Vermont Democratic gubernatorial challenger Christine Hallquist, left, and Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who will face off in the 2018 general election. Source: Associated Press |
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Former utility executive Christine Hallquist has a plausible shot at defeating Vermont Gov. Phil Scott's re-election bid on Nov. 6.
Hallquist resigned in February as CEO of Vermont Electric Cooperative Inc. after 12 years at the helm of the electric distribution cooperative to run against Scott, the incumbent Republican governor who was elected in November 2016. She would be the first transgender governor in the United States.
Vermont holds gubernatorial elections every two years. Hallquist faces an uphill battle — a recent VPR-Vermont PBS Poll showed Scott with a 14-point lead — but nearly a quarter of surveyed voters were still unsure. While national media coverage has focused on her gender identity, Hallquist's campaign has focused on energy and climate change and their connection to poverty and economic development in the overwhelmingly rural New England state, which has some of the highest energy prices in the nation.
In "the history of humankind, civilizations and nations have risen and fallen based on energy," Hallquist said in an interview.
Agreements and differences
Although Hallquist is keen to draw sharp differences between her energy policies and Scott's, as shown in recent debates and coverage by WCAX3, both candidates agree that Vermont's energy future will be a mix of renewables and Canadian hydropower imports. Both also acknowledge that widespread opposition among Vermonters to building wind turbines on ridgelines makes large-scale wind development in Vermont unlikely, and they support Vermont's goal of procuring 90% of its electricity needs from renewables by 2050.
Scott, however, is adamantly opposed to a carbon tax, while Hallquist will not take a position until studying its impact on low-income Vermonters.
Hallquist helped craft the state's Solar Pathways Vermont plan in 2017, to procure 20% of Vermont's electricity needs from solar by 2025 — which amounts to 1 GW of capacity, the equivalent of Vermont's peak electric demand — as a milestone to meeting the 90% renewables by 2050 goal. While she vocally supports renewables, Hallquist is a realist on the limits of wind and solar power.
"There's actually too much focus on solar right now because [with] solar, you've got to buy replacement power 85% of the time [to back up the intermittent] solar," Hallquist said. "Just relying on solar alone, without looking at all of the other options is clearly not going to get us to a 90% carbon-free portfolio because … in the winter, we don't have any solar when we're hitting our peaks and we're highly fossil fuel-dependent."
Beyond the borders
Vermont's energy transition depends on getting out of a "Vermont-only solution" mindset, Hallquist said, to pursue an aggressive build-out of the transmission system to facilitate the flow of renewable-generated electricity across the region and the country. She envisions a "peakable transmission grid" across North America that would widen access to not only the Midwest's vaster and cheaper onshore wind resources, but also solar resources and New England's offshore wind resources, with Canadian hydropower supplying backup power.
An example is National Grid USA's proposed 400-MW, high-voltage direct-current Vermont Green Line, which seeks to supply low-carbon hydropower from Hydro-Québec subsidiary HQ Energy Services (U.S.) Inc. About 40 miles of the approximately 59-mile-long line will be buried under the lakebed of Lake Champlain. Expected to be in service in 2023, the project has put in a bid for Connecticut's competitive zero-carbon power supply contract.
"We've got to move some more transmission into New England," said Hallquist, mentioning the repeated blocking of attempts by electric utilities to fund the expansion of New England's natural gas pipelines in an effort to shore up supplies for gas-fired generators during cold snaps.
Power grid operator ISO New England has repeatedly warned that, without expanded natural gas infrastructure in New England, the region faces blackouts in coming winters, thanks to constrained pipelines and a growing regional dependency on gas-fired generation.
"Certainly on the short term we have some serious [wintertime grid] issues, but the problem with making these [gas] infrastructure investments: they're 40-year investments," Hallquist said. "And I'd rather be making 40-year investments on transmission and renewables."
Even though Vermont's lone nuclear power plant, Vermont Yankee, closed in December 2014, Hallquist declared recently that "we have a choice [of] fossil fuels or nuclear" when it comes to baseload power. As a result, she "won't take anything off of the table" to solve climate change and backs regional efforts to shore up uneconomic nuclear power plants.


