Sep. 14 -- Back when everyone's tongue was hanging out at the prospect of affordable, renewable energy from offshore wind farms, Gov. Ned Lamont bet heavily on Danish utility Ørsted.
Indeed, Lamont doubled down on disastrous decisions made by the scandal-plagued Connecticut Port Authority, with its give-contracts-to-insiders policies, and signed a final deal in 2020 to expensively rebuild New London's State Pier for Ørsted.
We should all remember now how Lamont, in a Hartford news conference, with a Danish executive standing behind him, announced the big Ørsted giveaway, saying he was confident in the state assuming all the cost overruns of the then-estimated $157 million project.
He said he felt good about the state guaranteeing the additional costs because of confidence in his assistant budget chief, Konstantinos Diamantis, whom he put in charge of the project.
Oops. We all know how that turned out.
The project, still not completely done, has cost more than $300 million, the most ever spent by the state on a maritime project. And Diamantis has been indicted on a variety of federal extortion, bribery and conspiracy charges.
And now, with the bloom off the offshore wind industry rose, the gilded renovations to State Pier, built to Ørsted's wind-handling specifications, are beginning to look like the makings of an expensive white elephant.
Just the overruns alone were close to $150 million. Just think of all the good things that tax money could have been used for.
The governor also made sure the guy from the port authority overseeing that disastrous construction project, David Kooris, moved on to a safe $240,000-a-year job running a new quasi public state agency.
The pier is now in use for the second Ørsted wind farm, Revolution Wind, which is under construction but already a year behind schedule.
The pier is slated to be used for the one last Ørsted project that hasn't been canceled, Sunrise Wind, but after that nothing is on the horizon.
Zip.
And Lamont himself seems to have stepped back from the wind frenzy, declining to nibble on the last round of bids solicited by Connecticut, with Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Massachusetts and Rhode Island signed up for energy from three different projects, but Lamont took a pass, apparently swooning from sticker shock of the bids, as spiraling electric costs become an enormous political problem at home.
The new bids to the three states, submitted after the wind companies canceled previous deals because the projects had become too expensive, included one massive farm proposed by Ørsted.
No one chose it.
Starboard Wind, Ørsted bragged this spring, was going to "cement Connecticut as a critical hub" in the offshore wind market.
Oops. Not only is Starboard Wind apparently dead in the water, but Gov. Lamont is sitting on his wind energy bidding paddle.
This also, of course, makes a mockery of Connecticut politicians' longstanding claim that New London was to play a crucial role in the new industry and the New London pier was necessary to do that.
Turns out there are lots of other places where foreign-made wind turbines can be assembled.
Ørsted's uncertain future use of the pier also makes a mockery of Gov. Lamont's $577,000 investment in a new private nonprofit, the Connecticut Wind Collaborative, which is meant to leverage the use of State Pier and lure manufacturing of wind components from Europe to here.
I'd rank that investment in the nonprofit right up there with the bad decision to sustain all the cost overruns for a project to benefit a foreign utility, although thankfully much less expensive.