A Former New England Energy Official Grapples With Losing Offshore Wind

This week’s conversation is with Barbara Kates-Garnick, a professor of practice at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, who before academia served as undersecretary of energy for the state of Massachusetts. I reached out to Kates-Garnick after I reported on the circumstances surrounding a major solar project cancellation in the Western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury, which I believe was indicative of the weakening hand developers have in conflicts with activists on the ground. I sought to best understand how folks enmeshed in the state’s decarbonization goals felt about what was happening to local renewables development in light of the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credit.

Of course, like anyone in Massachusetts, Kates-Garnick was blunt about the situation: it’s quite bad.

The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

So to start, how do you feel about the state’s odds of meeting its climate goals?

My own assumption is that it was going to be tough before all of the federal changes to meet those goals. They were highly ambitious and I really support the ambition, but now it’s going to be really, really difficult to meet the clean energy goals. It’s not that we shouldn't work hard to meet them but we have to understand that in this current state of affairs, the obstacles are going to be much greater. But when you take offshore wind off the table, the challenge becomes even more enormous.

Why is offshore wind necessary to meet the state’s climate targets?

It’s because it is a large resource that would be coming into the grid over a period of time. The significance is in the megawatts, the size and scale. It was particularly important and we’re land constrained in New England. And all of the sudden you’re taking such a large opportunity in generation off the table.

We can do energy efficiency and we can do solar but as you know from the Shutesbury situation, land is at a premium. Location – you can’t site onshore wind here. We tried really hard under former Governor Deval Patrick and that hit a lot of obstacles. So offshore wind is critical to meeting those goals.

Help me understand the conflicts over this land constraint – is Shutesbury an aberration or a bit of a tale of the tape of the problems here?

The Shutesbury situation reflects how we’re not a large geographical area. We’re not Texas. We can put solar on roofs but you need larger solar installations. We’ve encouraged the solar industry as much as possible. But the area is limited. Wind off the coast provided an alternative that was realistic and not a science experiment.

How much of this problem is state permitting? It feels like there is some land in a space like Massachusetts but people don’t want to use it for this.

Any time you try to put energy infrastructure into New England – whether it's a gas pipeline or a solar installation – there’s a lot of local environmental and permitting regulations that can really hold up a project. One of the good things Massachusetts has done is we made energy permitting easier and went through a permitting reform. We have an Energy Facility Siting Council.

There’s still ways local interests can hold up projects. I think that’s just a fact of life in New England.

So that’s why offshore wind is so important to New England.

It becomes more challenging. From a resource perspective, we are at the end of the fossil fuel pipeline. The middle Atlantic has more gas pipelines coming into it than we do in New England. Offshore wind represented a great opportunity for us.

With respect to the state permitting, it is possible to now overcome some local regulations in state permitting in ways that weren’t possible before. We did address permitting reform in Massachusetts. The Energy Facility Siting Council has played a great, important role in having that happen and [towns] can be overruled to a certain extent.

Well, but it sounds like what you’re saying is that the conflicts will still exist because land is at a premium?

Yeah. And local control will always play a role in that.

The Commonwealth signed permitting reform into law in 2024 and in that there were comprehensive reforms to the process for clean energy infrastructure. This has improved siting. But again that doesn’t always ensure a project will be permitted and you can easily find ways to hold them up.

What gives you hope for the future? Where’s the light at the end of the tunnel for you?

I think that by facilitating permitting reform and also participation – local participation – as early as possible in the stages of projects… I think this is where the key lies. You can pass regulations but a lot of it has to do with doing the work ahead of time on your project and satisfying the local community so you don’t have a bigger fight on your hands.