On May 9, 2023, Karl Meyer, environmental journalist; sent the following valuable update that indicates a pathway to the denial of Firstlight’s application to FERC for a license to operate the Northfield Mountain pumped storage station and Turners Falls dam. Especially notable is Meyer’s emphasis on the fact that the permitting for the original operation of these destructive facilities was made AFTER the 1972 Clean Water Act became effective. Meyers argues that FERC must rectify the ongoing violation of the Clean Water Act by Firstlight by closing down these dangerous and climate destroying operations now.
A LEGAL ROAD MAP TO SHUT IT DOWN
Karl Meyer, M.S. Environmental Science
66 Fort Sq.
Greenfield, MA, 01301
413-773-0006 May 9, 2023
The Honorable Kimberly D. Bose, Secretary
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
88 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20426
Notice to Intervene: RE: P-2485 and P-1889
Dear Secretary Bose,
Herein please find my notice to intervene in the relicensing and proposals and requests included
in the Comprehensive Settlement Agreement for a new licensing respecting Fish, Flows and
Aquatic conditions submitted to FERC by FirstLight Power for the Northfield Mountain Pumped
Storage Project, P-2485 and Turners Falls Hydro projects, P-1889, et al, on March 31, 2023. I
have been a participating stakeholder, member of the Fish and Aquatics Studies Team, and
intervenor in the relicensing process for these projects since they commenced in 2012. Please
see attachments and further statutory references included below in this intervention filing.
I intervene on the basis that these projects divert, slow, quicken, push, pull, halt and reverse
miles of the mainstem Connecticut River in three states on the navigable Waters of the United
States (WOTUS), and massively extinguish its aquatic life. Thus, in total or in part, the massive
suction and surge actions of the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Project (NMPS), and the
diversions and re-peaking of those flows through the Turners Falls Hydro projects comprise a
taking of miles of WOTUS on an interstate river contrary to the standards of the Clean Water Act
of 1972(CWA).
Over a half century ago Northfield Mountain missed its April 30, 1972 targeted construction
completion date due to disastrous flooding and a fatality that fully compromised its startup. It did
not become operational until the following year. (Please see attached Federal Power
Commission correspondence.) Thus, NMPS subsequent startup was subject to all CWA
standards and conditions. Those mandates were not followed or imposed. And thus, NMPS has
been in operation these last 50 years contrary to the protections afforded in federal and state
clean water standards. It’s operations have deprived and denied the citizenry of the United
States in Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire an interstate river with guaranteed
physical and biological standards being met under WOTUS.
As currently in operation today–after over five years of extended FERC licensing, it continues to
fail in meeting the legal standards of a connected and continuously flowing river with its
attendant and protected “natural hydrologic cycles” under the federal Clean Water Act; and the
slowing and halting of its sediment flushing and transport properties under the Federal Water
Pollution Control Act, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ own state water quality
standards. Thus, and in particular, the daily operation of the Northfield Mountain Pumped
Storage and its attendant daily suction-and-surge peaking and downstream re-peaking
diversions–and its deadly consumptive cyclings at 15,000 and 20,000 cubic feet per second(cfs)
including capturing day-ahead and energy spot-market profits, make this project ineligible to
receive a new federal operating license.
These hydrologic cycle-erasing disruptions occur daily–and take place at any and various
junctures in the river’s annual dips and increases in naturally routed flow–with brutal flushing,
slowing, and upriver pushing, plus back-river suction in the successive, artificial freeze-thaw of
daily five-foot tides created in winter. Under these conditions the artificial and unnatural flows
and releases must be considered as statutory effluents and pollution, and the generated
flushing releases that push flows upstream as unnatural disruptions in sediment transport, slow,
de-oxygenate and caused unnatural sediment accumulation in the Turners Falls pool and
FirstLight’s Upper Reservoir as river deposited effluents as well.
Further, during the grim, scorching low flow periods on the Connecticut River in the Turners
Falls impoundment during the 2022 summer drought, NMPS was withdrawing and storing its
struggling, de-oxegenated flows at 15,200 cfs when routed flow as measured at the Montague
USGS gauge (which includes Deerfield River inflow) were registering total flow input at a mere
1,400 cfs. At that level of brutality in the age of climate disruption, these river-cycling
deprivations become yet exponentially more destructive to aquatic life in Western New
England’s fast-warming critical river ecosystem.
