It’s been a great year for CLF — and a great year on CLF Scoop. We’ve had lots of great posts by our advocates, staff and volunteers. See below for the most read 10 blog posts published in 2011.

1. Northern Pass: The 5 million ton elephant in Massachusetts’s climate plan 
By Christophe Courchesne

“The Northern Pass transmission project is being pitched by its developers as a clean energy proposal for New Hampshire. As I’ve pointed out before, Northern Pass is aregional proposal with dubious benefits in the Granite State. Unfortunately, the developers’ hollow promises have found an audience further south, in Massachusetts.”

2. RGGI results good for our climate, economy and consumers 
By N. Jonathan Peress

“If you listen to the word on street, or read the headlines, you’ll have heard that our times are hard times. Joblessness remains stubbornly high, markets remain volatile and credit is tight. Most people agree that what we need is a program to creates jobs, generates money, and reinvests each of those in our communities to make them stable, healthier and happier.”

3. My NY Times letter to editor 
By John Kassel 

“It would be hard to find “a tougher moment over the last 40 years to be a leader in the American environmental movement” only if your sole focus is the national debate. All the rest of us — at the local, state and regional levels — have known for years what the nationals are only now realizing: we’ve got to engage people closer to where they live.”

4. Countdown to Shark Week 2012
by Robin Just

“I really do love our New England sharks. But I also love to surf. And as the water temperature at my favorite break is going down, the great whites are heading south. One less thing to worry about as I struggle with frigid water, thick head-to-toe neoprene, and my own personal resolve to surf all year long.”

5. We Can Get There From Here: Maine Energy Efficiency Ballot Initiative 
by Sean Mahoney 

“Maine has a new motto: We can get there from here… As Washington has failed to advance clean energy legislation, and Governor LePage has expressed open hostility to the state’s renewable portfolio standards (RPS), I am reminded of that famous quip from Bert and I: “You can’t get they-ah from he-ah.” For Mainers concerned about Maine’s dependence on expensive, dirty fuels, and sincere in their interest in building a sustainable economy for the years to come, this quip has become a frustrating reality – a reality we can change, with your help.”

6. Love That Dirty Water: Massachusetts Lacks Money, Needs Clean Water 
By HHarnett 

“Massachusetts lacks money and needs clean water. This bind – one in which the state found itself following a June report – has forced a discussion policies that are raising the hackles of Massachusetts residents.”

7. Would Northern Pass Swamp the Regional Market for Renewable Projects? 
By Christophe Courchesne

“With the Northern Pass project on the table, as well as other looming projects andinitiatives to increase New England’s imports of Canadian hydroelectric power, the region’s energy future is coming to a crossroads. The choice to rely on new imports will have consequences that endure for decades, so it’s critical the region use the best possible data and analysis to weigh the public costs and benefits of going down this road. To date, there have been almost no objective, professional assessments of the ramifications.”

8. CLF Negotiates Cool Solution to Get Kendall Power Plant Out of Hot Water (And To Get Hot Water Out of Kendall Power Plant)
By Peter Shelley 

“Today marks a new milestone for CLF in our efforts to clean up the lower Charles River. Concluding a five-year negotiation, involving CLF and the other key stakeholders, the EPA issued a new water quality permit for the Kendall (formerly Mirant Kendall) Power Plant, a natural gas cogeneration facility owned by GenOn Energy. The plant is located on the Cambridge side of the Longfellow Bridge.”

9. What the Keystone XL decision should mean for Northern Pass
By Christophe Courchesne 

“Last week, a major disaster for our climate and our nation’s clean energy future was averted – at least for now – when the Obama administrationannounced that it won’t consider approving the Keystone XL pipeline’s border crossing permit before it reconsiders the Keystone XL pipeline’s environmental impacts and the potential alternatives to the proposal on the table.  For all the reasons that my colleague Melissa Hoffer articulated in her post last week, the Keystone XL victory was a resounding, if limited, triumph with important lessons for environmental and climate advocates across the country as we confront, one battle at a time, the seemingly overwhelming challenge of solving the climate crisis.”

