The Trump administration favors natural gas. What does that mean for CT?

Doug Burgum, the U.S. Department of Interior secretary, said the quiet part out loud.

It was a few days before Christmas, an hour or two after he had announced that five offshore wind projects under construction — including Connecticut’s Revolution Wind — was being halted “due to national security risks identified by the Department of War in recently completed classified reports.”

“I think what keeps us up the most [at night] is that policymakers seem to be still reaching for gas as a solution for affordability, despite how much has changed to the contrary about the affordability of gas in the last 10 years,” said Jamie Dickerson, senior director of clean energy and climate programs at Acadia Center, a regional advocacy group for clean energy and climate change solutions.

He said even though the climate concern is still there, “we still are very concerned that natural gas would actually have an upward impact on energy prices and exacerbate the current affordability dynamics in the region.”

And there are also questions about how to move forward with existing gas infrastructure. Spend the money to repair it when needed? Replace it if necessary? Even expand it?

“We’re not doing the right cost-benefit analysis to determine where the public should be putting its money,” said Noah Berman, senior policy advocate and utility innovation program manager at Acadia Center.

That’s where politics comes in.

“Connecticut is an outlier on gas consumption rates among the rest of the region,” said Acadia’s Dickerson. “If you isolate just Connecticut, the rest of New England is actually flat or declining gas consumption over the past five to 10 years.”

Acadia supports consideration of non-pipeline solutions — like promoting heat pumps, solar or geothermal energy — to avoid recommitting to natural gas when existing infrastructure has reached the end of its useful life or has safety issues.

To read the full article from CT Mirror, click here.