Conservation Law Foundation warmly welcomed the news that Vermont Yankee will soon close. The closure is long overdue for this tired old plant, following a history of leaks, false testimony, broken promises and poor management.

For over ten years, CLF has been actively showing that Vermont Yankee is not a good deal for Vermont. The state has been saddled with this poorly managed, uneconomic dinosaur for far too long, enduring environmental damage and the persistent threats to public health and safety that come with operating a nuclear power plant well beyond its planned life.

Image Credit: Tim Newcomb

With no place to put the waste that will remain dangerous for thousands of years, no power contract that would provide reliable and low cost power to Vermonters, and rapidly escalating costs to shut down and clean up the site—and little money available to make that happen—the numbers just never added up. The plant has been a pig in a poke for some time. The schemes from the plant’s wily owners to eke out a profit and keep the plant running, finally failed.

Vermont Yankee’s closure is good news for Vermont and the region’s economy and energy future. It heralds a transition away from older and polluting power supplies. Old technology, whether nuclear or coal-fired, cannot compete with newer, more efficient resources, renewable energy and energy efficiency. As New England undergoes a massive technology transition that hastens the demise of old polluting power plants throughout the region, we can begin investing in cleaner supplies that will meet our energy needs and create good, green jobs, instead of propping up polluting old plants and paying too much for their power.

Throughout the past decade, CLF added a strong oar pulling to move away from Vermont Yankee. We explained to state regulators, courts, legislatures, federal agencies and blue ribbon commissions the problems with water pollution, management and poor economics of the plant operation. Our advocacy built on a history of holding states and power plant owners responsible for acting in the best interest of ratepayers.

In the 1980s, we led a successful campaign to prevent a second reactor from being built at the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant in New Hampshire because the economics didn’t make sense. In 2000, we helped avert a fire sale of Vermont Yankee that was a bad deal for Vermont ratepayers. And in 2006, CLF showed how cleaner energy efficiency could help meet our power needs and reduce the need for massive transmission that would prop up older plants.

Throughout New England, whether it’s these old nukes, or old coal-fired power plants, we and our allies—the people who have paid and continue to pay with their health, their wallets and their children’s futures to keep them running—are shaking the region from simply accepting business as usual. The demise of Vermont Yankee—and the Salem Harbor and Somerset Station coal plants—was the result a changing energy landscape brought about by  advocates like CLF, who held  plant owners to account year after year, and  built legal, political and popular support for a better deal for New Englanders. Who knows how much more life their owners may have tried to wring out of these old plants at our expense if CLF and others had not been there to keep the pressure on for them to move aside?

Economics and advocacy are closely intertwined. Regardless of which straw finally broke Yankee’s back, the end of these old, polluting power plants is clearing the way to a cleaner energy future in our region. Thanks to the persistence and dedication of many, that is now within our reach.

The Vermont Public Service Board will be holding a public hearing on the proposed expansion of Vermont Gas facilities.

Vermont Gas Systems Expansion

Tuesday evening, September 10, 2013

7:00 p.m 

Middlebury Union Middle School, 48 Deerfield Lane, Middlebury, Vermont 

At a time when climate change is upon us we must think carefully about putting in place new fossil fuel systems that will be around for a very long time. Keeping us hooked on fossil fuels for many years is a bad idea.

The Board is considering a proposal to expand the Vermont Gas Systems pipeline to Middlebury and then beyond. The proposed project would run through valuable wetlands and farmland, and expands Vermont’s reliance on fossil fuels at a time we need to be moving away from these polluting sources. This is the beginning of a bigger project to supply gas across Lake Champlain to New York. It also moves Vermont closer to being able to access gas supplies from fracking in the United States.

Come let the Board know what concerns you have. Tell the Board you want to make sure energy is used wisely and that Vermont takes steps now to reduce our addiction to fossil fuels. It is important for the Public Service Board to hear from you.

photo courtesy of lydia_shiningbrightly@flickr.com

If your doctor puts you on a diet to prevent major health problems, it is a bad idea to fill your pantry with potato chips. Simply hoping you don’t eat the chips staring you in the face is a bad way to try losing weight.

