If Katie Dykes has said it once, she’s said it a dozen times since Election Day. “I’m not going to conjecture about what the new administration will do.”
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.
Some of the potential threats to Connecticut’s energy goals are from Trump directly, such as his stated intention to stop all offshore wind projects on day one, referring to subsidies for them as “insane.” At a recent news conference he reiterated that sentiment saying: “We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built.”
Other threats are indirect, though equally explicit, and are found in Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s governmental blueprint. It calls for eliminating “political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports” and eliminating and defunding the Grid Deployment Office – both of which would have a direct impact on power in New England. (During the campaign Trump disavowed a connection to Project 2025, but has since hired several Project 2025 authors to serve in his administration.)
The threats and uncertainty come as all signs point to the need to increase power —and fast. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s December Long-Term Reliability Assessment shows that the New England grid faces an elevated risk of power shortfalls during extreme conditions, especially in winter. And that’s without the prospect of the kind of intense power drains other areas are facing from data-center growth, something New England has not yet experienced.
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?
“We spent a lot of time developing models that can account for that uncertainty and to have the flexibility to change some of the inputs as things become clearer,” said Matt Kakley, spokesman for the grid operator ISO-New England.
Flexibility is a skill that could come in handy navigating unpredictable policies and changes that might come from a Trump administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which is likely to have a Republican tilt in the new administration and generally has the final say on grid policies and projects.
“Look, there’s no way to sugar-coat the situation that that industry faces — it is enormously challenging,” said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association, which represents about 95% of the generating capacity in the region. “One of the lessons that we are taking from Trump 1.0 as we go to Trump 2.0 here is, let’s see what they actually do. There has been often a kind of two-step process of rhetorical statements with different actions. And one of the things that we are now watching for is, how does that look January 20 and beyond?”
Dolan said he and his members have been discussing contingencies since well before the election. Some scenarios, such as fewer regulations and faster permitting, can work to their benefit. Others are way more challenging.
“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, (AEU) 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.”
Melissa Birchard knows a thing or two about that. A recent alum of the Grid Deployment Office during Biden’s term, as well as a one-time climate activist in New England, she is now with the Georgetown Climate Center. She also thinks state action will be critical.
“They’ve seen this before, and they know the playbook. The states are well positioned to continue to lead,” she said. “I don’t think that there’s any stopping the advanced energy economy at this point, simply because the market is very strong.”
Money is deployed and there are jobs all over the country related to it. The technology is proven.
“It’s not like it was 15 years ago when we were wondering if we could make these things scalable. They’re already scalable,” she said. “We’re seeing huge new demand for energy and it has to come from somewhere new, right?”
It also needs transmission.
The new plan
Transmission — that’s what goes through those big, high towers — is how power gets from the facility generating it into the smaller distribution system that brings power to your home. New transmission in New England has been a challenge. Connecticut’s plan, more than a dozen years ago, to bring on-shore wind from Maine to Connecticut failed when the transmission to do that couldn’t be secured.
In 2019, a transmission plan to bring Canadian hydropower in through New Hampshire failed after several years of protests and court fights. Its replacement plan through Maine is under construction after years of its own court battles and delays.
A dozen days before Christmas, the New England States Committee on Electricity, (NESCOE), representing all six New England states, sent a letter to ISO-NE, authorizing it to move ahead with a process to construct new transmission to connect northern New England with southern and provide a way to transmit on-shore wind power from northern Maine — the “historic” agreement that Dykes is excited about.
The idea was set out in ISO-NE’s 2050 Transmission Study officially released about a year ago, but had been circulating for a couple of years before that. The states — two of which have Republican governors — embraced the idea; FERC gave it an initial blessing last summer. ISO-NE will now issue a request for proposals in keeping with parameters set out by the states — including each state’s individual goals and mandates for clean energy and proposals for funding and cost allocation for each state. The ISO will choose a vendor.
The process still has several years ahead of it, including more visits to FERC. Given the coming administration change, and Trump’s stated preference for fossil fuels, anything could happen.
