By Michael Kuser

BOSTON — More than 200 people — nearly all women — gathered on the sparkling new Campus Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston on Wednesday for the annual summer meeting of New England Women in Energy and the Environment (NEWIEE).

“There’s just so much going on here that is relevant to the work that you do in the energy and environment field,” UMass Boston Chancellor Katherine Newman said as she welcomed the group’s members and state officials invited from around the region.

Newman pointed to a program the university inaugurated this year to establish 20 industry clusters on the campus, companies linked together by “common labor markets” and looking for people with the “same kinds of skills.”

“One of them will definitely be in energy and environment,” she said.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey quoted the former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, who recently said that “climate change is a manmade problem with a feminist solution.”

“The crisis we face is, of course, existential,” Healey said. “No other country is going to solve this problem for us, and even while our federal government hands control over to coal lobbyists and climate change deniers, the world does continue to look to us for global leadership. And we need to demonstrate the path that transitions our economy away from fossil fuels by transforming the way we power our communities.”

Healey will host the annual meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General’s Eastern Region in Boston this September and is making energy the focus of that meeting. “That’s how important I view this topic,” she said.

She recommended applying the clean energy revolution to buildings and transportation as well as to the power sector, possibly mandating efficiency retrofits on old buildings, and incentivizing the adoption of electric vehicles.

Regional Collaboration

“On behalf of a very small state with a strong governor [Gina Raimondo], we can collaborate to help make this region be more than the sum of its parts,” said Carol Grant, commissioner of the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources. “At the end of the day, that is the goal. Each state is going to do what each state is charged with, but how can we collaborate?”

Raimondo set a goal of developing 1,000 MW of renewable energy in the state by 2020, Grant said. “The good news is, as of the second-quarter report — not out officially — we will be over 750 MW, so we are going to make that goal.”

Grant also said her office works to ensure the state’s clean energy moves help those who need it most, such as by introducing electric buses into poor communities identified as most subject to public health disparities.

“Our renewable portfolio standard is set at 38.5%,” Grant said. “When we set it, we were first in New England; now we’re fourth. That’s amazing and a compliment to Maine and to other states that have been pushing their RPSes. So everybody keep going.”

Energy and climate are a focus of Maine Gov. Janet Mills, said Hannah Pingree, director of the governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future (OIF).

A former state legislator, Pingree recommended NEWIEE members “run for public office, in your spare time if you have to, because that’s where policy gets made.”

Maine is about two years behind Rhode Island in the push for clean energy, but it is now first in the country on RPS targets with a goal of 80% renewables by 2030, she said.

The state led the country in offshore wind in 2008 and 2009 until Mills’ predecessor, Gov. Paul LePage, “shut that down in a big way,” Pingree said. (In 2008, former Gov. John Baldacci established the Maine Ocean Energy Task Force, which in 2009 published a report recommending the development of 5 GW of offshore wind energy by 2030.)

LePage served two four-year terms until Mills was inaugurated in January.

“My kids are into ‘Harry Potter’ now, and I’m sure you’re all familiar with the phenomenon of ‘He Who Must Not Be Named,’” Pingree said of LePage.

The University of Maine has received a $40 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build Maine Aqua Ventus, which they hope will be the country’s first floating offshore wind platform. In addition, she said her state is working with New Hampshire and Massachusetts on a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management task force to develop offshore wind regionally. (See New England Officials Speak on Grid Transformation.)

New Hampshire Public Utilities Commissioner Kathryn Bailey recommended that project developers “work with local people way before they put any plan forward. They need to get buy-in from local people.”

Bailey served on the state’s Site Evaluation Committee that rejected Eversource Energy’s proposed 1,090-MW Northern Pass transmission project to carry Hydro-Québec hydropower to Massachusetts. The New Hampshire Supreme Court the previous week upheld the rejection, and on Thursday, Eversource filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission its intent to drop the project.

“Not every local person has to buy in, but without it, you’re going to get a lot of animosity and opposition, and it’s really hard to overcome that,” Bailey said. “It may cost you more, but in order to get these things sited — and cost is my main issue — you’re going to have to pay a little bit more for it than people thought because you can’t do it without some local support.”

‘Women Know What to Do’

When Healey first became attorney general in 2014 — she was re-elected last year — she brought together what had previously been separated: the office’s Environmental Protection and Energy divisions.

“It was my view that unless we thought about synergies between these spaces, we weren’t going to get to where we needed to be. So that’s why we created, for the first time, an Energy and Environment Bureau, housed everybody together, and I think it’s made us smarter, more strategic and hopefully … more of a leader in this space,” Healey said.

Study after study has shown that women are more likely to understand the impact that climate change will have on their lives, she said, and they’re more likely to worry about what that’s going to mean for future generations.

“And even more importantly, women know what to do. We know the game plan; we know the blueprint. Every day, we see cities across this country adopting their own Green New Deals. Every week we see hundreds of municipalities and businesses signing new clean power purchase agreements. Our clean tech community continues to roll out new programs and policies that are making real differences.”

Ultimately, running the economy on clean energy is a win for everyone — for consumers, the climate, public health and the economy, she said.

“I explain to people that I am forced to sue Donald Trump and his administration time and time again because the actions they are taking undermine the interests of Massachusetts residents and our businesses,” Healey said. “I explain that Massachusetts has over 100,000 clean energy jobs and growing right now, twice the number of coal jobs in the entire country and representing an $11 billion dollar industry.”

The solar and wind industries are creating jobs 12 times faster than the rest of the economy, she said, with more Americans working in solar energy than in oil and natural gas extraction. “Think about that.”