A curious thing about recycling in Connecticut — it’s mandatory. Has been for 20 years. And that doesn’t just mean commercial folks have to recycle, or towns have to take your recycling if you choose to leave it out. The recycling laws in Connecticut mean that everybody, all the time, is required to recycle. The […]
Jan Ellen Spiegel
Jan Ellen is CT Mirror's regular freelance Environment and Energy Reporter. As a freelance reporter, her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Yale Climate Connections, and elsewhere. She is a former editor at The Hartford Courant, where she handled national politics including coverage of the controversial 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. She was an editor at the Gazette in Colorado Springs and spent more than 20 years as a TV and radio producer at CBS News and CNN in New York and in the Boston broadcast market. In 2013 she was the recipient of a Knight Journalism Fellowship at MIT on energy and climate. She graduated from the University of Michigan and attended Boston University’s graduate film program.
Posted inEnergy & Environment, Money
A new agriculture committee?
As we reported a week or so back, the idea of re-establishing an agriculture committee in the General Assembly for the first time in decades was being considered by a pair of Republican lawmakers. On Thursday, Sen. John A. Kissel, R-Enfield, and Rep. Penny Bacchiocchi, R-Somers, will announce plans to create a Select Committee on […]
Posted inNews
Microgrids offer potential for greater energy reliability
Easy to miss in the flurry around the Two Storms Panel report earlier this month was an idea called microgrids. A jargony techno-term, a microgrid is a small electric grid with its own generation source. It normally operates linked to the main electric grid, but when that suffers widespread interruptions, as Connecticut’s did during Tropical […]
Posted inEnergy & Environment, Money
DEEP hires first procurement manager
Connecticut Thursday became the second state in the nation to have a power procurement manager — with the announcement that the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection had hired Jeffrey Gaudiosi. The position was mandated in the huge energy bill passed during the last legislative session as way to get cheaper and cleaner energy to […]
Posted inEnergy & Environment, Money
CEQ offers legislative priorities for session
It’s a modest, and somewhat familiar, list of legislative priorities released by the Council on Environmental Quality Tuesday in advance of the 2012 legislative session. Modest in that, with a short session, folks tend to be mindful of realistic expectations — not to mention the current economic climate notable for its distinct lack of money […]
Posted inNews
Agriculture’s star rises in Malloy administration
In an era when jobs haven’t exactly been growing on trees — Connecticut is betting that they just might. And on bushes. And even indoors. Some half-dozen years after the Rowland administration tried to all but eliminate the state’s Department of Agriculture, the Malloy administration is embracing the state’s $3.5 billion, 20,000-job agriculture industry as […]
Posted inEnergy & Environment
The bear truth
Barely a peep in the last few days on the possibility of a bear hunt in Connecticut, after a flurry of assertions that one was in the works, followed by a bunch of non-denial denials, and some generally vague answers that left all kinds of doors wide open. (In case you forgot where this all […]
Posted inNews
The bear truth
Barely a peep in the last few days on the possibility of a bear hunt in Connecticut, after a flurry of assertions one was in the works followed by a bunch of non-denial denials, and some generally vague answers that left all kinds of doors wide open. (In case you forgot where this all started […]
Posted inEnergy & Environment, Health
Of caps and emissions and a program named Reggie
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — the first-and-only-in-the-nation carbon dioxide trading and reduction program — has reached its first three-year compliance and evaluation cycle with mixed results. Total emissions from more than 200 plants in the 10 participating Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states were 34 percent below the cap at the end of 2011, according to preliminary calculations by […]
Posted inNews
Want to see what a hurricane could do?
Nobody had to convince Branford First Selectman Anthony “Unk” DaRos that the water level in Long Island Sound is higher than it used to be. He’s spent four decades as a stonemason, much of it raising docks all along the shoreline “Why would they build a dock that goes underwater at high tide,” he asked. […]
Posted inNews
Big agenda, and a few battles, brewing for energy and environment in 2012
After the bumper 2011 legislative session, you might expect a modest wish list from Connecticut legislators, environmentalists and conservation advocates for 2012. Not happening. Nearly a year after those groups and the Malloy administration began an energy and environmental reform quest that resulted in the new Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, an unprecedented comprehensive […]
Posted inNews
With a dash of drama, state picks solar projects
Christmas arrived a couple of days early for two solar power developers chosen Friday by the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to build a total of 10 megawatts of clean power that will go into the electric grid. Despite a tight timetable that prompted complaints, developers proposed 21 projects, with the winners promising clean […]
Posted inEnergy & Environment, Money
State’s face is red (not green)
When the U.S. Green Building Council — the folks who brought us the LEED certification system for buildings — released its inaugural list of “Best of Green Schools” Connecticut with its fuel-cell and solar-powered schools was notable by its absence. What’s worse, who’s the sponsor for the USGBC’s Center for Green Schools, which oversaw the awards and other […]
Posted inNews
Deadlines loom for many DEEP programs
January 1 probably felt a long way off last spring when legislators were pulling together the hundreds of pages, 140 sections and countless new programs in the final version of the big energy bill. What is now known as Public Act 11-80 was also packed with close to three dozen deadlines for those programs as […]
Posted inNews
Economic value of state’s parks is more than $1 billion
A study on the economic impact of Connecticut’s state-run parks and forests is causing more than a few eyebrows to arch not to mention visions of some serious dollar signs. The total — an impressive $1.25 billion a year. And that could be a very conservative number. “I always want to be very careful to […]