Jessie Stratton, a long-time legislator turned environmental advocate has been named to help formulate policy as the state merges environmental and energy regulation under one department. Monday was Stratton’s first day as director of policy development for the DEP – a job she will continue with the new Department of Energy and Environment, once legislation […]
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.
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Legislation aims to streamline complex energy-savings contracts
The first time Mike Walsh, East Hartford’s director of finance, heard the words “performance contract,” his response was, “What’s that?” He certainly found out. “They are a pain in the butt,” he said. And he loves them. “Simply put,” Walsh said “you take money otherwise put into energy use and put it into upgrading.” But […]
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Electric car backers focus on conquering ‘range anxiety’
Frank Calder remembers the 38-mile drive from Karl Chevrolet in New Canaan to his home in Oxford just before Christmas last year in his new electric car – a Chevrolet Volt, the first one sold in Connecticut. “Coming home on the Merritt Parkway, it was bumper-to-bumper,” Calder said. It was also cold and he knew […]
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Creating DEEP: Consensus on the concept, haggling on the details
The last time Connecticut had something akin to an energy department, Jimmy Carter was president and the nation faced the aftereffects of the Arab oil embargo: crude oil had risen to $14.53 a barrel–$53.02 in today’s dollars–and the average price for a gallon of gasoline was 62 cents–$2.26 today. They would be a relief now […]
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High hopes, low support for growing the fuel cell industry
In the last decade, fuel cells–those extremely efficient electro-chemical devices that make power from hydrogen and oxygen–have been seen as Connecticut’s ticket to the alternative energy ball. The state remains a hub of the fuel cell industry, but it is a glass half full and half empty. Half full, it has created jobs and increased […]
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Pending energy bill seen as vital to future of state’s solar industry
There’s a joke going around the Connecticut solar industry these days: They ought to start a shuttle service between here and New Jersey. The thing is, no one’s really laughing at it. Some five years after Connecticut established the most generous solar incentive program in the country, spurring the growth of dozens of solar companies […]
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As deadline nears for cleaning Sound, added funding unlikely to be enough
When this legislative session comes to an end, Connecticut’s Clean Water Fund could be among the few winners – on track right now to gain a net $15 million in state bond funding. But with a federal deadline to clean up the amount of nitrogen discharged into Long Island Sound only a few years away […]
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After hopeful start, renewable energy initiative struggles through recession
In 2003, when the General Assembly created what is now known as Project 150, it was widely anticipated that most if not all of the renewable energy projects it was supposed to spawn would be operational or close to it by now. Today none of Project 150’s 13 plants is even under construction, and only […]