It has been one month since Governor Sherrill took office and we finally have been provided a glimmer of what the path on energy may look like. Last week, the administration released its energy transition report which is intended to guide their policy. At AENJ, we created a word cloud with the text to help explain what is and more importantly is not included in what was released:

You may need to squint on the word cloud to even try to find words like baseload, while the word natural gas isn’t even on there. In fact, by our count on 12 pages we found:

• Affordability/affordable appears 28 times
• Solar appears 26 times
• Baseload generation appears 2 times
• Offshore wind appears 1 time
• Natural gas appears 0 times

The report appears to prematurely pick winners and losers despite ten years of historical evidence here in NJ that shows picking winners and losers is not an effective strategy. That is also despite the fact that:

• Nearly all industry experts continue to point to the need for increased natural gas generation
• 50% of in-state generation comes from natural gas
• 75% of NJ homes use natural gas for heat

It’s concerning that the transition report fails to even mention natural gas. It appears we are once again putting all our energy policy eggs in one basket – this time with solar – which is the same mistake we made with wind, that lead to the terrible situation we are currently facing.

When the words affordable or affordability appear more than actually generating energy and the baseload sources to do it, we are left skeptical about the direction that the transition has set for the administration.