Plan to heat state buildings with natural gas system riles advocates
Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
The Capitol Area System building in Hartford on April 23, 2025.
Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration plans to invest in a new gas heating system for state office buildings in downtown Hartford, but the decision has fueled backlash from state and local activists who say it will spew pollution into surrounding neighborhoods and undermine the governor’s own climate goals.
The administration’s plan would upgrade a facility that supplies heating and cooling to an underground network of pipes connected to 15 buildings in downtown Hartford known as the Capitol Area System.
The system — also called the “loop” — includes several government buildings including the Armory, the Supreme Court Building and the Legislative Office Building, as well as private ones like the Bushnell Theater. (The Capitol itself relies on a separate system to heat and cool the 146-year-old building.)
Hot air and water, as well as steam, is produced at the CAS plant several blocks west of the Capitol, which officials say is in desperate need of renovations — particularly after a 2021 explosion damaged the plant’s pump house and necessitated the installation of temporary boilers.
Environmental and climate activists seized upon the project, arguing that it offered the Lamont administration an opportunity to de-carbonize more than a dozen buildings at once through the installation of electric boilers or a geothermal heating and cooling system.
But earlier this year the Department of Administrative Services announced that it was opting to move forward with a “hybrid” approach, utilizing both heat pumps and newer natural gas boilers to power the system. The upgrade is estimated to cost roughly $42 million and take several years to complete.
The decision infuriated advocates, who accused Lamont of breaking his pledge to reduce the use of fossil fuels to heat and cool state buildings.
“He’s going against his own word,” said Alycia Jenkins, a Sierra Club organizer from Hartford. “It falls in line with what we see happening across this country, people choosing fossil fuels, people choosing natural gas.”
Jenkins and other opponents of the state’s plans say they want a new study to examine the feasibility of turning the CAS into a geothermal system, which would harness ambient temperatures from deep underground that can provide heat in the winter and cooling during the summer.
Similar systems are being piloted nearby in Framingham, Mass., and — dependent on federal funding — at New Haven’s Union Station.
Leigh Appleby, a spokesman for DAS, said the state has not entirely given up on potentially cleaner options for the future of the facility. In an email last week, he said that the next step in the process would be to hire an engineering consultant to study the hybrid approach, along with other “viable alternatives” that could reduce costs or carbon emissions.
“We recognize that the selected option of heat pumps and natural gas condensing boilers is not zero emissions, as many of the comments advocated,” Appleby said. “However, other factors, most notably the uncertainty surrounding the long-term location of the CAS facility due to the anticipated realignment of I-84, prevented the implementation of more costly and extensive zero-emission scenarios. During the design development process, we will seek additional opportunities to reduce emissions.”
When asked about the project during an event commemorating Earth Day last week, Lamont said he was concerned about the cost of updating the facility along with the environmental impacts.
“We’re going to look at everything, and we’re also going to let the taxpayers know what the relative costs of everything are,” Lamont said. “I think affordability has got to be on the table right alongside what we’re celebrating here on Earth Day.”
According to a decarbonization study commissioned by DAS in 2023, the hybrid approach selected by the administration would produce about 197,668 fewer metric tons of carbon dioxide over the next three decades — the equivalent of driving nearly 50,000 cars for a year — compared to it’s current operations.
Still, the study found that utilizing a geothermal system or a combination of all-electric boilers and heat pumps could reduce emissions by an additional 80% or more.
The total cost to build the new system — including the $42 million in construction costs — and operate it for for the next three decades using the hybrid approach was roughly $164 million, according to the study. That was nearly half the cost of using all-electric boilers and about one-third less than the cost of geothermal.
Opponents, however, argue that the volatile price of natural gas as well as the future health care costs for people living in the vicinity of the plant could put the plant’s price tag much higher.
“The cost is not just the cost of rebuilding this plant, it’s maintaining this plant for 30 to 35 years, because that’s how long it’s going to be there, [releasing] all kinds of toxic pollutants into the air and creating all kinds of asthma and respiratory conditions,” said Cynthia Jennings, a former Hartford councilwoman who is involved with local efforts to oppose the state’s plans.
Jenkins, the Sierra Club organizer, pointed to data showing that Hartford has among the highest asthma rates of any city in the nation. While attending Trinity College, Jenkins said she lived in the Frog Hollow neighborhood abutting the CAS plant, and later developed bronchitis as an adult.
“We’re concerned about the air pollution, we’re concerned about asthma rates, and we’re also concerned about jobs,” Jenkins said.
The state’s study — conducted by Veolia, a French infrastructure management company — attempted to calculate the so-called “social” costs of carbon pollution, such as human health impacts, property damage from floods and storms, and changes in agricultural productivity. The study concluded that they did not outweigh the additional expenses of carbon-free options.
Asked for comment on the project this week, a spokesman for Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam said it was a “state matter” and deferred further requests to the governor’s office.
The CAS plant was originally constructed in 1988 as a cogeneration plant producing both electricity as well as steam that was used to heat and cool buildings connected to the loop. At the time, it was the second-largest source of air pollution in the city of Hartford, according to the Sierra Club.
The previous owners of the plant, Capitol District Energy Center Cogeneration Associates Property Co., shuttered its gas-powered electric turbines in 2021, several months before the pump room explosion, and sold the facility to the state the next year for $7.3 million.
In the public notice of its decision to adopt the hybrid power plan, DAS said the decommissioning of the plant’s power-generation capabilities will reduced annual greenhouse gas emissions by more than two-thirds, and that it is no longer considered a major source of air pollution as defined by the federal Clean Air Act. The agency added that its review of the project determined it will not result in “significant environmental impacts,” and thus does not require a separate environmental impact study.
During a public comment period, officials at Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection submitted several recommendations regarding applicable environmental laws and regulations during construction, but the agency did not signal any overall objections to the project. A DEEP spokesman deferred to DAS for comment on the project.
Appleby, the DAS spokesman, said work is expected to begin this summer to demolish and remove old, unused equipment from the site including wiring, generators, turbines, chilling equipment and a boiler. That work is intended to make space for the installation of new equipment.
Following the completion of the engineering study and design work, Appleby said construction will begin around December 2027 assuming funding for the project is in place. Work is expected to be completed sometime in 2029.
Lamont’s budget proposal for the upcoming year called for an additional $16 million in capital expenses for the CAS project, bringing the total available funding through bonds to $35 million.
CT Mirror reporter Mark Pazniokas contributed to this story.
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