As minimal examples of miles of halting, disrupting, reversing, and upriver flow-flushing please
see FirstLight NMPS Intake Study for P-2485, Study filed March 1, 2015, under Study 3.3.9,
Appendix B Velocity PDF.
See page 94 of 302 for 50% of Exceedence Flow (8,440 cfs), 4 Units Generating at 20,000 cfs
at 185 WSEL at Dam, showing a flushed, halted, and reversed river flow for over a mile
upstream.
See also page 122 of 302 for 50% of Exceedence Flow (8,440 cfs), 4 Units Pumping at 15,200
cfs, 176 WSEL at Dam, showing suctioned and reversed river flow for a minimum of 3 miles
downstream until the graphic’s flow arrows disappear, but clearly the river continues in reverse.
See also page 74 of 302 for 75% of Exceedence Flow, (4,900 cfs), 4 Units Pumping at 15,200
cfs, 176 WSEL at dam, again demonstrating minimum of 3 miles of WOTUS lost to the citizenry.
As originally designed, NMPS’ rare use and role as an emergency power source should have
been phased out along with its grim daily river suctioning when its license expired in 2018.
Several tie lines and big, new, readily-dispatchable, Northfield equivalent, grid-scale megawatt
energy connections from Canadian hydropower sources are currently available or soon to come
online. Massachusetts ratepayers are already on the hook paying for the interstate powerline
infrastructure delivering this energy. Several of the sanctioned connections will fully and
redundantly replace all of NMPS’s net-loss, river-crushing megawatts with directly-conveyed
electricity—erasing the excuse for the crushing losses inherent in suctioning away a river’s
lifeblood. These should fully satisfy grid energy needs, including 10-minute emergency dispatch
readiness. It is time to stop pillaging the life from a critical ecosystem artery.
Also, FirstLight’s filings vaguely described its proposal to increase its reservoir storage capacity
by what would appears to be an overall 30% capacity ballooning of its Upper Reservoir ponding.
That would serve their incalculable water appetite and unmeasured profit margin request while
further erasing miles of a physically and biologically functioning river ecosystem for longer
periods daily and annually. That would amount to a new and incomparable “taking” of the
public’s right to functioning WOTUS for the Connecticut River three-state project nexus. Again,
a corporate profit enhancement outlined, without public compensation.
The Connecticut is the critical central artery of New England’s four-state ecosystem. Its
continuous connected flows, uninterrupted hydro cycling, and year-round biological nourishment
and cooling properties are key factors in mitigating the crushing impacts of pressing climate
change.
Catastrophic damage due to industrial design and operational errors in 2010 took NMPS off line
for over half a year when it was sanctioned for massive violation of the Clean Water Act by the
EPA. The ISO-NE power grid continued to deliver uninterrupted energy to consumers
throughout that time–demonstrating that the pumped storage station’s grim, daily statutory
violations and impacts are unnecessary for daily energy supply. The grid can and has run
without erasing key functions of WOTUS on the Connecticut, and this must be its future.
Woefully failed entrainment studies in the current relicensing shed little light on the full
destructiveness of its sucking turbines. It is accepted that any organism from the size of fish
eggs and larvae to adult has no expectation of survival on a round trip through NMPS. As
federal trust American shad are already present during spring and summer—just one species
among over two dozen, it must be stated that a barrier net experiment should have been in
place long ago. The $40 million FirstLight has earmarked for its deployment and use years from
now should not be left as merely an untried, cost-intensive, hypothetical promise–as it is likely
to fail.
Given that, it should be put in place and tested immediately, rather than kicking the experiment
down the road for seven years. As had been the case with the former Atlantic salmon smolt
exclusion nets seasonally deployed there in the past–failure due to debris damage and high
flows will more than likely cause repeat and regularly occurring failures. The proposed exclusion
net will do little to protect the eggs, larvae and young of many species that will have spawned in
the impoundment by its June 1 st deployment, and the never-enumerated killing of hundreds of
millions of aquatic animals annually has never been compensated as what it is—a massive
taking of the public’s fish and aquatic life.
