Editor’s note: This commentary is by Karl Meyer, who has been a stakeholder and member of the Fish and Aquatics Study Team in the current FERC relicensing process for the Northfield Mountain and Turners Falls projects in Massachusetts since 2012. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Each winter solstice a few friends and I gather on a quiet bridge to offer a toast honoring New England’s Great River. Lingering above its cold December waters, we send along hopes for the river’s coming year.
As central artery to a four-state ecosystem and the Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, the Connecticut needs all the help it can get. Just upstream are the grimmest 10 miles of habitat in its entire 410-mile run. Worst are the suctioning turbines of FirstLight’s Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Project, eviscerating millions of migratory and resident fish year round. Nearer by are the starkly-dewatered 2½ miles of riverbed dubbed the “By Pass Reach” — ground zero as the sole documented natural spawning site for federally endangered shortnose sturgeon.
Rinse, kill, repeat, has been the daily routine at Northfield since 1972. Formerly running off Vermont Yankee’s excess nuclear electricity, it now operates via massive amounts of imported electricity — basically functioning like a nightmare giant electric toilet. Sucking the river up to its 4 billion gallon reservoir-tank for hours at rates of up to 15,000 cubic feet per second, it kills all life vacuumed up in its vortex. Later, at peak times and peak prices, operators flush that dead water back through turbines, producing a few hours of expensive secondhand juice.
To picture one second of 15,000 cfs suction imagine a three-story mansion with seven bedrooms and eight full bathrooms — filled to the rafters with aquatic life. Now watch it wrenched backward and sucked to oblivion: all fish, eggs, animals and insects destroyed by reversing blades on a twice-through Northfield sleigh ride. Now picture 60 grim implosions each minute, 600 every 10 minutes — 3,600 mansions obliterated every hour for hours on end.
A FirstLight consultant’s 2016 study estimated Northfield Mountain Power Station’s operations resulted in the loss of just 2,200 juvenile American shad. Yet results from a study released in 2018 by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Massachusetts Fisheries & Wildlife estimated that carnage from those same operations actually resulted in the loss of 1,029,865 juvenile shad. Those are the young — the river’s future generations, extinguished from a 20-mile reach stretching from Massachusetts to Vermont and New Hampshire. Other imperiled migrants include American eel, sea lamprey and blueback herring. Largely unstudied are lethal impacts on two dozen resident river species. The more it runs, the more it kills.
Northfield Mountain Power Station has never produced a single watt of its own power. Nor will owners — after bragging to be able to power a million homes for seven hours, point out they must actually consume the megawatts of some 1.25-1.33 million homes in order to do so. It’s a net-loss system, an electric toilet filled by chewing through the core of the S.O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge.
FirstLight now wants to run Northfield Mountain Power Station even more — attempting to rebrand its secondhand electric output as clean, renewable energy. And the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and ISO-New England are doing their best to keep FirstLight’s unholy new vision afloat. It wants to marry the ecosystem-destruction of its killer turbines with renewable ocean wind in a corporate package to service unprecedented, climate-warming construction booms in metro Boston, Providence, Worcester and elsewhere. Massachusetts, as host to this plant — and as the largest energy-consuming state in New England, ought to be ashamed for the climate- and ecosystem-futures of its children. And our regional river neighbors should not tolerate such grim folly.
In the 1980s a grim proposal arose to employ Northfield Mountain Power Station to suck up more of the river and pipe it to the Quabbin Reservoir for use as reserve metro-Boston water. But citizens, states and towns rebelled under leadership from the likes of the late-Terry Blunt of the Connecticut River Watershed Council and Alexandra Dawson of the Conservation Law Foundation. The result was the 1984 Massachusetts Interbasin Transfer Act, forbidding the out-of-basin export of river resources until all conservation efforts are first exhausted. Such leadership is sorely missed here today.
On Dec. 20, 2018, FirstLight’s Canadian parent-owners quietly spirited their assets out of New England — reregistering them as separate, limited liability corporate tax shelters in Delaware. It was slick timing. Federal fish negotiators were to undergo a government shutdown the next day. Meanwhile FirstLight remained in the middle of a bid to keep operating its U.S. facilities for decades here under new FERC licensing.
Stakeholders didn’t learn of their move until Jan. 8, 2019. Nearly all cried foul to FERC.
Huge concerns included the loss of access to information used for valuations and information assuring FirstLight can and will be held accountable to supply the construction and funds necessary to meet U.S. and state environmental laws — including the Anadromous Fish Conservation Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act under new licensing.
One year later, at the solstice, New England’s Great River remains without courageous leadership and in desperate need of a new river NGO — one with a fiery legal department.
