Representative Mitch Bolinsky introduced a bill, HB 6026, in January 2015 to freeze Connecticut’s Renewable Energy Standard. The legislation proposed would have suspended the clean energy law for five years, but the bill did not move forward after being referred to the Joint Committee on Energy & Technology.

The Yankee Institute for Public Policy released a report written by the Beacon Hill Institute (BHI) that claims enormous economic costs to Connecticut because of the renewable energy standard. In the Yankee Institute report, which was released in January 2015, BHI’s authors cite flat electricity demand as a rationale for not transitioning the electricity grid to clean energy sources. However, the authors fail to acknowledge that electricity demand increased between 2007 and the Great Recession. The reports attacking RES laws produced by BHI have been throughly debunked by independent economists at Synapse Energy Economics. Synapse found “fundamental flaws in both the energy data and the economic modeling used by BHI.”

Posted by Energy and Policy Institute