Prickly Dan Esty Enters the Distraction Zone.

The Malloy administration harbors high hopes of winning a reputation as the home of dynamic energy policy in a state with soaring electricity costs.  This year’s consolidation of power in the new Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) is supposed to be the foundation of all the innovation that follows.  Making Cheshire Democrat Dan Esty the energy czar has been seen as the other key to success.  He’s been a professor at Yale and media hound, credentials that appealed to the administration.  Team Malloy probably did not expect Esty would have so much trouble dealing with the press.  After all, he’d been on the Colbert Report to flog his book!

The working press, Esty may not have realized, is not comprised of the same people who pay $25,000 to hear him speak at a closed company conference.  Members of the cosseted establishment write those checks.  The great unwashed have other interests, such as telling the story of Haddam residents who recognized the whiff of an acrid deal to swap preserved land for real estate development overlooking the Connecticut River.  Esty got on board that one after some internal rasslin’ and confusion.

Jon Lender reported in the Courant Sunday that Esty made an unprecedented intervention in a high stakes matter involving Connecticut Light & Power and costly residential “smart meters” before the new Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA).  He tried to do the same in a similar matter involving United Illuminating, but that had been decided long ago.

“Smart meter” is not a phrase that comes to mind 6 months into Esty’s rickety tenure.  He appears to have left his on an exclusive cloud at Yale.  Eli Colin McEnroe sounds like he has had enough of Esty, too.

Esty’s elbows and ego are trumping policy.  He is becoming that dreaded word that precedes departure, a distraction.  He cannot afford one more stumble in his Connecticut audition for a national post.  Tick-tock, Dan Esty, tick-tock.