4/12/23 Karl Meyer, Letter to the Editor – Vermont Digger
In 2016,Canadian capital giant PSP Investments bought three FirstLight Power-branded properties on the Connecticut River in Massachusetts, two years before their federal licenses would expire. They quickly transferred them into Delaware tax shelters.
Facing no pressure, they dragged out relicensing procedures five more years, knowing the sole nongovernment organization representing New England’s river hadn’t had a staff lawyer since its 1952 founding. PSP also knew the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries and Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife passively watched Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station’s lethal pillage of the Connecticut for decades, despite landmark federal and state environmental law.
This April Fool’s Day, FirstLight’s chief operating officer, Justin Trudell, hailed those agencies for signing an agreement supporting Northfield’s crushing river chaos through 2073. He described it as “a huge win for the environment.”
For some 11,500 years, the Connecticut flowed as all rivers had throughout time — downstream in an endless cycling of this planet’s critical resource, fresh water, toward its ancient destination, the sea. But in 1972 a deadly machine ended that natural history here. Operated like an electric toilet, Northfield Mountain’s daily up-and-down cycling produced 5-foot artificial tides. Its turbine-charged pumping halted and reversed flows for miles. The essence of a living river vanished. (Editor’s note: In off-peak hours for electricity use, Northfield Mountain pumps water from the Connecticut River uphill into a huge reservoir. When electric use jumps, that water is released to power huge turbines that produce electricity.)
Today that anti-gravity machine continues crushing the river’s key physical and biological functions from Turners Falls, Massachusetts, upstream to Vernon, Vermont, and Hinsdale, New Hampshire. It squanders massive grid megawatts via its pumping and storage — erasing all life sucked in for its peak-priced power regeneration. Swallowing flows for hours at 15,000 cubic feet per second (the aquatic life equivalent of seven 3-bedroom homes every second), its annual death toll — in the hundreds of millions of eggs, juveniles and adults across two dozen fish species subjected to its turbines — has never been fully calculated.
With agency enforcement, conservation and alternatives long ignored, FirstLight’s Canadian shareholders are now closing in on banking cash rewards for the sacrifice of New England’s Great River ecosystem for a new half a century, at fire sale prices. One key license question remains: Will a new, legitimate, public river defender finally step in?
Karl Meyer
Greenfield, Massachusetts