HARTFORD, CT – President Donald Trump last week called for a new pipeline that would potentially give New England states access to natural gas from Pennsylvania.
Much of that state sits atop the vast Marcellus Shale formation, which extends 600 miles from New York to West Virginia and Ohio. He said such a plan could save households up to $5,000 annually, depending on their energy use.
Gov. Ned Lamont the following day indicated he would not necessarily be opposed to the plan, telling CTInsider’s Ken Dixon that “the president and I will never agree about wind power and solar power, nor will we agree about coal and even oil, but perhaps in the area of natural gas and nuclear there are some ways that we can work together to potentially bring down dramatically the prices of electricity in our state and region.”
Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich, ranking senator on the Energy and Technology Committee, agreed that the issue boils down to supply and demand.
“To potentially bring down prices dramatically in CT, we need more generation,” Fazio wrote Monday in a statement. “As the governor said about a potential new pipeline: ‘Let’s find a way to do it.’”
Fazio urged Lamont to “continue working expeditiously with neighboring states to explore greater access to natural gas here in CT in order to lower costs and protect winter reliability.”
The focus on supply could be an avenue to lower costs. The average monthly gas bill in Connecticut is about $139, up from just over $90 a decade ago. That number can vary depending on the size of a home and whether it uses gas for heating and cooking.
According to the 2012 Office of Legislative Research paper, “Expanding Gas in the State,” Connecticut is served by three natural gas pipelines: The Algonquin, Tennessee, and Iroquois. The paper also described the original proposal for the Constitution gas pipeline, which New York rejected in 2016 over environmental concerns. After a series of court battles, the proposed operators, Williams, Inc., declared the project dead in 2020.
The Algonquin connects in New Jersey and includes spurs in Danbury, North Haven, and New London. The Tennessee brings gas from Texas and the Gulf of Mexico and runs to Massachusetts. The Iroquois runs from Canada through western Connecticut before terminating in the Bronx.
There could be even more savings on the electricity front. State residents pay an average of $200 per month for electricity and Connecticut generates about 58% of its electricity from natural gas power plants. Another 37% comes from the state’s lone nuclear power plant, Waterford’s Millstone Nuclear Power Station.
With a production of 16.5 million megawatt hours, Millstone produces about 15% of New England’s electricity, or enough energy to power about 2 million homes. The next six largest plants, and a total of seven of the top 10 energy producers in the state, are powered by natural gas. These include the Lake Road Generating Plant in Killingly (5.8MWh), the CPV Towantic Energy Center in Oxford (5.5MWh), the Milford Power Project (3.7MWh), Bridgeport Station (3.4MWh), the Kleen Energy Systems in Middletown (2.8MWh) and the Bridgeport Energy Project (2.4MWh).
The state also has dozens of smaller generators among its 154 total energy-producing plants. Other sources of electricity, including solar, hydroelectric, and municipal trash-to-energy, contribute less than 5% of the electricity produced in Connecticut.
And while any construction – and therefore any potential savings – is unlikely to take place any time soon, the key is to maintain open lines of communication between state and federal officials and leaders of the other New England states and New York, according to Rob Blanchard, Lamont’s director of communications.
Blanchard reiterated on Monday that Lamont wants to bring new energy resources into New England to lower costs for ratepayers.
“We look forward to continuing the conversation with federal and regional partners on how we can best achieve this goal,” he stated.
