We have editorialized before about the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund, usually in terms that are less than laudatory. It’s a difficult stand to take. After all, CCEF’s very name seems to imply that it’s here to save the world. Why would we want to be nitpickers about that?
The problem with organizations like the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund is that, because their façade is one of a wholesome warrior against the evils of pollution, global warming and corporate greed, no one wants to challenge them. But without someone serving as watchdog, the hard questions never get asked, and what we are left with is not a virtuous champion of the environment, but a feel-good boondoggle of wasted money and irresponsible activity.
The Clean Energy Fund is a quasi-governmental body. It operates under the oversight of Connecticut Innovations Inc. It is not funded with taxpayer dollars, but with ratepayer money. That means that everyone in Connecticut who pays an electric power bill or a natural gas bill – consumers and businesses – kicks in a little bit every month to fill the coffers of the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund.
In other words, because of the CCEF, everyone’s energy costs just a little bit more than it otherwise would. CCEF contributes to higher energy expenses, not lower ones.
Perhaps all this capital inflow is still a good thing, if it eventually leads to a better future for all of us. The problem, though, is that the Clean Energy Fund’s record doesn’t look like that’s the direction we’re headed in.
Since CCEF’s inception in 2000, the clean energy fund approved 206 projects that promised to produce 71.5 megawatts of clean energy; so far, those projects have produced 2 megawatts of energy.
The fund has been a little more successful in promoting solar energy power. But for the grants and abatements that it has put out to help homeowners adopt solar power, it has been keenly inept at doling money out to commercial and public organizations.
Maybe there’s a plausible argument that says the Clean Energy Fund should help schools and municipal buildings pay for solar power. Government buildings, after all, are taxpayer supported – and often drastically under funded. Solar installations at schools, community centers and the like help communities, and provide tacit, visual lessons about the effectiveness of solar power. In making grants to communities such as Hartford, New Haven, Hamden and Milford, CCEF chalks up a win.
But then, in some misguided marketing scheme, CCEF keeps putting up huge solar power systems into big corporate environments, like a $3 million grant to a Staples distribution center in Windham County. What’s the point of this? If big companies need huge taxpayer handouts to install solar power, that’s telling every other commercial enterprise to stay away.
The biggest laugh came a couple of weeks ago. CCEF announced that it has given Fairfield-based General Electric a $722,000 grant to buy solar panels – which, by the way, are made by GE. We are now using ratepayer money to convince GE to buy its own products.
The Connecticut Clean Energy Fund has taken some $75 million of ratepayer money and essentially squandered nearly all of it. And now it has moved into the realm of the absurd. If we really want to bring down energy costs in Connecticut, it’s time to bring down this sunstroke-stricken program.
