Worcester Business Journal

Biz-friendly communities 6 Natick, Marlborough have found success creating single points of contact for companies. WBJ >> To Subscribe Central Massachusetts' Source for Business News April 25, 2016 Volume 27 Number 9 www.wbjournal.com $2.00 Shop Talk 8 Q&A with Kim Goulette, executive director, American Red Cross, Central Mass. chapter M A I N E N E W H A M P S H I R E V E R M O N T M A S S . C O N N . R . I . Northern Maine wind resources Western Maine wind resources Unable and unwilling to install the necessary infrastructure for renewable energy, Central Mass. has teamed with the rest of southern New England to pay far-flung locations to help meet the region's lofty goals for emissions-free electricity Outsourced Ideology Previous major renewable energy purchases by southern New England relied heavily on Maine wind farms, and the 24 proposals being weighed now also focus heavily on wind turbines and transmission lines from northern New England. BY LAURA FINALDI, JAMES McCARTHY, AND MATT PILON New England Business Media Staff Writers Starting on Tuesday and lasting until late July, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island will begin awarding contracts to clean power providers inside and outside their jurisdictions who offered to help the states reach their goals for emissions-free electricity. By partner- ing together starting one year ago, the three states planned to use their collective buying power to elicit more responses and drive down the cost of renewable energy, which is important for a region that already has the highest electricity prices in the continental U.S. "By procuring with other states, it allows us to attract and benefit from economies of scale and benefit from renewables with a cost-effective price. Not only are we meeting our clean energy goals, but we are reducing the cost of electricity," said Judith Judson, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources. W ith limited ability to gen- erate large-scale renew- able electricity within their own geographies, the three southern New England states are close to assigning large sums of money to more remote regional locations to do what Central Massachusetts has largely been resistant to: install new major energy infrastructure. Region's incubators driven by startup culture W hen Wyatt Wade gets a call from a business hoping to move into the Printers Building, the nearly 100-year-old space on Portland Street in Worcester owned by his family, his No. 1 con- cern is making sure it's the type of business that might be able to collaborate on projects with other tenants. "We want [tenants] to be creative-economy type businesses that could work well with the others. It will create potential synergies," Wade said. There's an African music development business, an NPR-affiliated jazz station and the Davis Art Gallery, which is owned and operated by the Davis family that Wade married into. Maker space Technocopia was in the process of moving into the sixth floor when Joe Bush, executive director of the Institute for Energy and Sustainability, approached Wade with the idea of bringing an incubator space for clean technology start- ups to the building. "He almost jumped out of his seat and said, 'I love it. BY LAURA FINALDI Worcester Business Journal Staff Writer >> Continued on Page 11 >> Continued on Page 10 Companies like Enerconnex work out of the Worcester CleanTech Incubator. 12 State and local officials are using vocational technical schools to fill the skills gap in the workforce. FOCUS: Workforce Development I L L U S T R A T I O N / M I T C H E L L H A Y E S P H O T O / L A U R A F I N A L D I

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