“This is a first-in-the-nation transmission regional procurement led by a group of states. It’s proving again that New England is leading on energy and unique in the ability to work together across state lines,” Dykes said. “We all realize that pursuing targeted investments that provide broad regional benefits, such as reliability and cost savings is something that consumers all across New England will benefit from. So in that sense, it’s a long-overdue step.”
Ironically, Dykes’ comments were made only minutes before she revealed that Connecticut was pulling out of its other first-in-the-nation regional procurement – for offshore wind.
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.
“My response is that I have no control over what Trump’s going to do, how he’s going to destroy all the tax credits, but let’s be slightly realistic here. There are already companies out there that are exercising those credits,” said Aziz Dehkan, executive director of the Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs. “There’s companies that are already in production, doing stuff, right? So is he going to just dismantle this stuff and ruin production for companies and destroy companies?”
Georgetown’s Birchard said a lot of the incentives were meant to get clean energy markets going and to bring investments back to the U.S. “Now that we have a lot of those investments back in this country, we’re in a better place than we were before. And so we’ve got more tools and more resources to keep the momentum up than we did during previous administrations,” she said.
For its part, ISO-NE is confident it’s in a solid position to handle what Trump 2.0 throws its way.
New grid modeling
ISO-NE is already reforming its process for making sure there’s enough power on the grid. For years it has done that through a “forward capacity” market that uses a price-based auction to look three years ahead at what generation will be available. That hasn’t always worked well when new projects are delayed or aren’t built.
The new format is what’s called a “prompt and seasonal” market. It has FERC’s blessing, but is still in development for 2028. It limits the guesswork by considering power generation when it’s ready to go, not when it MIGHT be ready to go. The ISO can work a few months, instead of a few years, in advance.
That allows the ISO to adjust for seasonal needs such as air conditioning versus heating. It also makes it easier to determine whether things like electric vehicles or heat pumps are coming into use faster or slower than might have been expected three years out. That makes for a more precise calculation for how much power is needed.
Conversely, it looks at supply, such as how much of a load residential rooftop solar is taking off grid-based power needs.
“We’ve tried to take some of that projection out of it,” said ISO spokesman Kakley. “Rather than saying, ‘okay, are these resources going to be available in three years,’ this would put it more of a ‘okay, go get developed, and then come into the market.’”
Kakley said the ability to operate in shorter time segments means the unknowns of the new administration — whether offshore wind development slows or a transmission project is rejected or a natural gas project is stuck in court for years or all of a sudden federal funding for renewable energy is cut off — would be much easier to absorb.
“I think a lot of our stuff is less reliant on the ‘why something isn’t available,’ and more on, ‘do you have this generation or not?’” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a siting issue, if it’s a financing issue. It’s more, ‘is it there or is it not?’”
But it doesn’t make reading Trump administration tea leaves any easier.
Gaming out the future
Ken Gillingham won’t go near predictions about what the Trump administration might do on energy. Gillingham is an environmental economist at Yale specializing in the adoption of new energy technologies, and worked as an economist for energy and environment during the Obama administration. Ask him what factors should be considered by states and grid operators as they plan long-term in the face of short-term uncertainty and the list is long.
“Technology developments,” he says instantly. “And technology adoption is a huge factor.”
By that he means electrification of increasing aspects of daily life from heat to cars to the use of AI.
On the generation side, he said, look at the advancements in technologies: Better batteries; geothermal; nuclear — which he said could see a tax credit; wave energy; advancement in demand management.
Wind could end up a bit of a loser, he said. And NIMBY pushback is always a factor. Which of these the Trump administration gets behind or puts a complete stop to is unknown.
But the big data center energy crunch some states are starting to see? There’s not much in Connecticut, he said, but Massachusetts and New Hampshire are building quite a bit.
“I personally think that the data center extrapolations are overestimated,” he said. “The key thing there is that there has not been an optimization for energy efficiency in AI in general. So while I do think it’s going to increase demand for electricity, I don’t think it’s going to increase demand as much as some projections are showing.”