Likewise, if you want to reduce fossil fuels and combat climate change, it is a bad idea to blindly expand pipelines that deliver these fuels to your doorstep and beyond. These are pipes that will be in place for the next 50 to 100 years. In that timeframe we need to move away from dirty fossil fuels, including fracked gas.

In Vermont, the proponents of a proposed gas pipeline expansion are sadly ignoring the long term impacts.

Instead of proposing a project that actually meets our climate change diet needs, the proposed gas expansion in Vermont is doing the equivalent of filling our energy pantry with potato chips. Chips that we will stare at every day and try not to eat in order to stay on our diet.

This is a bad idea.

The gas cheerleaders, including the Shumlin Administration, are hoping folks will only eat the chips as a small snack. But sadly they are not proposing any limits on the use of the gas, or sizing the project to meet our very limited dietary needs. They are not even considering the use of the full pipeline capacity in their analysis.

Testimony from Conservation Law Foundation provided by Dr. Elizabeth Stanton, explains the considerable uncertainty underlying the claims of Vermont Gas and states:

“As long as there is significant uncertainty in the emissions from natural gas, Vermont risks adopting long-lived natural gas infrastructure that is not compatible with meeting Vermont’s 2050 greenhouse gas reduction goals. Approving Vermont Gas’ request represents a gamble, on the part of the PSB, that Vermont’s current and future sources of gas will be at the low end of the current range of possible emission rates in the literature and not at the higher end, and that the uses of the gas will only replace oil or propane. Both assumptions are unlikely and as a result the project proposed will most likely increase greenhouse gas emissions over the life of the project.” (Stanton Testimony at 9-10).

The testimony from the Public Service Department, which is responsible for the State’s energy plan, and helping us meet our climate goals, provides various manipulations of others’ testimony but still simply assumes all the gas in the pipeline will replace oil use. (Poor testimony at pg 8). That is an analysis that is far too limited.

The testimony from the Agency of Natural Resources recognizes that if any gas supply sources have emissions as high as some of those documented, then the claimed emissions benefits of the project “could be reduced or even result in a scenario of increased GHG emissions relative to oil.” (Merrell Testimony at pg. 3). Instead of recommending ways to reduce that impact, however, the Agency calls for annual reporting. While more information is always good, the Agency’s suggestion will be about as effective as closing the stable door after the horse has already run away.

It is past time for Vermont to begin taking its climate change goals seriously. Expanding our addiction to fossil fuels by expanding gas pipelines in Vermont is irresponsible.

A version of this article first appeared in the Sunday August 11 edition of the Rutland Herald /Times Argus.

A cleaner energy future looks bright. It means less pollution, lower costs and better service. Getting there takes some work.

It’s a pretty good bet that a cleaner energy future includes lots more “distributed generation” and fewer large, centralized power plants. Think about your PC or MacBook in place of a huge central computer, or your cellphone — and computer — in your pocket. Examples of distributed generation include solar panels on roofs of homes and parking garages and community wind power.

Linking these sources together so they can power our cars, run our refrigerators and keep us cool is a challenge — one that we must embrace. Failing to meet it leaves us with yesterday’s dirty coal plants or problematic new pipelines for tomorrow’s power needs.

The challenge is that our electrical grid operates without storing energy. The grid is a marvel of human ingenuity that delivers power from any electrical plant to anyone in the region who turns on a switch. It is a bit like a seesaw. The grid must keep in balance the power coming in with the power going out.

Our grid was built and designed to keep this balance by operating mostly with large regional power plants, some of which can be turned on and off fairly easily. When we add more, smaller power sources, keeping the balance becomes a different challenge.

The seesaw must balance with a handful of marbles instead of a few large buckets. But the marbles are more nimble, and the solar panel on your roof delivers power that doesn’t need to travel far. The challenge in the next decade is making our grid as nimble as our power resources to make the most of these new advantages.

If we fail to figure out how to balance our grid with the use of smaller, cleaner resources, we will have more situations where we keep burning fossil fuels instead of allowing wind power on hot summer days, a situation that occurred during our most recent hot spell.

A group of environmental organizations and businesses known as the E4 Group is working with the region’s grid operator to help us meet this challenge. To start, we must correctly account for the amount of new smaller sources that will be used.