10. When it comes to river restoration, haste makes waste
by Anthony Iarrapino

“In their rush to exploit recovery efforts from Tropical Storm Irene, ideologues who perpetually fight against regulation and science and who posture as the defenders of traditional “Yankee” values are forgetting two important rock-ribbed principles.”

courtesy Society for Protection of New Hampshire Forests

Last week brought a fitting capstone to the botched year-long rollout of the Northern Pass project.  In a disturbing turn of events, the project developers sought to scuttle a historic plan to preserve a storied wilderness in New Hampshire’s North Country. Their attempt failed, but what the episode says about their future tactics is anything but encouraging for New Hampshire and the region.

Northern Pass Transmission, LLC (NPT) – a partnership between Northeast Utilities and NSTAR – has spent 2011:

• misrepresenting the Northern Pass project’s environmental benefits,
• misleading the public about potential savings to New Hampshire electric ratepayers,
• withdrawing and refusing to analyze alternatives (including options that would avoid overhead lines through the White Mountain National Forest),
• blocking a full assessment of the nature and extent of the region’s need for more electricity imports from Canada, and
• trying to buy off landowners along the northernmost 40 miles of the project.

It has been clear for some time that the current proposal is really about two things – securing profits for Hydro-Québec and propping up NU subsidiary PSNH’s weakening bottom line. CLF is not alone in wondering: what’s in it for New Hampshire?

Last week was a vivid preview. And if you care about New Hampshire’s iconic wilderness landscapes or the organizations that protect them, it’s not a pretty picture.

Earlier this fall, we learned that NPT was bidding to purchase a strip of land through one of the North Country’s crown jewels – the magnificent Balsams estate in Dixville Notch – from its owner, the Neil Tillotson Trust.

Enter the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests (SPNHF), a key collaborator with CLF on Northern Pass advocacy and one of the state’s leading land conservation organizations. Culminating a decade of effort to preserve the Balsams landscape, SPNHF secured from the Trust a conservation easement over 5,800 acres of spectacular wilderness surrounding the resort, provided that SPNHF raises $850,000 for the easement by mid-January. (You can follow the effort here. Word is that, as of today, SPNHF is nearly a third of the way there.) The easement would preclude any transmission corridor.

The land is an ecological and scenic marvel, and the deal marks a historic land preservation achievement for SPNHF, the Trust, and New Hampshire as a whole.

The Balsams Resort in winter (photo credit: j-fi/flickr)

NPT’s bizarre and audacious response: launch a legal attack on the conservation plan.

Last week, NPT asked the state Attorney General’s Office to disapprove the easement on the ground that NPT’s earlier bid was higher. Then on Friday of last week, NPT made a very public offer to buy both the transmission corridor and the conservation easement, which would secure a right to site the Northern Pass project on the Balsams property. The last move was particularly odd because most bidding wars don’t involve publicly bullying a seller – a respected charitable trust no less – into accepting an offer.

As noted in the Concord Monitor and on NHPR, news came late Friday afternoon that the state Attorney General’s Office had approved the sale of the conservation easement to SPNHF, despite NPT’s objections and richer offers. The approval letter noted that it was well within the Trust’s charitable purposes and discretion to sell the easement to SPNHF for less than NPT’s offer. In other words, the Trust should be free to decide that preserving the Balsams property for the benefit of the North Country is more important than the Trust’s financial return.

Why was NPT’s attack on the conservation plan so troubling?

