Three Questions with Kathryn Wright, Senior Program Officer for Clean Energy at the Barr Foundation, and Jay Campbell, Partner at Hart Research

The Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) is a long-time grantee of the Barr Foundation’s Climate Program. CESA supports state agencies in the Northeast as they work towards a renewable energy transition. This interview summarizes relevant findings from a recent Barr-supported poll on public perceptions of offshore wind. This article is cross-posted from CESA’s Offshore Wind Accelerator newsletter.

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In the fall of 2023, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on offshore wind procurement. The MOU allows project developers to submit bids to multiple states at once, which could attract larger projects and drive down energy costs. This past July, the Barr Foundation and Hart Research published Views on Offshore Wind in New England: Findings from statewide surveys in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. The survey sought to understand voters’ perspectives on offshore wind and their feelings about collaboration between the three New England states on offshore wind.

CESA’s Sam Schacht spoke to Kathryn Wright, Senior Program Officer for Clean Energy at the Barr Foundation, and Jay Campbell, Partner at Hart Research about their motivations to undertake the research, key findings from the survey, and what lessons we can learn from their work.

CESA: Why did you decide to pursue this research, and what went into creating it?

Kathryn Wright: For several years, the Barr Foundation has tried to do regular polling of New England states, mostly focusing on Massachusetts and Connecticut, because that’s where we do the most work. One of the things we’ve always tried to track is how voters think about clean energy and our energy system.

Back in October, the three southern New England states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island signed an MOU saying they would work together on offshore wind to procure a lot more energy for the region. A requests for proposals was released, and applications were submitted back in the spring. There’s also been quite a bit of press about offshore wind, because there’s active construction off the coast of New England. Both of those were opportunities for us to really get a sense of how people are feeling. These projects are now going from being concepts to being real.

For a project like this, we bring in the perspectives of the organizations we work with. We have a subset of organizations that receive grants from the Barr Foundation that are very focused on offshore wind from different perspectives. They provided feedback on some of the topics we were covering and helped to set the scope. They were part of the reason we ended up polling in all three states.

Jay Campbell: We interviewed 400 registered voters in each of those three Southern New England states, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. We reached them through a variety of methods, including some individuals who are part of a large national online research panel. We augmented it with additional interviewing including live calls and directing people in all three states to our survey through text. We utilized all three modes of interviewing to get to 1,200 people. Through a series of conversations, using Barr’s expertise in offshore wind and Hart’s expertise in polling, we created a set of questions to help us understand where New Englanders are when it comes to offshore wind.

CESA: How do the results fit in with polls you’ve done in the past? Was anything that surprised you about your findings?

Kathryn Wright: This poll is a little different than some of our previous work, which was more broadly about people’s perceptions of renewable energy, including states’ commitments to high-ambition renewable energy and greenhouse gas targets, how reliable people think renewable energy is, and people’s opinions of the transition away from natural gas. I can tell you that generally, the trend we’ve seen from when we started polling to now is steady support for renewable energy, and softening of support for a natural gas expansion and growing skepticism about gas safety.

Jay Campbell: One of my top-of-mind findings is this idea of cooperation among the states could potentially lead to better outcomes in this area. Whether that’s a perhaps decreased financial commitment for each individual state or the other types of benefits cooperation might bring, the idea of the state’s working together is actually a quite high selling point in favor of the tri-state procurement idea. It’s not often in polling that respondents reflect on or are drawn to those sort of process-type elements. I think an important point is that three states in the same region are kind of working together to tackle a very big problem. In my 28 years as a pollster one thing that I have learned is that people intuitively get a lot of things, and one of the things they get is that an individual state or an individual country cannot fix climate change.

CESA: How does this polling inform the way we ought to communicate the government’s role in offshore wind, especially considering people’s concerns about offshore wind and marine habitats?

Kathryn Wright: States and the offshore wind industry are taking a lot of precautions around marine life and whales throughout project development. Earlier this year, we saw NOAA and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management release new rules that were specific to whales and offshore wind development.

It’s something that’s being taken seriously, and we’re informed by the science that we know. Right now, a lot of the whale deaths we’ve seen are related to fishing line entanglements and ship collisions. There have been a lot of conversations on social media and misinformation around the connection between offshore wind and marine life. We have to take those concerns seriously, so perhaps there’s an opportunity to lift up some of the work that marine scientists are doing to really try to do some myth-busting where possible.

I think the survey results told us that there are a lot of positive benefits that people associate with offshore wind, including energy price reductions and energy independence. I think the job we have as communicators is to lift up the positive story, and not always play defense, but instead talk about the benefits of offshore wind, because they really resonated in the poll.

Jay Campbell: Whether it’s energy independence, jobs in the economy in the state, the effects of climate change, cleanliness of air and water, health, or electric reliability—all of those factors come down very much on the positive side when people are asked to think about the potential effects of offshore wind. Upwards of 75% of respondents said that they favored the idea of building these offshore wind operations off the coast of these states. It’s tough to get more than three quarters of the electorate to be in favor of something. Addressing those concerns around marine life, while also lifting up the positives around the potential to bring down electricity prices, and enhance energy independence for these states, are all really important steps to take.

More broadly, the idea of working together to address this big problem of either air pollution, water pollution, climate change, and being able to bring to bear the resources that three states have, that one state may not have on its own, to address big problems, I think is a really important way to think about this. For example, renewable energy is something that we know that young people care about a lot, and they tell us so in the poll. We can use the fact that something—the tri-state procurement—is going to address that as one way to illustrate the ability of government to affect change and take big steps to ultimately improve life for people in these states and the country as a whole into the future.

Published 09.10.2024