A recent report prepared for the E4 Group, “Forecasting Distributed Generation in New England,”  by Synapse Energy Economics shows how billions are being spent in the region now to improve our electric transmission system. Yet these efforts are moving forward without a clear estimate of how much local, distributed generation will be used. It is like projecting the needs for telephone service without considering how many cell phones will be used.

As a result, our electricity system is likely being overbuilt — and we are paying far too much for it. We are building our electrical grid as if the likelihood that you or the school nearby will put up solar panels doesn’t exist. That just doesn’t make sense.

The opportunity is to better tailor our electrical grid investments to take advantage of distributed generation and avoid costly investments for delivering power from far away.

A key finding of the report is that the plans for the grid significantly underestimate the amount of distributed generation that will be installed in the region by 2021. The report forecasts 2,855 megawatts of power from distributed sources by that date, compared to the 800 megawatts assumed by the current plan. This means we will have more than three times the distributed generation than previously estimated.

But the grid and the resources required to meet power needs are being planned as if the real contribution from distributed generation won’t even exist. By ignoring the cleanest, local generation we will be overbuilding and overpaying for bigger, more expensive power upgrades than we actually need.

The report is a clarion call that shows how distributed generation can be better integrated into our regional system and as a result lower pollution and costs for everyone.

courtesy of Jen Sorensen available at: http://jensorensen.com/2013/07/01/giving-gas-a-pass-fracking-cartoon/

A thoughtful New York Times opinion piece from an oil and gas engineer, Anthony R. Ingrafea, recently noted that:

“gas extracted from shale deposits is not a ‘bridge’ to a renewable energy future – it’s a gangplank to more warming and away from clean energy investments.”

This is a refreshing insight.

The leaks of methane from gas production and transportation “eviscerate” and advantage natural gas has over oil. Conservation Law Foundation provided a similar analysis last month regarding the Vermont Gas expansion in Addison County.

Even if natural gas burns cleaner it is still a fossil fuel. It still contributes to climate change. It still ties us to a dirty fuel at a time our climate demands we move toward cleaner sources.

It is disappointing to hear Vermont Gas and others tout claims that natural gas is clean and affordable. Glossing over the real impacts doesn’t eliminate them. As the cartoon says, it is time for a little honesty. Time for some real action toward clean energy as well.

A version of this article first appeared in the Sunday July 21 edition of the Rutland Herald /Times Argus.

Helping farms and Vermont businesses thrive while cleaning up the environment is a win all around.

Conservation Law Foundation is pleased to serve on the Executive Committee to help Vermont’s homegrown Green Mountain Power Cow Power program to pave the way for cleaner air, happier farm neighbors and more successful Vermont businesses.

The program works by turning farm manure into electricity. The average cow produces more than 30 gallons of manure a day. Multiply that amount by 1,000 — the numbers of cows on a typical Cow Power farm — and you have a lot of cow manure. That means there is also a lot of methane, which can be used to create electricity.

Here is how it works. The manure is placed in a digester at the farm that converts the waste into methane gas. The gas fuels an engine that runs an electric generator.

Gases that would otherwise create a nuisance and release harmful and very potent greenhouse gases are instead captured to produce electricity.

Farms have an additional revenue source, and the rest of us have cleaner air and renewable power.

Currently GMP Cow Power farms are producing electricity for nearly 3,000 Vermont homes and businesses. With the expansion of GMP Cow Power so that it is now available to any GMP customer, there are opportunities to grow the program even further. Customers can sign up and make a voluntary 4-cent-per-kilowatt-hour payment on all or a portion of their electric bill. The contribution goes directly to support Cow Power projects to reduce pollution and produce 100 percent renewable power that gets used in Vermont.

Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases. Its global warming impact over a 20-year horizon is nearly 75 times more potent than carbon dioxide because methane traps radiation much more effectively. But instead of simply being released into the air, farm methane can be used to produce electricity. This reduces pollution and makes the farm methane projects some of the best fighters of climate change.

These projects don’t just create renewable energy; they effectively capture some of the most potent global warming gasses.

Twelve GMP Cow Power farms remove the equivalent of over 40,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, in addition to replacing 6,800 tons of carbon from other electric sources. This is equivalent to removing more than 9,000 cars from the highway each year that would have burned 5.3 million gallons of gasoline. These are big numbers — and the biggest benefit comes from removing methane.