• NPT sought to undermine land preservation efforts throughout New Hampshire. Land preservation almost always requires generosity – the landowner’s decision to accept less than market value or to make an outright donation of an easement. If it had been successful, NPT’s legal attack would have left no room for such generosity, granting any private developer the power to block a landowning non-profit’s preservation of its land whenever the developer offered more money than the conservation organization or community that would hold the conservation easement.
• NPT is on war footing.  NPT is pursuing the equivalent of scorched earth litigation, resorting to strong-arm tactics and legal appeals to the state, including a threat of litigation to block the SPNHF easement that, as of today, remains on the table. At this early stage of the project’s permitting, this is exactly the opposite of what we need – a well-informed regional and statewide dialogue about our energy future, the project’s potential role if any, and the alternatives to traditional overhead lines along NPT’s proposed route.
• NPT has broken its promise to find a route “that has support of property owners.”  The Trust made a decision not to sell to NPT; within days, NPT was crying foul to a state official.  NPT’s appeal to the state reveals, for all to see, that NPT will respect the will of landowners only when that will is to sell NPT the land it wants. As others pointed out before the Attorney General Office’s decision, NPT’s carefully-worded disinterest in using eminent domain (except as a “very last resort,” in the words of PSNH President Gary Long) is no longer credible, if it ever was.
• NPT is willing to spend huge sums, but only to get the project it wants. Without hesitation or public discussion, NPT offered what amounts to a $1 million donation (of Hydro-Québec’s money) to the Trust, including a $200,000 grant to Colebrook Hospital and the money for the Balsams conservation easement. Clearly, NPT is willing to spend millions above and beyond market costs to get the route it wants, even as it rejects as too costly alternatives that could be better for New Hampshire.

Above all, the Balsams episode shows that NPT is not pursuing the Northern Pass proposal as a public-minded enterprise for the “good of all of New Hampshire.” With so much at stake for the region and New Hampshire, CLF’s work of 2012 is to secure a searching and rigorous public review process that will scrutinize every element of the Northern Pass project and ensure that the public interest – and not the dollars in NPT’s coffers – determines the project’s fate.

For more information about Northern Pass, sign-up for our monthly newsletter Northern Pass Wire, visit CLF’s Northern Pass Information Center (http://www.clf.org/northernpass), and take a look at our prior Northern Pass posts on CLF Scoop.

photo credit: Witthaya Phonsawat

With the Northern Pass project on the table, as well as other looming projects and initiatives to increase New England’s imports of Canadian hydroelectric power, the region’s energy future is coming to a crossroads. The choice to rely on new imports will have consequences that endure for decades, so it’s critical the region use the best possible data and analysis to weigh the public costs and benefits of going down this road. To date, there have been almost no objective, professional assessments of the ramifications.

Today, CLF is making available to the public a technical report prepared by Synapse Energy Economics addressing a crucial issue: the potential effects of new imports on the region’s own renewable power industry. 

The report, Renewable Portfolio Standards and Requirements (PDF), explains how the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) of each New England state and New York address hydropower and then examines the potential effects of allowing Canadian large-scale hydropower to qualify for incentives by allowing such power to count toward states’ goals for renewable power under RPS programs.

Vermont is currently the only state that allows Canadian hydropower to qualify for its (now voluntary) RPS. If Vermont elects to use Canadian hydropower to fulfill all or most of its RPS goal (which is contemplated by pending legislation that would make Vermont’s RPS mandatory), there would be a modest but important reduction in the incentives available to new renewable projects in the region. The report concludes that there would be a much more significant impact if the RPS programs in other states were changed to allow Canadian hydropower to qualify (as was proposed in New Hampshire and Connecticut earlier this year and is being discussed right now in Massachusetts). In that scenario, imports from Northern Pass (or import projects of similar size) would swamp the market, taking up 45% of the region’s mandate for new renewable power and deeply undermining the viability of new renewable development in the Northeast.

This finding is a new illustration of why CLF opposes changing RPS laws to count large-scale hydropower toward the region’s renewable goals, a result that would both harm local renewable projects and send incentives funded by New England ratepayers out of the country to suppliers that do not need them.

For their part, Northern Pass’s developers have downplayed any risks to local renewable energy but have refused to refrain from lobbying for and securing the very changes to the RPS laws that Synapse predicts would, when paired with new imports through Northern Pass, cut the legs out from under renewable energy based in New England. It is no wonder that it’s not only CLF sounding the alarm on this issue:  electric industry veterans like Cynthia Arcate and the trade association of New England’s competitive electric generating companies have also expressed concern.

The bottom line for CLF: any plan to increase imports will need a robust and comprehensive set of enforceable commitments – which are completely absent in the current Northern Pass proposal – for the region to ensure that New England’s own renewable energy industry will prosper and grow into the future. 