“I worry in the very short run about the political economy of doing anything that’s going to raise electricity rates any higher in Connecticut right now,” he said. “We saw how inflation was, by no means the only reason, why Trump was elected. But it just laid bare to me how people will vote, sometimes out of frustration, for anything but the status quo, even if the status quo is at least trying in many ways, and the alternative would not be trying.”
But the reality remains that Connecticut and New England will need more energy and the states would prefer it’s clean.
Massachusetts may provide an example of how to go about doing that even with the unpredictability of the new administration.
The Mass model
Late last year, the Bay State enacted groundbreaking legislation to facilitate moving away from natural gas and toward more clean energy using endeavors like siting reforms, streamlining permitting and up-to-date “grid-enhancing technologies” to make everything work.
Less noticed was an announcement last March that the state was creating a first-in-the-nation Office of Energy Transformation. The way that new office has chosen to approach its own very broad mission — while not designed to work around what the Trump administration may have in store — may position the state to do just that.
The office is starting off with three focus areas within its high-level mandates. One is to decarbonize what are known as “peaker plants” — the power that is only used in extreme circumstances, usually when it’s very cold or very hot. They are typically powered by the dirtiest fuels. Another focus is to no longer rely on the LNG facility in Everett, Mass. Both goals run counter to Trump’s repeated pledge to drill for more natural gas and activate more LNG terminals.
But importantly, the last goal is to create new ways to finance energy transition projects. Trump, along with Project 2025, have vowed to eliminate funding for renewable energy projects and take back funding provided by the Biden administration.
The change in administrations hasn’t changed the office’s thinking or urgency according to its executive director, Melissa Lavinson.
“We don’t know what’s gonna happen, right? We don’t know the timing of what might change or not change,” she said. “That’s why we’re looking at ways in which we can move forward as a state.”
She said the new technologies already out there are going to be needed. And with all the climate tech companies in the state, figuring out how to leverage all that innovation will be a big part of the effort.
“It’s an environmental imperative, but it’s also an economic imperative and a competitiveness imperative,” she said. “So we’re looking at building off the federal funding we have, recognizing that that might change. So what can we do as a state to make sure that we can keep moving?”
For the financing component, Lavinson said the new office is considering innovative mechanisms at the state and regional levels to engage the private sector. “There’s a lot of capital on the sidelines that’s looking for places to go,” she said. “If we can figure out structures to enable that, that can lower costs for customers while making sure we continue to invest in the infrastructure that’s going to be great.”
Dolan of the Power Generators Association said he gives Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey and her administration a lot of credit for not trying to solve all the world’s problems.
“How do we focus on these three where we think there’s actually pretty good buy-in on both the public and the private side to push something forward, then learn any best practices or lessons from that and scale it up on a broader basis,” he said.
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.
AEU’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.”
Gillingham at Yale agrees new financing models will be needed.
“To the extent that the private sector funding can be leveraged to make things happen, and that you can put a small amount in, or not even put much in at all but leverage —provide information, provide support, connect people. That’s something that that I think this Office of Energy Transformation in Massachusetts is trying to do,” he said.
He also pointed to Connecticut’s Green Bank and its role in getting more residential solar in the state than had been imagined. “Much of that value came about through leveraging non-governmental funding.”
But Gillingham also warns states need to be concerned about more than just the Trump administration’s energy policy.
“Twenty-five percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and we’re gonna go right to a recession,” he said. “There’s no question.”
Turbines for wind; panels for solar — most are still coming from Europe and China. “It would just have a huge impact.”
That’s if the tariffs actually happen, said Georgetown’s Birchard. Real economic prosperity from clean energy has already taken root and a Trump rollback or something like tariffs could face serious headwinds from the business community, she said.
“We’re all in transition at this point, and we’re watching closely what’s going to happen next,” she said. “But we also know the federal administration isn’t the only actor here. We’ve got a whole lot of forces involved in our economy, and those forces are all moving forward towards the clean energy transition. We need more energy, and we need new energy. That new energy is going to be clean. We have the technology. It’s now cost-effective and affordable. The more we do it, the cheaper it will be. And so the drivers of economic forces, as well as the states, are well poised to keep things moving forward.”