Removing farm-generated methane is great but it comes with some real challenges. The first is financial. The equipment is expensive and requires steadfast maintenance to operate smoothly. It is not like a refrigerator you plug in and forget about, and is mostly economically viable only for our larger farms at this stage of technological development.

To be a real success, we need to make this work for smaller farms as well. A few smaller-scale applications are underway that look promising. For instance, some simpler digesters are used in other parts of the world. The ingenuity of Vermont’s farmers and engineers will undoubtedly yield a product that works well on smaller farms within the next decade, but we don’t have it yet.

One way to improve the economics is to find a way to value and pay for the many real benefits of farm methane projects. They are counted now as renewable power, but offer additional advantages as well. One approach would involve credits or payments that recognize their value in reducing methane pollution. That could make it economically feasible to operate smaller-scale projects, or even applications that use digesters alone, without producing electricity.

Another opportunity – and challenge – is expanding the materials used in the digester. Some farms now use additional organic waste in their digesters, such as waste from ice cream manufacturing or fish production. Currently only pre-consumer waste can be used on farms, and off-farm substances cannot make up more than 49 percent of the total digested waste.

New opportunities arise as Vermont moves to expand digesting for managing solid waste. Some organic wastes are very good fuel for digesters and can produce more methane per pound than manure, but the challenge is to make sure the waste is handled well from beginning to end. After digestion is complete and electricity is made, waste and nutrients still remain. We must be careful not to import or spread more nutrients than our land is capable of absorbing on our farm fields. Lake Champlain is already suffering from excess nutrients, and digesting our waste should not be allowed to make this problem worse.

Another new possibility includes expanding how the “products” made with farm digesters are used. Currently farms use the heat produced from the digesters to keep the digester warm. But this heat could also be used to support greenhouses or a new district heating project, among other possibilities. The challenge is to be as resourceful as possible and, like our farms, use as much of the output as possible. This will expand the reduce, reuse and recycle practice even further by adding “upcycling” — converting waste materials into products of better quality or with greater environmental value — while providing an additional revenue source.

Cow Power presents real, exciting opportunities and challenges. The leadership and innovation Vermont’s farms, businesses, utilities and customers have already shown are poised to take these efforts even further.  If you are a GMP customer, your participation in GMP Cow Power and your 4 cents per kilowatt-hour makes a huge difference. Sign up now at: http://www.greenmountainpower.com/renewable/cow/enroll/

A full environmental review is needed before Vermont Gas Systems digs up wetlands and pollutes the air.

Federal law requires a full review for major projects – like pipelines – that will have significant environmental impacts. The Vermont Gas project should not be exempt from this requirement.

The proposed gas pipeline planned for Addison County would use publicly owned rights of way. Land acquired with federal tax dollars. When federal land is used for a major project, the environmental impacts need to be fully evaluated. That’s the law. And it only makes sense that before we allow our tax dollars to support major projects, we know what the environmental impacts are.

In a letter to the Federal Highway Administration, Conservation Law Foundation is calling on the Agency to undertake this needed review.

The significant wetland, water resource, habitat and air pollution impacts have already been noted in testimony filed with the Public Service Board. Vermont Gas plans to use a right of way that was acquired for the Circ Highway and has already been shown to have significant and valuable wetlands. A full and new review is needed for the gas pipeline.

Before we blindly commit to a pipeline that will have far-reaching impacts for generations, we need a thorough and transparent understanding of what is at stake.

Read CLF’s letter here.

A version of this article first appeared in the Sunday June 23 edition of the Rutland Herald /Times Argus.

Conflicting and confusing information is nothing new when it comes to climate change or big energy projects. The role of natural gas in meeting our energy needs is but the latest guest to this party.

Like most things in life, natural gas itself is neither all good nor all bad. True, natural gas is a relatively clean-burning fuel with fewer emissions than coal or oil. And currently natural gas prices are lower compared to oil. As a source for electricity, gas can be quickly brought on and off line and so fills a useful niche to balance intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind. But these benefits are only part of the equation.

Relatively clean-burning does not mean clean. 