For more information about Northern Pass, sign-up for our monthly newsletter Northern Pass Wire, visit CLF’s Northern Pass Information Center (http://www.clf.org/northernpass), and take a look at our prior Northern Pass posts on CLF Scoop.

photo credit: flickr/OpenThreads

The Northern Pass transmission project is being pitched by its developers as a clean energy proposal for New Hampshire. As I’ve pointed out before, Northern Pass is a regional proposal with dubious benefits in the Granite State. Unfortunately, the developers’ hollow promises have found an audience further south, in Massachusetts.

From the public discussion as well as the developers’ PR blitz, you might think that the Northern Pass – a high voltage transmission line that would extend 180 miles from the New Hampshire-Canada border, through the White Mountains, to Deerfield, New Hampshire – is just a New Hampshire issue. It’s not: the ramifications of this project extend well beyond New Hampshire.  The implications are both regional and enduring, as they will shape the energy future of New England for decades to come.

Given this context, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) should be leading a pro-active, regional assessment of the options for additional imports of hydroelectric power from Canada. So far, DOE has squandered its opportunity to lead such an assessment while the Northern Pass permitting process remains on indefinite hold. Since April of this year, CLF has been urging the DOE to use this delay to deliver a fair, big picture review of the Northern Pass. It’s what New England deserves, and what DOE owes the public.

Although you wouldn’t know it from the media or the developers’ “MyNewHampshire” advertising campaign, Northern Pass also is a Massachusetts issue. Why? As if hidden in plain view, it’s at the center of Massachusetts’s plan to combat climate change. You might say it’s the elephant in the room.

Massachusetts’s 2010 “Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2020” (the Plan) seeks to reduce Massachusetts’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) 25% below 1990 levels by 2020. CLF has applauded the Plan as an aggressive, nation-leading effort. However, we long have been dubious of the Plan’s reliance on potential imports of Canadian hydropower.

Regrettably, the final Plan (at pp. 45-46) uncritically bought the Northern Pass developers’ line that Northern Pass will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.1 million metric tons annually by 2020. Where does the Plan get that figure? The figure was never publicly vetted or discussed during the public planning process in which CLF was an active participant. The only citations are to the developers’ website and to a 2010 report by an energy consulting firm hired by the developers. That’s it. Massachusetts is taking the developers’ sales pitch at face value.

The Plan goes on to claim that Massachusetts can take credit for the entire reduction, even though the current Northern Pass proposal, by design, does not guarantee that Massachusetts customers will purchase any hydropower from Hydro-Québec through Northern Pass or otherwise. So, just how much of Massachusetts’s ambitious GHG reduction goal does Northern Pass’s supposed 5 million tons represent? More than 70% of the Plan’s reduction goal for the electric sector and more than 20% of the Plan’s goal overall. Of the Plan’s “portfolio” of initiatives, the Plan credits Northern Pass with achieving the single highest amount of emissions reductions.

Northern Pass is a highly questionable element of the Plan for a number of reasons. First, it’s not clear how much power Massachusetts will actually get from Northern Pass. Second, the project faces myriad permitting hurdles and isn’t anywhere close to a done deal. Third, Massachusetts has no direct role in the project’s development.

But it’s worse than that. The report by the developers’ consultant – and its 5.1 million ton estimate of Northern Pass’s reductions of GHG emissions – is simply wrong. The report’s error is a contagion that directly undermines the Plan’s ambitious GHG reduction goal.

To make a long story short, the report assumes that Canadian hydropower results in no GHG emissions. That assumption is contradicted by Hydro-Québec’s own field research on the GHG emissions from the recently constructed Eastmain reservoir – the very reservoir where, according to testimony by a developer executive, Northern Pass’s power will be generated.  Together with other scientific literature, the research demonstrates that reservoirs have long-term, non-zero net GHG emissions (in part because they permanently eliminate important carbon “sinks” that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, such as boreal forests). That makes the  5 million tons, at a minimum, blatantly inflated.

