Bay State Bracing for New D.C. Wind & Solar Political Climate
Mike Clifford – Commonwealth News
BOSTON — Despite President Trump pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, New England states and many Americans continue to embrace the idea of renewable energy. Forty years ahead of Environmental Protection Agency predictions, output from renewable energy has doubled.
Nearly 20 percent of electricity in the U.S. now comes from renewable resources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Trump is not the first president to try to put the brakes on renewable energy, said Peter Shattuck, director the Acadia Center’s Clean Energy Initiative.
When the George W. Bush administration pulled back on renewable energy, he said New England governors responded with the nation’s first mandatory climate program for power plants.
Shattuck said he expects New England will push back again. “Backsliding by the Trump administration certainly doesn’t help,” Shattuck said, “but a lot of the fundamentals of clean energy, wind and solar, are taking off on their own; and a lot of the policy incentives are dictated at the state level.”
Shattuck said Massachusetts is the biggest solar market in New England and legislative proposals already are pending to increase the state’s current pledge to obtain 25 percent of the state’s power from renewable sources by 2022.
In 2012, a report by the Energy Information Administration predicted the country would see wind and solar power providing 15 percent of total energy by 2035. Ken Bossong, executive director at the SUN-DAY campaign, said the nation currently is ahead of that prediction, but the momentum that has been gained could be lost because of the latest developments in Washington.
“If anything, it’s clearly more of a problem today,” Bossong said; “and certainly with the Trump administration it’s a serious concern just because there’s not the support that we had just a year ago from the White House for addressing this problem.”
Bossong said solar power is utilized by 1.2 million households in America, either from solar panels installed on rooftops or by homeowners tapping in to nearby solar energy sources.