Since time began rivers have been the Earth’s arteries — the foundation of its ecosystems. Here in New England, it’s “last chance” time for our Great River. On April 30, 2018, the fate of the long-foundered Connecticut River migratory fisheries restoration — and the survival of a four-state river ecosystem — will be decided for what’s essentially forever.
New Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hydropower licenses are expected to be signed then by government agencies and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the latest purchaser of the Turners Falls and Northfield Mountain projects.
That company’s stated investor mandate is “to maximize investment returns without undue risk of loss.”
Over two generations ago, public trust mistakes were made favoring power companies, fish hatcheries and high-end salmon-fishing interests that rendered 8 miles of the Connecticut in Massachusetts a massively-suctioned, partially-dewatered flush sink.
Sanctioned by fisheries agencies and nonprofits, those decisions severed an ecosystem in two. They forced all migrating fish into a deadly power canal, leaving 3 emptied miles of riverbed below Turners Falls Dam, while four turbines at the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station 5 miles upstream consumed massive amounts of nuclear energy to suck a river backward and uphill to a mountaintop reservoir.
Those turbines were built to run on the promised endless supply of overproduced juice generated nightly at the local, now-closed, Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, 15 miles away. Today, running on giant slugs of imported fossil fuel, they continue to spin, sucking the river up in endless gulps into a 4 billion- gallon pool a mile up Northfield Mountain.
That daily suctioning creates eroding “tides” higher than those at Hyannis Port, with some rivaling the 10-foot fluctuations of Fundy Bay.
Back then, predecessors of today’s National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Massachusetts Fish & Wildlife and the Connecticut River Watershed Council signed off on an agreement with the Federal Power Commission and Western Massachusetts Electric that strangled the river in northern Massachusetts. It resulted in the failure of migratory fish passage and a promised renewal of the river’s ancient seafood resources upstream to Vermont, New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts.
Few American shad emerged alive after diversion into that canal.
It also failed the shortnose sturgeon — this river’s only federally endangered migratory fish, leaving it without flow or monitoring at its only documented natural spawning site.
Upstream at the Northfield Mountain hydroelectric plant, the destruction was yet more complete. The suck-and-gush appetite of that nuclear-charged contraption virtually disassembled the river. It gulped flow at a rate of 15,000 cubic feet per second, often for hours at a time — drawing on the river pool above Turners Falls Dam where, 70 percent of the time, the Connecticut’s natural routed flow is less than 15,000 cubic feet per second. Boaters a mile downstream could find themselves drifting upriver via Northfield’s unearthly pull.
All fish and organisms drawn up through the sphere of that suction were deemed “functionally extirpated” — dead to the ecosystem by virtue of being sieved twice through the turbines.
It was evolution in reverse — a river ripped away from its eternal run to the sea.
Today, climate-blind Federal Energy Regulatory Commission labels Northfield as a source of “renewable, clean” energy.
But there’s nothing clean, renewable or sustainable about its imported, twice-produced, peak-priced electricity crippling this river.
ISO New England, the energy commission’s Northfield-cheering, ever-energy-hungry cousin, also ignores climate and its environmental dismemberment. “Pumped storage” is not hydropower — not even by the industry’s own technical terminology. Northfield-produced power in fact represents the heavy planetary burden of fossil fuel used to push a mountain of water uphill, merely as a weight to produce high-cost, second-hand electricity. It cares nothing of rivers, fish or ecosystems.
If bureaucrats again fail the public trust and don’t demand critical habitat protections, flows and day-to-day monitoring needed to fulfill U.S. environmental statutes, Canadian pension speculators will be left as the de facto controlling interests on our river.
The new owners have asked the energy commission to merge two separate licenses for Northfield and Turners Falls into a single new license as the “Northfield Project.” What’s represented as mere bureaucratic streamlining would actually enshrine, by precedent — next time and forever — river-killing pumped storage.
Any responsible environmental agency should deny this single-license merger and seek to have Northfield kept in use as emergency infrastructure only — with the ultimate remedy its dismantling in tandem with a move to a decentralized system far less vulnerable than today’s expanding mega-grid.
Massachusetts legislators are currently signing onto energy deals for a glut of future hydropower from Quebec. Some 1,200 megawatts of those penciled-in imports could easily replace the few hours of daily juice Northfield puts out, while keeping Northfield available for rare emergencies. Though new Canadian power imports largely ignore conservation and innovation, they could be employed to end the river carnage here and begin restoring a future for a critical New England ecosystem.
(Note: Timely public comment on these licensing issues is carefully considered by FERC. Go to ferc.gov/docs-filing/ecomment.asp and use “E-Comment.” Check “Hydro” and address your comments to Secretary Kimberly D. Bose, using the required identifiers “P-2485” and “P-1889” for Northfield and Turners Falls.)
Karl Meyer is participating in the FERC relicensing process. He lives in Greenfield and is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.