The barrier net will let most life get sucked through or impinged, and is bound to clog and fail via
bio-fouling and debris capture. It will likely be left foundering on the banks like ones tried in the
past. However, there is no reason to wait seven years to get the results of its failure—there are
migratory fish seeking relief today. Please, as illustration of the perils and folly of such a red-
herring fish, see attached photo of the EPA mandated dredging at the NMPS Intake, and the silt
barrier net flopping in the current during the fall of 2010, when it was supposed to be kept in
place to capture the 45,000 cubic yard of silt FirstLight had dumped into the Connecticut in
massive violation of the Clean Water Act.
Further, FirstLight’s vague promises and plans to have infrastructure linkages created that could
allow future wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean to be used to divert and suction flows from this
three-state river basin at a western Massachusetts site in Northfield runs contrary to the tenets
of the Massachusetts Inter Basin Transfer Act. It would allow cities and towns far beyond and
east of the Connecticut River basin to import their energy via power lines linking Atlantic basin
turbines to the pillaging and diverting of the Connecticut’s physical and biological flows and
connectivity functioning—all to meet power needs in their distant, respective river basins, before
meet the mandate of getting, storing, and providing for their own water use, services and needs
locally, in their home districts. Again, another “taking” of the Connecticut River is inherent in the
reasoning of FirstLight’s license proposals.
In 2019 FirstLight reported the prior year’s revenue from NMPS alone at $159 million. It’s parent
company PSP Investments paid a total of just $1.2 billion dollars for all FirstLight-branded
assets in MA and CT in 2016. Since that time, and since license expiration in 2018 FirstLight
has been on an asset buying spree with hundreds of millions of dollars being spent outside the
Connecticut River ecosystem without a single improvement or change here, five full years after
license expiration. See, for example, their consortium investment purchases of thousands of
offshore acres in the New York Bight. See for example:
https://www.firstlightpower.com/invenergy-and-energyre-secure-offshore-wind-lease-award-and-
announce-formation-of-investor-consortium/
The money being spent on Fish, Flows and Aquatic restoration in the failed Turners Falls pool
for FirstLight’s requested 50 year license amounts to less than a single year of sale profits from
Northfield Mountain. Indeed, without any spending on structural or flows improvements here
since that 2016 purchase and 2018 license expiration, they now appear to have fully realized
and erased the costs of their asset purchases while slow-walking a Final License Application
and Settlement Agreement to a half decade beyond its expiration. The profits flow out of this
ecosystem to distant states and Canada, while the miseries remain.
The Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station, was not completed or operational on its
originally stated construction completion deadline of April 30, 1972. Due to destructive internal
flooding of its incomplete, inner-mountain station, control room and power house on April 22,
1972, Northfield did not become operational until the year after Congress adopted the Clean
Water Act on October 18, 1972. Please see attached letter to the Federal Power Commission by
Northeast Utilities Service Company dated July 19, 1973, referencing an earlier letter of January
22, 1973 representing owners of the Connecticut Light and Power Company, the Hartford
Electric Light Company, and the Western Massachusetts Electric Company requesting an
“extension of the date of completion of construction of the project.”
Further, in the attached letter from the Federal Power Commission to the Western
Massachusetts Electric Company President Robert E. Barrett Jr., referenced and dated January
22, 1974, the Commission is still requesting the company provide specific data for a Draft
Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on “the conditions expected to produce flow reversals in
the Turners Falls Reservoir as a result of Northfield operation.” The FPC did not have the
information to sanction NMPS operation under 1972 CWA rules when it was first allowed to
operated and began ravaging the Connecticut River the year following. The FPC’s letter
specifically asks, “Since the Northfield Mountain Project became operational, which of the
conditions described have been observed to produced reverse flows? Based on operational
experience, are there any observed or anticipated changes in the patterns, durations, or
velocities of the flows described therein?”
This plant was licensed to kill 50 years ago without a full vetting of its river erasing impacts.
Under existing federal and state landmark law there is no case to be made for allowing it a new
federal license a half century on.
