This commentary is by Karl Meyer of Greenfield, Mass., a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists who has written hundreds of articles on issues affecting the Connecticut River.
Living rivers flow downstream, but not the Connecticut River in Franklin County in Massachusetts, where FirstLight’s 50-year-old Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station reverses miles of flow at times.
The Northfield station is the deadliest machine ever installed on New England’s Great River. It sucks in endless streams of the Connecticut’s flow at 15,000 cubic feet per second for hours — the equivalent of eight three-bedroom homes filled with aquatic life every second, inhaling over 28,000 fish houses an hour.
A 1992 Northeast Utilities study of its toll on eggs, larvae and juvenile American shad stated there is “no expectation of survival” for any of those millions of early-life-stage shad sucked through its reservoir loop annually. The 1960s Connecticut River nickname as “the nation’s best landscaped sewer” remains alive and well at Northfield today.
American shad are just one of two dozen species exposed to that daily suction. For those other species, what’s undisputed is none of their millions of untallied eggs, adults and young survive the trip through Northfield either.
That giant predation has been the key river cleanup ignored for generations by federal and state agencies — and shamefully left unchallenged by river nonprofits. Silencing its ecosystem damage decades ago would have restored scrambled, suctioned and reversed flows and lethal impacts in Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire.
Instead FirstLight Power, the Canadian-owned subsidiary of global venture capital giant PSP Investments, is on the verge of receiving a second Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license to kill.
Northfield is neither a producer of classic river hydropower nor of renewable energy. It is a giant grid consumer. This is a buy-low/resell-high, net-power-loss appliance — wholly dependent on massive megawatts culled from the climate-searing natural gas that dominates today’s New England power grid.
In 2010, Northfield’s unscheduled half-year breakdown and the EPA’s subsequent sanctions of FirstLight for three months of blatant Clean Water Act violations proved its use is unnecessary for the daily running of the power grid. Its half-century-old federal license labeled it as it should be — an “emergency” power source. Today it’s a deadly foreign-owned cash cow.
For 50 years, no substantial defense from those depredations was waged by the likes of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries, the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. The now 70-year-old Watershed Council/Conservancy did nothing. Despite standing law, none took this killer’s owners to court under landmark federal safe fish passage laws established in this very river system — nor did they take action under federal and state Clean Water Act provisions or requirements of the Anadromous Fish Conservation Act.
All had public trust mandates to protect the river and its migratory fish as food for future generations. But surely their true intergenerational failure was not standing u p for the Connecticut as a living entity — as the key life source and thriving central artery of New England’s sprawling four-state ecosystem.
The Connecticut has lots of monikers: National Blueway, American Heritage River, and the critical lifeline of the sprawling Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. But as an intervener in the 10-year-old Federal Energy Regulatory Commission relicensing for this now Delaware tax-sheltered contraption, it’s been heartbreaking to witness the non-defense of the essential properties of a living river. The Connecticut River is literally sucked backward, flushed like a toilet for huge energy resale profits.
Those agencies and nongovernment organizations had half a century to retrieve the disastrously licensed mess they signed onto over two generations back. Today the sole pointed licensing remedy specifically targeting Northfield’s year-round killing is a FirstLight proposal to place a temporary nylon net above Northfield’s sucking mouth toward the end of fish migration season. It’s meant to deflect “entrainment” of just two species: adult American eels and juvenile American shad.
Rather than a fix, even if it works it will do next to nothing to quell the endless death toll for all those other vulnerable fish species during key life stages and annual movements.
FirstLight now operates the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station via its series of FERC license delay requests while its venture capital shareholders and CEOs profit off an expired 2018 license. Both U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service region 5 director Wendi Weber and Connecticut River Conservancy director Andy Fisk recently moved off to new bureaucratic positions elsewhere. They won’t be around when the ink dries on a license disastrously poised to re-enshrine Northfield’s horrific impacts for decades.
Hydro-Quebec recently bought up 13 U.S. licensed river stations, many in the upper reaches of the Connecticut. Canadian capital interests now control the for-profit flows and ecosystem impacts of nearly 300 mainstem miles of New England’s river. “Sold out again” is one intergenerational descriptor that comes to mind. Another is heartbreaking.