I belatedly read FirstLight Power vice president of operations John Howard’s lengthy May 31 column after returning from vacation [“Setting the record straight on flows and fish passage commitments”]. After years of public information lockdown via their company-required nondisclosure agreements, I wish he’d gone into more detail.

It’s been over five years since the original Federal Energy Regulatory Commission licenses to operate the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station and Turners Falls hydro units expired, and still no new licenses. Seven years since their parent-owner, Canadian global investment giant PSP Investments, swooped down on the Connecticut River in 2016 “to deliver clean, local, reliable, cost competitive power” as Mr. Howard describes it, he fails to mention the corporate profits are largely exported elsewhere.

FirstLight is a subsidiary of $240 billion Public Sector Pension Investments of London, Hong Kong, New York, Montreal and Ottawa. Since those Massachusetts licenses expired, PSP’s capital has backed FirstLight’s far-flung spending spree worth of hundreds of millions. With yet no spending here on critical infrastructure and safeguards to meet federal/state regulations and Clean Water Act standards for the Connecticut River, they’ve been buying legacy 20th-century hydro projects from Pennsylvania to Ottawa, Canada and remarketing them under FirstLight green labels in distant power grids.

Despite the re-promotion, these old facilities are operating essentially as they have been for generations. It’s a purchase-rebrand, profit and acquire, venture capital model.

Early in 2022, FirstLight invested with a handful of transglobal corporations in a $645 million dollar consortium deal to lease 85,000 acres of seabed in the New York Bight. This May, they announced their new bank and credit lending arm — backed by the Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank and Export Development Canada. That’s a new $97.5 million capital asset. It’s been a field day bankrolled from afar by PSP and locally by money derived from their Northfield Mountain cash cow, without a pauper’s pittance spent in the Masschusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire counties where it causes chaos, miles of reversed river flow, and kills millions of fish yearly.

FirstLight’s law and lobby firm is Van Ness Feldman of Washington, D.C., Seattle, Houston, and Baton Rouge. Their engineering consultants, Gomez and Sullivan, are in Buffalo, Albany, Utica and Henniker, New Hampshire. Kleinschmidt, another relicensing consultant, is based in Maine. Their sole semi-local team member is Slowey-McManus Communications of Boston and Worcester, which supplies messaging, advertising, press releases and op-ed writing.

Since FirstLight’s licenses expired, they’ve not been required to, nor have they spent, a penny on long-overdue environmental upgrades on their aging, profit-bearing facilities here.

Northfield Mountain is far and away their big cash cow. In 2019, FirstLight reported revenue of $195 million, the bulk realized from Northfield’s pump-and-flush anti-gravity operations. Their stated relicensing goal is to spend less than that single year’s reported revenue on structural fish passage facilities on our U.S. river, riven by Northfield impacts. It’s a pittance in return for 50 years of future transnational profit.

Meanwhile, they tout little thousand-dollar prizes in local “environmental justice” grants here, and modest PR-generating battery and storage research funds to a few Bay State colleges.

Ironically, Northfield Mountain can’t produce any virgin electricity. It is wholly dependent and wired in the New England grid, which itself is powered by 60% climate-killing natural gas. Northfield’s anti-gravity pumping wastes 34% of that virgin grid power sucking our river backward and uphill. In all, the two encompass a full 94% waste of peak-price energy redundancy — since Northfield’s net-loss power input is not necessary for day-to-day delivery of grid electricity here. FirstLight plans to continue, and even increase, Northfield’s suction storage, shown to reverse a minimum of four miles of river at times in a critical, 20-mile, three-state reach.

As to Mr. Howard’s statements on Northfield’s annual killing of baby shad, known as “entrainment,” he contends, “contrary to popular narrative” FirstLight studies show it results in the estimated deaths of just “2,093 juvenile and 578 adult shad.”

In stark contrast, a 2017 “Juvenile Shad Assessment Report for the Connecticut River” by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Massachusetts Fish & Wildlife specifically rebuts those juvenile shad numbers. They note FirstLight excluded standard study information they’d cited in several other findings, but not this one. The agencies stated that had FirstLight again applied that information to this study, it would show an “estimated loss of juveniles from larval entrained shad of 1,029,865 fish.”

One million dead juveniles is a huge departure from FirstLight’s 2,093 shad. Shad, along with untold millions of young from two dozen fish species have been subject to Northfield’s merciless killing for 43 years. Mortality studies for those species were not even done.

Here’s FirstLight’s proposed remedy: In 2031, 12 years after Northfield’s license expiration, they’ll deploy an untested seasonal net across its suctioning mouth. Like former “salmon” nets there, it’s almost certain to fail, echoing ones that tore, detached and failed in the currents across decades to protect baby salmon from Northfield.

Allowing even a year’s delay to deploy this “solution” would be another profit-saving gift from FERC. Northfield’s daily depredations here amount to a massive burnt offering to a planet desperately in need of living rivers and functioning ecosystems. I’ve petitioned FERC to not relicense our river’s greatest predator.

Karl Meyer has been a stakeholder, intervenor, and member of the Fish and Aquatics Studies Team in the federal relicensing bid for Northfield Mountain since 2012. Meyer is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. He lives in Greenfield and formerly worked at both Northfield Mountain and the Connecticut River Watershed Council. 

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