Natural gas is still a fossil fuel. It contributes to climate change in very significant ways. The main component of natural gas is methane, a greenhouse gas 25 to 75 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of its ability to warm the Earth’s atmosphere.

The real damage comes from natural gas leaks.

And they occur. When an average leak rate of 3 percent is taken into account for the full natural gas life cycle — from the time it leaves the ground to the time it burns in your furnace or range — it turns out that increasing the supply of natural gas significantly increases emissions. That is not good for our climate.

Lower cost comes at a high price.

Natural gas prices are now low partly because of abundant supplies from fracking, an extraction method that uses water, sand and chemicals to force gas out of the ground. Vermont banned fracking because of concerns about the impact to water and the environment. But this practice continues elsewhere, and supplies used in Vermont come from fracked sources.

In Vermont, a proposed expansion of natural gas will cut through valuable wetlands and farmland in Addison and Chittenden Counties. Future plans include putting a pipeline across Lake Champlain, a development that would increase greenhouse gas emissions by more than 3 million tons over the life of the project — the equivalent of adding a half-million cars to the road.

One of the biggest problems of increasing our reliance on natural gas is that the pipes we put in place now will still be here to deliver gas in 50 to 100 years. Yet in that timeframe we must solidly break our addiction to fossil fuels — including natural gas.

Regionally across New England, momentum is developing to expand or build new gas pipelines. But rushing to build bigger pipes is not the answer. We can do better than throw up our hands and blindly accept expensive and environmentally damaging new pipelines at a time when we should be moving away from fossil fuels. Recognizing the impacts and providing offsets for any expansions that do occur is a must.

The first step should be to repair leaks and honestly account for and address emissions. It makes no sense to build expensive, bigger pipes while customers needlessly pay for gas and pollution that escape into the air.

The next step is to use gas and all fossil fuels wisely. By dramatically increasing efficiency, most homes and businesses could cut use by 20 to 30 percent. That would significantly reduce the need for more supply.

Finally, let’s make sure any new project helps and doesn’t hurt our climate and environment. We should keep sensitive and valuable environmental resources off the table.

We should limit supplies from fracking, and require offsets to reduce overall emissions for any new pipeline so we don’t add to our climate problems.

Natural gas will play an important role in our energy supply over the next decade, but let’s make sure it is a role that leads to a cleaner and healthier planet.

photo courtesy of kara newhouse@flickr.com

Expanding natural gas in Vermont moves us in the wrong direction to address climate change. The expansion increases greenhouse gas emissions, compounding Vermont’s contribution to climate change.

In detailed testimony filed with the Vermont Public Service Board, Conservation Law Foundation explained that the simplistic evaluation by Vermont Gas that the expansion will reduce emissions is simply wrong. Testimony from Dr. Elizabeth Stanton shows on pages 18-19 that expanding natural gas increases emissions more than three million tons over 100 years and brings environmental costs of an additional $76,000,000.

This project is not a good deal for Vermont.

Dr. Elizabeth Stanton shows that the emissions from the full life-cycle of the project result in significant increases in global warming pollution. This project will be around for a long time as will its greenhouse gases. Dr. Stanton explains on pg 9:

“The natural gas life cycle is the set of all processes related to the use of natural gas from its extraction, processing, and distribution, to its end-use combustion. Life-cycle analyses are studies that determine the upstream and downstream consequences of a particular product or service used by consumers.”

Its overall emissions include leaks of methane, a gas 25 to 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to climate change.

Testimony by Dr. Jon Erickson, Dean of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont shows that expanding gas results in locking us in to fossil fuels at a time our climate and energy goals require moving the opposite direction. He states at pg 6:

“Any expansion of the delivery of natural gas to customers in Vermont has the potential to substitute for other nonrenewable, carbon-based fuels (such as fuel oil), but also has the potential to displace current and future uses of renewable energy (such as wood-based home heating or district heating).”

His testimony goes on to state at pg 8:

“Beyond GHG-related risk, the extraction of natural gas supplies is using increasingly environmentally damaging procedures such as hydro-fracking, a practice that Vermont has temporarily banned within State borders. Environmental regulation in other States and Canadian Provinces poses a risk to the long-term stability of natural gas supplies.”

Let’s be honest. Increasing our reliance on fossil fuels, including natural gas, is a bad move.