Hartford Business Journal

4 CONNECTICUT GREEN GUIDE • SPRING 2016 www.CTGreenGuide.com CTrides can help with free resources for commuters. Give it a rest. 1-877-CTrides | CTrides.com Rest your car, relax your mind & save some money. News Cycle ENERGY NEWS IN BRIEF Moody's: Capacity auction bad for generators ISO-New England's recent forward capacity auction was good for ratepayers, with the cost to guarantee that power plants will be ready to deliver when needed in 2019 falling from $4 bil- lion to $3 billion. But that 25 percent drop in capacity pric- es wasn't so great for merchant generators, Moody's said. The ratings agency said the decline would hurt cash flow for NRG Energy, Dominion Re- sources, NextEra Energy and others. ISO-NE region remains the most lucrative merchant generation market, Moody's said, but it will face continued pressure from the spread of wind and solar, as well as expected major transmission projects like Northern Pass, which aims to bring Canadian hydropower to the region. Mass. solar industry swamps CT While incentives have boosted Connecticut's solar industry in recent years, the state has a ways to go before it catches up job-wise with Massachusetts and other states. The 2015 Solar Foundation solar job census pegged Connecticut's industry employment at 1,951. That was the 18th highest per capita in the country, the report said. More than half of those jobs were solar in- stallers, while 29 percent were sales and distri- bution positions. Manufacturing accounted for just 4 percent of Connecticut's solar jobs. Hartford County had 697 solar jobs, which was the most of any Connecticut county. The rankings were again dominated by California, while Massachusetts had the sec- ond-highest number of solar jobs per capita, at 15,095, the survey said. That's 74 percent of all solar jobs in New England. Bridgeport Harbor to make the switch to gas Connecticut's last coal-fired plant will be no more in just several years. The owner of Bridgeport Harbor Generating Station, Public Service Enterprise Group, plans to convert the plant to run on gas by 2019. The new gas plant will cost more than $550 million. New England has relied more heavily on natural gas in recent years, both for environ- mental reasons and because its price has come down with the advent of fracking, which pro- vides a steady supply of gas deposits that were once difficult to reach. Coal was just 5 percent of New England's power mix in 2014, down from 18 percent at the turn of the century. CT solar arrays could get much bigger While Connecticut's solar jobs still lag behind many other states, it could soon move up the rankings, depending on the outcome of a first-of- its-kind bidding process currently underway. As soon as next month, Connecticut resi- dents will know the likelihood of a handful of major solar projects being built. As part of a three-state RFP, developers pro- posed approximately 240 megawatts of Con- necticut-based clean energy generation. Of that amount, 63 megawatts is from a fuel cell park in Beacon Falls (see our cover story on page 7), but the remainder are ground-mount- ed solar farms. The solar proposals include a 50-megawatt array straddling Brooklyn and Canterbury; 44-megawatt installation near Foxwoods; 26-megawatt solar farm in Simsbury; and 20 megawatts straddling Enfield and Somers — which is currently home to one of the state's largest solar fields (five megawatts owned by Dominion).

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