NMPS is a river robbing, energy-wasting machine whose daily operation have now crippled
critical miles of the first National Blueway in the United States for half a century. It should not be
in daily operation under current federal CWA and state standards, and unless and until it can be
shown to come into compliance with those standards, it be cannot relicensed by FERC under
FirstLight’s proposed conditions. Regardless of any state and federal signatory stakeholder
endorsements attached to FirstLight’s relicensing requests, allowing Northfield Mountain’s
crushing aquatic impacts and energy waste is not in the public interest and runs contrary to
landmark federal and state environmental law.
Thank you for your timely attention to my intervention in these long-delayed matters. All require
a living Connecticut River, one protected for the citizenry under all statutes of the WOTUS. I
look forward to your response.
NOTE: Please see attachments, and references further below, included in this intervention filing.
Sincerely,
Karl Meyer, M.S. Environmental Science
Member Fish and Aquatics Study Team, P-2485 and P-1889 since 2012
Notice of Intervention cc’d via email to:
Justin Trudell, FirstLight Power
Audrey Mayer, US Fish and Wildlife Service
Michael Pentony, National Marine Fisheries Service
Mark Tisa, MA Division of Fisheries and Wildlife
Todd Richards, MA Division of Fisheries and Wildlife
Jesse Leddick, MA Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program
Deb Markowitz, The Nature Conservancy
Katie Kennedy, The Nature Conservancy
References and citations:
CLEAN WATER ACT
Source: Federal Register / Vol. 88, No. 11 / Wednesday, January 18, 2023 / Rules and
Regulations
I. Executive Summary:
Congress enacted the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, Public Law
92–500, 86 Stat. 816, as amended, 33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq. (Clean Water Act or Act) ‘‘to restore
and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.’’ 33 U.S.C.
1251(a).
United States v. Riverside Bayview Homes, 474 U.S. 121, 134 (1985) (‘‘Riverside Bayview’’).
The Supreme Court noted that ‘‘[f]aced with such a problem of defining the bounds of its
regulatory authority, an agency may appropriately look to the legislative history and underlying
policies of its statutory grants of authority.’’ Id. at 132. The Court went on to state that
‘‘[p]rotection of aquatic ecosystems, Congress recognized, demanded broad federal authority to
control pollution, for ‘[w]ater moves in hydrologic cycles and it is essential that discharge of
pollutants be controlled at the source.’ ’’
“In other words, the adjacent wetland must have a continuous surface connection to a
relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing water connected to a paragraph (a)(1)
water or must either alone or in combination with similarly situated waters significantly affect the
chemical, physical, or biological integrity of a paragraph (a)(1) water.”
Federal Water Pollution Control Act
Source: FEDERAL WATER POLLUTION CONTROL ACT (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.)
FEDERAL WATER POLLUTION CONTROL ACT
[As Amended Through P.L. 107–303, November 27, 2002]
(6) No license granted by the Federal Power Commission for a hydroelectric power project shall
include storage for regulation of streamflow for the purpose of water quality control unless the
Administrator shall recommend its inclusion and such reservoir storage capacity shall not
exceed such proportion of the total storage required for the water quality control plan as the
drainage area of such reservoir bears to the drainage area of the river basin or basins involved
in such water quality control plan.
From Massachusetts’ Inter Basin Tranfer statutes and definitions:
4.04: Projects Subject to 313 CMR 4.00
“Projects with water or wastewater needs that result in an increase in the Present Rate of
Interbasin Transfer are subject to M.G.L. c. 21, §§ 8B through 8D. An increase in the Present
Rate of Interbasin Transfer shall mean any change that increases the ability to transfer water
out of the Donor Basin, including but not limited to the following actions:
(2) Construction or enlargement of reservoirs or storage facilities to store water transferred or to
be transferred from a Donor Basin if such construction causes an increase in the ability to
transfer water from the Donor Basin;
(3) Construction of, or increase in the Hydraulic Capacity of Transfer Facilities or a Transfer
System which causes an increase in the ability to transfer water or wastewater from the Donor
Basin;
(6) Any other structural change in a water or wastewater system that causes an increase in the
ability to transfer out of a Donor Basin.”
END of Intervention submission