Connecticut’s legislative leaders and energy officials have come to a consensus to lift the state’s three-year ban on wind turbine development, says a report from Hartford Business.
The report says the ban is likely to be lifted Tuesday after the approval from the General Assembly’s Regulation Review Committee.
The moratorium was enforced in June 2011 following protests from a citizen’s group against the construction of turbines in Prospect. The legislature had banned the construction of new wind turbines until the Siting Council wrote regulations pertaining to height, setback, impact on neighboring properties, and other measures.
The new development follows a meeting held by the committee leadership, the governor’s office, the Siting Council, and the Department of Energy & Environmental Protection earlier this year to hammer out the conflicts they had in order to get the ban lifted.
If the ban is lifted, it will immediately pave way for a planned 10-12 megawatt wind farm in Ashford and Union to move toward completion by the end of next year, a key date in obtaining a special federal tax rebate.
Adam Cohen, vice president and founder of Texas-based Pioneer Green Energy, which is developing the Ashford project, said if the moratorium is not lifted immediately, it will be almost impossible for them to meet the deadline.
If the committee does approve the regulations on Earth Day, that should leave enough time for the Pioneer project in Ashford to get the federal production tax credit, which provides a 2.3 cent corporate tax credit to the project owner for every kilowatt hour of electricity produced, he added.
The Siting Council is crafting a plan through the participation of all the key players. Some of the key points in the discussion have to do with how far a turbine must be from an adjacent property line as well as decommissioning funds for wind projects.
State Rep. Selim Noujaim (R-Waterbury), co-chair of the regulation committee, said Noujaim said the decommissioning provision was the key for his vote of approval.
Connecticut has only one operating wind turbine in New Haven. The state is ranked among the least in terms of wind energy contribution with zero thousand megawatt hours of wind power production per year.
While not leading to a flush of new projects, the lifting of the wind ban would erase a stigma for a state that views itself as a progressive leader in clean energy and is seeking 27 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2020, Cohen said.
If Connecticut wants to make a significant splash in the renewables market and have a healthy variety of in-state generation, then wind power has to be part of the mix, Cohen said.