By William Opalka

NEWTON, Mass. — More than 150 people attended the Northeast Energy and Commerce Association’s 13th Conference on Renewable Energy Thursday. Here are some highlights of the speakers’ comments.

Timothy Rougan, National Grid’s director of energy and environmental policy, and Cynthia Arcate, CEO of PowerOptions, said it’s time for Massachusetts to reconsider its generous solar subsidies.

“What people are getting paid — whether it was $6 a watt on their house, or $1.50 a watt on a 5-MW solar farm — it’s much more than in surrounding states,” Roughan said. “There’s only so much money in the pie and we need to make intelligent decisions on where it needs to go.”

“The incentives in Massachusetts have done a phenomenal job in jump-starting the industry, but we’re beyond the beta stage,” said Arcate, whose company helps more than 500 nonprofits with $200 million in annual energy spending maximize their buying power. “I believe the incentives are too rich and we need to reconfigure it somehow.”

Michael Cuzzi, senior vice president of VOX Global, a strategic communications firm, said the challenges of siting new infrastructure are especially acute in New England, “where our traditions of local control remain very strong and where resistance to change seems bred into our DNA.”

“Questions about cost-competitiveness and subsidies still linger [and have an] ability to unite strange political bedfellows, with opposition to projects coming from the environmental left and the fiscally conservative and libertarian right. So for the politicians in the host communities, there is no political safe space.”

John Fernandes, director of policy and market development for Renewable Energy Systems’ North American unit, which has built or has under construction more than 80 storage and renewable energy projects, said one benefit of storage is its flexibility. “I can do a lot more with a storage plant than I can do with 40 miles of transmission. All I can do with 40 miles of transmission is move electrons,” he said. “Not to oversimplify it, but I can pick up and move a storage plant a lot easier.”

Bryan Sanderson, senior vice president of Anbaric Transmission, made a pitch for the company’s proposed Vermont Green Line, which would deliver Canadian hydropower and New York wind power over a transmission line partly under Lake Champlain.

“We view transmission paired with wind and hydro as the most cost-effective way to deliver clean energy at large scale into the region,” he said.