But even more importantly for Northern Pass and Massachusetts’s GHG reduction goal, the same research suggests that Northern Pass may not reduce GHG emissions at all before 2020, if ever. According to Hydro-Québec, a newly inundated reservoir has GHG emissions comparable to a modern natural gas power plant in the decade following flooding.  This chart from a Hydro-Québec paper, which itself likely underestimates reservoir emissions over time, tells the tale:

Natural gas plant and reservoir (Eastmain 1) emissions are similar in first decade of reservoir operation

And according to the developers’ projections, Northern Pass would overwhelmingly displace natural gas-fired generation (itself a missed opportunity to displace the output of coal-fired power plants).  If Northern Pass relies on new hydroelectric facilities in Canada for its power (as the developers and their consultant are assuming), Northern Pass as proposed will have no net effect on emissions in its early years and may never result in meaningful reductions, let alone 5 million tons per year.

Without the claimed reductions from Northern Pass, the Plan cannot come close to achieving the bold 25% reduction in GHG emissions that made headlines, even if every element of the Plan is implemented. In other words, there is a 5 million ton hole in the Plan that Massachusetts needs to fill with real and verifiable reductions.

CLF has been making this case during Massachusetts regulators’ review of the proposed merger of Northeast Utilities and NSTAR – the same companies behind Northern Pass – that week approval to form the largest electric utility in New England. Piggybacking on the Plan, Northern Pass’s developers are citing the emissions reductions from the project as the premier “climate” benefit that Massachusetts will supposedly get from the merger. That benefit appears right now to be a zero; particularly in light of the merger’s negative impacts, Massachusetts deserves a lot more to satisfy the “net benefit” standard that the merger must achieve to gain approval.

In the months ahead, we also will be pushing back against Hydro-Québec and its corporate allies in Massachusetts, who are now urging radical changes to Massachusetts’s clean energy laws that would subsidize large-scale hydropower imports, at the expense of local renewable energy projects that provide jobs and economic benefits in Massachusetts and throughout New England. The Plan itself explains the reason this is a bad idea – large hydro is a mature technology that is economic and cost-competitive without any additional public support; large hydro also has caused dramatic environmental damage and major disruptions to native communities in Canada. If imports secure little or no reduction in GHG emissions, the case for new subsidies disappears altogether.

Some may be hoping that no one is looking seriously at what Northern Pass would mean for the climate and that the Northern Pass debate will remain within New Hampshire’s borders. CLF, however, is committed to securing real scrutiny of Northern Pass’s misleading claims, ridding Massachusetts’s climate plan of its faulty reliance on Northern Pass, and advancing clean energy solutions that will, in fact, meaningfully reduce our region’s carbon footprint while enabling Massachusetts to achieve its full 25% reduction in GHG emissions by 2020.

Protesters against Keystone XL - November 6, 2011 (photo credit: flickr/tarsandsaction)

Last week, a major disaster for our climate and our nation’s clean energy future was averted – at least for now – when the Obama administration announced that it won’t consider approving the Keystone XL pipeline’s border crossing permit before it reconsiders the Keystone XL pipeline’s environmental impacts and the potential alternatives to the proposal on the table.  For all the reasons that my colleague Melissa Hoffer articulated in her post last week, the Keystone XL victory was a resounding, if limited, triumph with important lessons for environmental and climate advocates across the country as we confront, one battle at a time, the seemingly overwhelming challenge of solving the climate crisis.

The Keystone XL decision also hits home in another way. It sends an unmistakable signal that the federal government’s review process for New England’s own international energy proposal – the Northern Pass transmission project – needs the same type of new direction.

The parallels between the State Department’s Keystone XL environmental review and the mishandled first year of the U.S. Department of Energy’s review of Northern Pass are striking. In both cases, we saw:

• Troubling, improperly close relationships between the developer and the supposedly independent contractors conducting the environmental review, with unfair and inappropriate developer influence on the review’s trajectory, undermining the public legitimacy of the review process;
• An extraordinary grassroots uprising against the proposal from diverse groups of residents, landowners, communities, businesses, and conservation and environmental groups;
• Massively expensive lobbying and public relations campaigns by proponents designed to confuse and mislead lawmakers and the public
• Repeated failures by permitting agencies to ensure fair, open, and truly comprehensive review of the full range of impacts, including climate impacts, and the reasonable alternatives for meeting our energy needs in other, less environmentally damaging ways.

