This commentary is by Karl Meyer, a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. He will be speaking about the Connecticut River at Peskeomscut Park in Turners Falls, Mass., as part of the free “Honoring the Land” events on Saturday, August 13, from 2 to 6 p.m.
On the global warming days of June 13, July 2, and July 19, 20, 24, 25, and 28, ISO-New England (the regional network operator in Holyoke, Massachusetts) sent emergency bulletins to corporate suppliers, banning them from “peak shaving” – selling excess uncontracted power into the electricity “spot market” to make quick profits from out-of-region deals.
The secretive ISO loves to tout its commitment to a fair “price” and having an endless, ever-present “supply” of energy to serve the public. It contracts years in advance to maintain its fat margin of 15% reserve energy above expected maximum use. We never have to think about the weather or electrical usage.
But ISO’s corporate juice portfolio has been tested repeatedly recently. Its ever-overabundant supply, overwhelmingly of electricity produced with natural gas, was being ravenously consumed. He alerted the public to an energy squeeze, warned us to cut back? No. He has chosen to keep the public bored in the face of excessive consumption of his planet-burning product. The notices reduce the profits of their corporate partners. What climate emergency?
Not surprisingly, it’s been another dismal year for the Connecticut River. Drought and blistering heat have resulted in woefully low flows and starved and suctioned channels. American albacore passage at Holyoke Dam was just 190,000, its lowest point since 2010, when only 164,000 were lifted.
Ironically, in the same 2010 season, 36 miles upstream at Turners Falls Dam, shad numbers soared 800% above the decade average at that notoriously poor fish passage site . For the first time in a decade, in which fish passage success at Turners Falls sank to less than 1% some years, American walleye suddenly had the opportunity to access another 50 miles of Connecticut’s wide, open spawning habitat that extends into Vermont. and New Hampshire.
This is a conundrum until you understand that in 2010, from May 1 to November 9, the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station was broken, inactive, and sanctioned by the EPA for massive violations of the Clean Water Act. FirstLight had regurgitated a mountain of accumulated sludge from its reservoir into the giant tunnels of Northfield Station. Then he secretly dumped hundreds of truckloads of that sewage sludge directly into the river, for more than 90 days.
The inactive six months of 2010 are the only time in half a century that the 23-mile channel from Turners Falls to Vernon Dam, Vermont, was not subject to heavy Northfield predation. The accidental experiment proved two things:
Their daily disruption has direct and massive impacts on the aquatic life of the Connecticut River from Montague and Greenfield in Massachusetts as far north as Bellows Falls, Vermont, and Charlestown, New Hampshire. Despite ISO-New England’s claims, Northfield’s unplanned six-month operation showed that its daily use is clearly unnecessary for the day-to-day operation of the ISO grid.
A dozen years later, and now five migration seasons after Northfield’s federal operating license expired in 2018, river conditions are miserable. Confronted and unchallenged these 50 years by the old federal Migratory Fish Passage Act and clean water statutes, Connecticut has never had an honest agency or a true watchdog in its corner.
FirstLight now adds the tag word “hydro” after every mention of its pumped storage machine. But it’s really a gas-powered contraption, fueled by the excess natural gas proliferating in today’s grid.
Northfield has never produced a watt of its own virgin electricity. It is a net loss energy consumer that devastates a critical artery of the ecosystem by the weight of its water alone. It works like an electric toilet, sucking up the net and the river’s aquatic life in a buy-low/sell-high scheme, handsomely benefiting its primary owner, Canadian venture capital giant Public Sector Pension Investments. Northfield pulls back endless gulps of river and a mile up through deadly turbines to a 4 billion gallon reservoir. When demand peaks and prices are higher, it spits a denatured river through these turbines, sending second-hand exportable power at premium profits.
Public Sector Pension Investments bought Northfield in 2016, looking to run this energy resale model here in the US until 2072. This portends the ultimate long, slow death for a crippled Connecticut River ecosystem.
It ran for decades on the bloated power produced by the long-shuttered Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. Now a gas guzzler, this July 25th he sucked up the river with 73% natural gas that affects the climate, by far the main fuel of the ISO-New England network that day. On August 1, 2022, this four-state fluvial ecosystem ran 69% natural gas, with another 23% imported nuclear. Like a Roadrunner cartoon gone wrong, Coyote’s deadlift anvil is propelled by massive net power. Here a living river is sacrificed for a dead weight.
Northfield’s turbines are fed from the river at 15,000 cubic feet per second, killing everything the vortex catches, from tiny fish eggs to full-sized fish of 24 species. Imagine seven three-bedroom houses filled with aquatic life. Now imagine them all wiped out simultaneously: seven vacuumed up per second, for hours and hours.
Studies of Northfield’s annual turbine carnage have either failed or proved woefully inadequate. Its annual toll is conservatively believed to be in the hundreds of millions. A federal study estimated that more than 2 million American alfalfa juveniles and 10 million eggs and larvae die in one season.
This direct death machine has now operated at the heart of an ecosystem for half a century, “decarbonizing” Connecticut’s aquatic life since 1972. Northfield is not an energy storage solution. Licensing their continued life-long pursuit of this region’s key planetary cooling artery will only add to their legacy of intergenerational environmental crimes.
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