American shad, and untold millions of young from two dozen fish species, have been subject to Northfield’s merciless turbines for 43 years. Mortality studies for those species were not even done.
This commentary is by Karl Meyer of Greenfield, Mass., who has been a stakeholder, intervenor and member of the Fish and Aquatics Studies Team in the federal relicensing bid for Northfield Mountain since 2012. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and formerly worked at both Northfield Mountain and the Connecticut River Watershed Council.
Recently FirstLight Power’s John Howard wrote a commentary published in local newspapers here in Massachusetts, touting his company’s accomplishment in reaching relicensing settlement agreements with federal and state environmental agencies for future Connecticut River fish and flow protections.
Referring to his company as “environmental stewards,” Howard characterized the deal as a fair, science-based win for the citizenry and the river. He describes a future river with “more natural-like flow” and fish protections on an interstate reach where FirstLight’s Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station’s operation will continue to halt and actually force miles of the Connecticut to run backward for hours, killing all the aquatic life it vacuums in daily for a new half-century.
FirstLight’s plan to acquire a new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license to operate Northfield Mountain on our Connecticut River should greatly concern folks in Vermont and New Hampshire. Upstream, you don’t hear much about its massive net-power-loss river-suctioning that profoundly impacts a 20-mile interstate river reach shared by three counties: Windham in Vermont, Cheshire in New Hampshire, and Franklin in Massachusetts. It’s such an ecologically lethal contraption, I’ve long hoped Vermont and New Hampshire would sue Massachusetts and the federal agencies and owners to put an end to its half-century of devastation.
Howard’s commentary didn’t go into much detail about how they got such a great deal for us and our river, but it comes after years of FirstLight’s public information lockdown via company-required nondisclosure agreement bargaining sessions. What it failed to mention is that the big corporate profits are being largely exported elsewhere
It’s now seven years since its parent-owner, Canadian investment giant Public Sector Pension Investments, swooped down on the Connecticut River Valley in 2016 to purchase FirstLight and its Northfield and Turners Falls facilities “to deliver clean, local, reliable, cost competitive power,” as the commentary describes it.
Northfield’s original license expired in 2018, yet the company profits have accrued, while the license process blunders on. Already a half-decade late, the corporate owners can now boast of the full allegiance and support of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries and Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife for another half-century of crushing ecosystem chaos in a signed proposal soon to undergo initial review by FERC.
FirstLight’s owner, PSP Investments, is a $240 billion global outfit with offices in London, Hong Kong, New York, Montreal and Ottawa. Since its 2018 FERC license expired, PSP’s capital has backed FirstLight in far-flung spending sprees worth hundreds of millions. With still no infrastructure and safeguard spending to meet fed/state regulations and Clean Water Act standards here on the Connecticut, they’ve been buying legacy 20th-century hydro projects from Pennsylvania to Ottawa 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, with a handful of transglobal outfits, invested in a $645 million consortium deal leasing 85,000 acres of seabed in the New York Bight. This May, FirstLight announced its 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 the Northfield Mountain cash cow, without a pauper’s pittance spent in the Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire counties where it causes chaos, reversed flow, and kills millions of fish yearly.
In 2019, FirstLight reported revenue of $195 million, the bulk realized from Northfield’s pump-and-flush operations. Its stated new license goal is to spend less than that single-year’s reported revenue on structural fish passage facilities on our U.S. river, one riven by Northfield’s impacts. It’s a pittance in return for decades of future transnational profit. Meanwhile, it touts little thousand-dollar prizes in local “environmental justice” grants here, and sprinkles around modest, publicity-generating battery and storage research funds to a few Bay State colleges.
FirstLight’s law and lobby firm is Van Ness Feldman of Washington, D.C., Seattle, Houston and Baton Rouge. Its engineering consultants, Gomez and Sullivan, are in Buffalo, Albany and Utica in New York and in Henniker, N.H. Kleinschmidt, another relicensing consultant, is based in Maine. Its sole semi-local team member is Slowey-McManus Communications of Boston and Worcester, which supplies messaging, advertising, press releases and op-ed writing. Walmart is a Slowey-McManus client.
Ironically, Northfield Mountain can’t produce virgin electricity. It is wholly dependent and wired into the New England grid — which itself is powered 60% by climate-killing natural gas. Northfield’s anti-gravity pumping wastes 34% of that virgin grid power, sucking the 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 4 river miles in our critical 20-mile reach.
John Howard’s commentary attempted to downplay Northfield’s annual suction-killing of baby shad — known as “entrainment.” He contended that, “contrary to popular narrative,” a FirstLight study showed its operations resulted in the estimated deaths of only “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 rebutted those juvenile shad numbers. It noted FirstLight had excluded standard study information it had cited in several other findings, but not this one. They 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 is a huge departure from FirstLight’s 2,093 juvenile shad.
American shad, and untold millions of young from two dozen fish species, have been subject to Northfield’s merciless turbines 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 — it will 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.