With all the legal, procedural, and substantive deficiencies our national advocate colleagues have been pointing out for years, the Keystone XL review (before last week) is a dramatic example of what we can’t allow to happen with Northern Pass. Right now, things don’t look good – it appears that the Department of Energy is engaging in an “applicant-driven,” narrow review of a few potential project routes, not the broad, searching analysis CLF and many others have demanded again and again (and again).  Last week’s decision to conduct a wide-ranging new review of Keystone XL shows that there is still the opportunity (and now a clear precedent) for the Department of Energy to bring the same spirit of renewed scrutiny and public responsiveness to its review of Northern Pass.

New Hampshire and New England deserve an impartial, comprehensive, and rigorous review of the Northern Pass project – and all reasonable alternatives – by the permitting agencies entrusted with protecting the public interest. Indeed, what we need now is a serious regional plan that addresses whether and how best to import more Canadian hydropower into New England and the northeastern U.S. With huge projects like Keystone XL and Northern Pass on the table, our nation’s energy future is at stake, and it has never been more important – for our communities, economy, natural environment, and climate – to get it right.

For more information about Northern Pass, sign-up for our monthly newsletter Northern Pass Wire, visit CLF’s Northern Pass Information Center (http://www.clf.org/northernpass), and take a look at our prior Northern Pass posts on CLF Scoop.

Merrimack Station in Bow, NH

In more than 50 pages of filings last Thursday, CLF responded to a pair of motions by Public Service Company of New Hampshire (PSNH) asking for dismissal of our Clean Air Act citizen suit now pending in federal district court in New Hampshire. That same day, CLF’s lawsuit got a major boost when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) filed a brief of its own, as a friend of the court, to identify the legal errors in PSNH’s key argument.

One PSNH motion challenged CLF’s right to sue PSNH to protect the environmental and public health from Merrimack Station’s illegal pollution. The other motion claimed that PSNH didn’t do anything wrong when it renovated Merrimack Station because EPA regulations allow it to make changes without permits.

In our briefs, CLF vigorously objects to both motions. You can download our briefs in PDF format here and here; our full set of filings, including attachments, is here (7MB .zip file).

PSNH’s illegal projects will increase Merrimack Station’s emissions, which will harm the health and well-being of CLF members. Under federal law, this harm means that CLF has the right to sue PSNH to hold it accountable for violations of the Clean Air Act. Because PSNH failed to get permits for its projects, PSNH violated the law. Those permits would require PSNH to install more stringent and protective pollution controls that all new plants must include, reducing Merrimack Station’s emissions of a wide range of pollutants, beyond the reductions that Merrimack Station’s expensive new scrubber (which is limited to reducing sulfur dioxide and mercury emissions) can achieve.

Incredibly, PSNH’s argument that it is exempt from permitting requirements is entirely based on EPA regulations that do not apply in New Hampshire. It’s not a close call; PSNH’s brief arguing for our lawsuit to be dismissed gets the rules 100% wrong, an astonishing error for a sophisticated company like PSNH, New Hampshire’s biggest utility.

EPA’s filing puts the final nail in the coffin for PSNH’s flawed legal argument. In a 25-page brief, EPA shows how, even if the rules PSNH is citing were the right ones, PSNH got those rules wrong too. As the author of the regulations PSNH cites, EPA explains that those regulations also would require PSNH to obtain permits before undertaking projects that will increase emissions.

It could not be clearer that PSNH’s recent renovation strategy at Merrimack Station — “build first, see what happens later” — violates the Clean Air Act. CLF will continue its fight to hold PSNH accountable for its violations as this case proceeds in the months to come.

A study released today documents the powerful benefits of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) – the nation-leading effort by Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants while building up energy efficiency and clean energy efforts in the states.

The study found that RGGI created $1.6 Billion in net economic benefits across the region ($888 million in New England alone).  The program saved electricity customers $1.3 Billion on their energy bills region-wide due to investment by the program in energy efficiency and created 16,000 Job Years (a standard measure of employment) during the first 3 years of the program (including temporary and permanent positions).   The cost of the program was minimal, creating an imperceptible 0.7% electricity price increase on customer bills across the region that was more than offset by the benefits of the program.

