Corbett Administration Responds To Renewable Energy Charges

The Cor­bett Admin­is­tra­tion is push­ing back against a Pitts­burgh Post-Gazette arti­cle accus­ing the Repub­li­can of “turn­ing off the lights” when it comes to renew­able energy programs.

Here’s what the Sun­day arti­cle charged:

Qui­etly but sys­tem­at­i­cally, the admin­is­tra­tion has all but shut down the state Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion’s Office of Energy and Tech­nol­ogy Deploy­ment — the state’s pri­mary energy office — and removed direc­tors and reas­signed staff in the Office of Energy Man­age­ment in the Depart­ment of Gen­eral Ser­vices and the Governor’s Green Gov­ern­ment Council.

It has also for­bid­den state exec­u­tive agen­cies from sign­ing con­tracts that sup­port clean energy supply.

Not so, says Corbett’s “energy czar” Pat Hen­der­son, in an AP arti­cle pub­lished this after­noon:

The pro­grams were empha­sized by pre­vi­ous gov­er­nors, but the Cor­bett admin­is­tra­tion says the changes are merely part of the new approach by Gov. Tom Corbett’s ener­gyex­ec­u­tive, Patrick Hen­der­son, it said.

“Gov. Cor­bett under­stands the crit­i­cal impor­tance of all energy resources, includ­ing renew­ables, both to our econ­omy and our qual­ity of life,” Hen­der­son wrote in a let­ter Mon­day respond­ing to the Post-Gazette story. “He remains com­mit­ted to poli­cies which respect tax­payer dol­lars and grow all our energy indus­tries in a sus­tain­able manner.”

Hen­der­son said the Office of Energy and Tech­nol­ogy Deploy­ment in the state Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion was renamed, not dis­banded, and he said the Guar­an­teed Energy Sav­ings Act pro­gram, which helps school dis­tricts and local gov­ern­ments invest in energy con­ser­va­tion project, is under review.

The office that admin­is­ters the Guar­an­teed Energy Sav­ings Act pro­gram is one of sev­eral that lost employ­ees, the Post-Gazette reported.