Deepwater Wind is taking exciting new steps to build on last month’s historic agreement to protect critically endangered right whales while developing offshore wind projects. The offshore wind developer, expected to begin construction on the proposed Block Island Wind Farm in 2014 or 2015, has announced an agreement to voluntarily adjust its planned construction period to minimize potential impacts to migrating North Atlantic right whales. This announcement follows extensive discussions with CLF, and shows a willingness to go above and beyond to protect North Atlantic right whales in the pursuit of renewable energy. In order to fasten the five proposed turbine steel foundations into the steel floor, the developer must undergo pile driving, a process of hammering steel pipes up to 250 ft into the ocean floor. This stage of read more…

Keeping the lights on shouldn’t be this difficult. The response by Entergy to the outage at the Super Bowl is very reminiscent of the responses by Entergy to the many problems at its Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. It boils down to a piece of equipment failed and the power went out. A repeated problem at Vermont Yankee has been equipment failures – from cooling tower collapses to leaking pipes. Sure problems happen, but c’mon. Enough already. The problem is that the same company that can’t keep the lights on for the Super Bowl is also challenged to keep its nuclear fleet running smoothly. Even without news of the Super Bowl outage, UBS issued another report  about the shaky financial future of Vermont Yankee. The report states: “We continue to believe read more…

The Boston Harbor Association has a powerful message about the very real threat of sea level rise driven by global warming.  Their report, “Preparing for the Rising Tide”, is a dramatic wake-up call about the fundamental threat to the historic and economic heart of Boston. The report starts with very solid science that shows how the homes, businesses and cultural institutions (like the New England Aquarium) that sit on the waterfront are now on the edge of entering, and have in some cases already entered, a very real danger zone.  A zone where the flooding and catastrophic damage that Hurricane Sandy brought to the New York region would tear across our coastline – with the prospect of worse to come.  Indeed, had Sandy hit only 5 ½ hours earlier than read more…

Vermont keeps working on better ways for people and goods to get where they need to go. The threats from climate change and the high cost of maintaining our travel ways mean we need to be smarter and greener. In 2011 Vermont’s Governor Peter Shumlin announced that the Circ Highway – an expensive, polluting and ill-conceived highway project outside Burlington — would not be built as planned. In its place a Task Force would work on solutions that won’t bust the budget or foul our air and water. Over the past year a good part of that work looked at targeted improvements in the immediate Circ area. The result is a study of the network . With this are recommendations that were just adopted by the Task Force to move read more…

This week on Talking Fish, an interactive map of groundfish closed areas; a proposal for a new closed area off Eastern Maine; cod populations are in collapse and fishermen can't find fish; CLF calls to shut down New England's cod fishery; Fish Talk in the News has updates on the New England Fishery Management Council's decision to cut cod catch limits dramatically. read more..

The massive drag on New Hampshire’s economy caused by PSNH’s continued operation of the uneconomic and obsolete Merrimack Station and Schiller Station coal-fired units—extracting hundreds of millions per year in above market costs for its shareholders—is spiraling out of control, and several recent developments at the NH Public Utilities Commission raise troubling questions about what the agency empowered to protect ratepayers is doing about PSNH’s problems. While competition among energy suppliers in New England is fostering efficiency, benefitting the environment and saving ratepayers money, PSNH’s energy service business, for which it collects its cost of service and a handsome profit, is increasingly looking like a dinosaur ready for extinction. Thousands of NH ratepayers are taking advantage of lower cost, more efficient electricity suppliers, but those remaining with PSNH are being read more…

Yesterday the story of New England’s cod fishery took another tragic turn when the New England Fishery Management Council voted to drastically cut catch limits for New England’s two cod stocks—Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank cod—by 77 and 61 percent, respectively. Now is not the time for denial. It is not the time for timid decisions and unconscionable risk. It is time to make the painful, necessary steps towards a better future for fishing in New England. Rather than arguing over the scraps left after decades of mismanagement, we should shut the cod fishery down and protect whatever cod are left. read more..

On Thursday, January 28, 2013, Maine’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) approved, by a 2-1 vote, the terms of a long-term contract for the first floating turbine offshore windfarm in Maine. After a few months of negotiation, this is good news for the state, and for renewable energy. This vote clears a major hurdle toward Statoil putting four, three-megawatt wind turbines on floating platforms in deepwater 12 miles off Boothbay, and marks the early days of implementation of Maine’s Ocean Energy Act. Signed into law in 2009, the Act encourages projects like this one, so as to support the development of renewable energy technology that harnesses ocean energy. In this project, energy generated from the project would be transported via underwater cable to a transfer station on land, delivering renewable energy read more…

The data don’t lie. In line with the trends we’ve been warning about for years, PSNH’s coal-fired business model is in free fall: Residential and small business customers continue to flee PSNH’s dirty, increasingly expensive energy service. Over the past year the number of residential energy customers in New Hampshire who purchased energy service from a supplier that is not PSNH jumped to around 30,000 households in December of 2012 (compared to around 2,000 households in December of 2011). That figure doesn’t include the veritable flood of customers who abandoned PSNH’s energy service at the end of 2012 when word got out about PSNH’s 34% rate increase (ENH reported signing up 1,700 customers on December 31 alone for service starting January 1). The stampede of residential and small business customers read more…

The front page of the Boston Globe last week presented a powerful, timely and cautionary tale about  two liquefied natural gas terminals  that sit off the coast of Gloucester and Salem. Those terminals are the tangible reminder of a massive push undertaken by energy industry insiders to build such terminals.  The intensity of that push, which began to build around 2002, becoming most intense during the 2004  to 2007 period and then petering out in the years since, contrasts sharply with the reality described in the Globe article: that those two offshore terminals have sat idle for the last two years. That push to build LNG import facilities, which was such a mania in energy industry circles circa 2005, yielded some crazy ideas, like the proposal to hollow out a read more…