CLF has been deeply involved with the RGGI program from its inception. We strongly believe that this is solid proof that RGGI, while first and foremost an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is also a win for the economy, consumers and business, as well as the environment.

We must apply the lessons of RGGI to date and move beyond this pilot phase, scaling up the program to further reduce pollution, create even more jobs and reduce energy bills on a much greater scale, and take this effort into other parts of the nation.

RGGI has proved that a well-designed greenhouse gas reduction policy is a win for just about everybody.  The complaints (amplified by their well-financed megaphone) from the filthy few companies who make their money by extracting and selling coal and oil, at great cost in lives and environmental damage, should not distract us from hearing that very positive story.

Zak Griefen

CLF is pleased to welcome Zak Griefen, a Vermont native and former litigator for Cheney, Brock and Saudek, in the newly created role of environmental enforcement litigator. Based in CLF’s Vermont office, but working on cases throughout New England, Zak will be focused initially on cleaning up our region’s inland and coastal waters by ensuring that polluters are aware of their Clean Water Act permitting requirements and bringing federal litigation when necessary. The environmental enforcement litigator position was created to hold polluters accountable for the violations of environmental regulations—Clean Water Act and others—that are rampant across New England, compromising our region’s health and the health and safety of our citizens.

Zak has a BA from the University of New Mexico, and earned his JD, cum laude, and Master of Studies in Environmental Law, magna cum laude, from Vermont Law School in 2005, where he was an editor of the Vermont Law Review. Admitted to practice in VT and MA, he served for two years as clerk to the judges of the Vermont Environmental Court, and then practiced civil litigation in Montpelier, where he lives with his wife and two children. Zak, who served as a summer intern at CLF in 2004, is an avid angler and is particularly interested in protecting healthy streams and promoting sustainable land use.

Today, the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services provided an annual report to the New Hampshire legislature detailing the results of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) Carbon Dioxide Emissions Budget Trading Program.  The report notes that the program has supported approximately $20 million in job creating energy efficiency investment in New Hampshire and that each dollar of invested RGGI revenue resulted in $3.42 in direct energy savings (See this study by the University of New Hampshire). The report concludes that the effect of the RGGI program on rates has been negligible, amounting to .06 cents per kWh, or approximately 30 cents per month per household.

At the same time, electricity bills for customers of New Hampshire electric utilities have decreased dramatically since RGGI went into effect, with the exception of PSNH customers.  According to the report, the average PSNH residential customer is currently paying approximately $27 per month more than a New Hampshire customer in National Grid’s service territory for the same amount of power ($89 per month for PSNH versus $62 per month for National Grid).

Given the magnitude of the excessive energy costs paid by PSNH residential customers (comprising the overwhelming majority of New Hampshire homes), one might assume that the legislature would use the report as a basis for reviewing and revising the state’s policy that forces New Hampshire residents to subsidize PSNH’s above market costs to the tune of $324  per ratepayer per year.

Instead, House Speaker William O’Brien and Majority Leader D.J. Bettencourt issued a statement today criticizing RGGI for laying an extra “$5.50 per year on the backs of our ratepayers.”  They appear to have missed the forest for the trees (and bungled their math).  New Hampshire ratepayers pay among the highest rates in the country because PSNH imposes on them the above-market cost of its dirty and expensive power.  In fact, the report shows that National Grid ratepayers in New Hampshire, having been spared the legislative mandates that inflict exorbitant costs on PSNH ratepayers, pay the lowest electric rates in New England. National Grid and other New Hampshire utilities purchase power from newer, more efficient power plants selling into the wholesale market.

Improving New Hampshire’s economic future requires a thoughtful review of the statutory policies that extend the lives of PSNH’s uneconomic power plants and foist the exorbitant costs of these plants, and the pollution they emit, on New Hampshire residents. Portraying a successful and economically beneficial program such as RGGI as a burden to ratepayers lays blame in the wrong place and amounts to a game of political charades—a disservice to New Hampshire voters and job creators.