During the week of September 23, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) has scheduled four additional public scoping meetings in different communities in New Hampshire as part of the scoping process for DOE’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Northern Pass transmission project.
As with the well-attended meetings more than two years ago, these new meetings are a vital opportunity to explain your concerns about the project to DOE officials. These meetings are the last in-person moments to influence DOE’s decisions on the scope and content of the draft EIS, including the environmental and social impacts of the project to be considered and the alternatives to be seriously studied. Those decisions will have lasting ramifications as the federal and state permitting processes continue. Here is the schedule:
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Monday, September 23, 2013, 6–9 p.m., Grappone Conference Center, Concord, NH (map)
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Tuesday, September 24, 2013, 5–8 p.m, Plymouth State University, Silver Center for the Arts, Hanaway Theater, Plymouth, NH (map)
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Wednesday, September 25, 2013, 5–8 p.m., Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa, Presidential Room, Whitefield, NH (map)
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Thursday, September 26, 2013, 5–8 p.m., Colebrook Elementary School, Colebrook, NH (map) (this meeting was moved from a smaller location in W. Stewartstown)
Each meeting will include both an “informal workshop” and a more formal session where the public will have the opportunity to make brief statements. In the 2011 meetings, speakers were limited to 3 minutes. If you want to speak, we advise that you reserve a slot in advance by emailing DOE’s Brian Mills at Brian.Mills@hq.doe.gov. The formal portion of the meeting will be transcribed by a stenographer, and all public testimony will be included in the official administrative record of DOE’s review of the project.
Even if you aren’t interested in making any remarks in the formal session, please attend and bring your neighbors, friends, and family. The turnout at these meetings is important to the course of the permitting process, and many will be watching to gauge the public’s reaction to Northern Pass’s revised route. Showing up matters!
(photo credit: flickr/Christchurch City Libraries)
You can also weigh in with written scoping comments on DOE’s EIS website. The deadline for these comments is November 5, 2013. (The deadline to file comments with DOE on the amended application and to ”intervene” remains September 18.)
What should you say or write? Any reasonable concern or question about the proposed Northern Pass project and alternatives is relevant to the scoping process and will help inform DOE’s decision-making. As a starting point, it may be helpful to review the maps of the project route prepared by Northern Pass Transmission LLC in its amended permit application; both the maps and the application are available at DOE’s EIS website. CLF’s Northern Pass site, our detailed 2011 scoping comments, and three years of our Northern Pass blog posts are also at your disposal. Consider submitting comments on the potential impacts of the project on communities, the White Mountain National Forest, the climate, wildlife, forest resources, wetlands, recreation areas, the renewable energy sector, the local economy, and natural resources in Canada. And don’t hesitate to tell DOE, once again, that its review of the project needs to be more fair, transparent, and objective than it is now. Note also that Northern Pass’s many rejections of potential alternatives to the project, including in its permit application, aren’t the final word, and DOE must conduct a rigorous review of all reasonable alternatives, including not building the project, and alternative routes and project designs that may have fewer impacts. It’s well settled that an objective and comprehensive analysis of alternatives is an ironclad legal requirement and, indeed, the heart of the federal environmental review of the project.
Roger Dennison
To protect our planet from catastrophic climate change, fuel-fired power generation must be phased out as quickly as possible. Doing so is wholely dependent on bringing on line cost-effective alternatives. Hydropower from Canada is far and away the most cost-effective form of non-carbon energy available to New England. It is both disappointing and puzzling to find CLF siding with people in the fuel-fired power generation industry to scrape together arguements against this promising effort to cut New England’s carbon emissions.
Christophe Courchesne
Mr. Dennison – As is all our work, CLF’s Northern Pass advocacy is centrally concerned with the climate crisis, and we wholeheartedly agree that we need to transition away from fossil fuel use as quickly as possible to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Indeed, while large-scale hydropower does not require fossil fuels (aside from the significant needs of the equipment and materials associated with facility construction), it does result in important carbon emissions throughout the life of the facilities. In the early years following construction, projects may have greenhouse gas emissions that are comparable to fossil fuel sources like natural gas. Your statement that it is a non-carbon resource is flatly incorrect.
That’s not to say that we don’t see a role for large-scale hydropower in the New England energy mix – we do. But undertaking massive new transmission projects like Northern Pass is a complex, generational decision with real risks and impacts; so far, Northern Pass is not shaping up to be a reasonable approach with meaningful public benefits and is being advanced with a ruthless disregard for the communities where it would be located and for basic, undisputed facts like the carbon facts above.
You also assume that large-scale hydropower is the most cost-effective renewable resource. That is open to substantial question, in part because we don’t really have a good sense of how expensive it would be, other than Northern Pass’s non-specific marketing and flawed and dated economic analysis. We do know that new projects undertaken in Quebec and the huge transmission projects needed to link the projects with southern New England are approaching 10 cents/kwh, which is even more expensive than many land-based wind projects in development now.
Finally, it’s important to note that your point about the fossil fuel industry fighting Northern Pass is exactly backward. The project sponsor PSNH/NU is, in fact, the owner of the state’s two coal plants, collectively the largest source of carbon emissions in New Hampshire, and refuses to budge on phasing out these plants (a logical move if it was sincerely committed to fighting climate change) notwithstanding the plant’s dreadful economics, which are causing real economic damage to New Hampshire ratepayers and New Hampshire’s economy. Indeed, there is no environmental group in New England that we know of that is backing Northern Pass (including those who focus exclusively on climate), while Northern Pass is loudly trumpeting the arguments of a Koch-connected group that won’t disclose its donors and favors more natural gas pipeline, stopping Massachusetts from siting offshore wind near Cape Cod, protecting PSNH coal plants, and weakening our region’s marquee clean energy efforts – including RGGI and Renewable Portfolio Standard requirements.
While Northern Pass is wrapped in a green jacket, it is the branchild of a company with a failing coal-fired business model that it refuses to give up. The project’s environmental benefits have not been even minimally substantiated and must be compared against the many potential alternatives – from increasing import capabilities in Vermont to more aggressive investments in homegrown renewables and efficiency.
CLF is committed to advancing a cleaner energy future for the region. Supported by the state’s biggest carbon polluter and others who oppose meaningful clean energy progress, Northern Pass as currently proposed has not been demonstrated to help get us there.
Roger Dennison
Mr. Courchesne – Thank you for your detailed response to my comment. I have read the Synapse Energy report and noted its conclusion that the emissions from newly-flooded boreal reservoirs are significant but “much lower than for fossil fuel technologies”.
Given this, one would hope to see CLF advocate in favor of the power-line project, and make the public understand that the environmental consequences of the power line would be limited and indeed trivial when set against the impending consequences of climate change.
Mark Orzeck
The issue with Northern Pass is not the need, it’s the suggested method. Both NY and ME have found ways to go completely underground for ~$6M/mile, yet NP says to go underground in NH it would be 4-14 times that amount. Also noted, that is an estimate on their part, they neither have real data to back that up, nor will they fund a study to provide that data.