about the money

McDiarmid wonders if there will be ways for companies or large institutions that buy their own power to help defray ratepayer costs.

“Is there a state bonding model that that would help buy down some of the cost of projects, so that we are not putting it all on the electricity bill?” he asked rhetorically. “There is no silver bullet. Investments still cost money, and we need to figure out the best way to protect our consumers while making those investments.”

Read the full article here.

Topics: United In The News, Offshore Wind, Transmission, Jeremy McDiarmid, Connecticut, Solar