Vermont moves a step closer to shuttering the aging Vermont Yankee nuclear power facility as planned in 2012.

In a strong rebuke to Entergy, the facility’s owner, the United States District Court denied a request to keep the plant open while Entergy’s legal challenge proceeds.  Entergy sued Vermont in April.  Entergy seeks to prevent Vermont law – which requires state approval - from taking effect.

The Court denied Entergy’s request for a preliminary injunction, stating:  ”This Court declines to order short-term drastic and extraordinary injunctive relief that will not offer certainty either in the short or long term, and will have no operative effect on state actions before trial.”

The Court rejected each of Entergy’s claims of harm.  The Court noted that a decision about refueling is “a business decision made very difficult by the uncertainties of litigation.”  The Court stated:  “In the unique circumstances presented here, the decision to refuel is either not harmful if Entergy prevails on the merits, or is not a cognizable injury if Vermont’s statutes are upheld.”    Refueling would cost between $60 and $65 million.  Revenues of $90 million would be earned from operating the plant until its planned closure in March 2012.

A full trial will take place this fall.  The Court’s decision on the injunction is a solid victory for Vermont at this stage.

Map of Northeast Energy Link (potential route in yellow)

Earlier this week, National Grid, Emera, and First Wind announced preliminary plans for a major new transmission project between northeastern Maine and Massachusetts – the Northeast Energy Link (NEL).  The financing structure for the project, known as “participant funding,” is similar to the structure that federal regulators approved for the Northern Pass project in 2009.  NEL would consist of 220 miles of underground, high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines, apparently to be sited in existing rights of way and transportation corridors, that would deliver 1,100 megawatts of power from future wind projects in northern Maine, as well as additional imports from Canada, to southern New England. National Grid and its partners have apparently found a way to make the economics of burying lines in already disturbed corridors work.  This development deeply undermines the continued refusal of the proponents of the Northern Pass project, despite CLF’s and others’ repeated requests, to consider the same approach.

NEL is an intriguing proposal, particularly because it emphasizes New England-based wind resources. As with Northern Pass, the proposal warrants thorough review through robust, comprehensive permitting processes.

More immediately, the proposal underscores the urgent need for the regional energy study CLF and others are requesting within the Northern Pass permitting process.  There simply is no comprehensive plan in place addressing the best approaches for facilitating imports of Canadian power, if needed, and for adequately connecting homegrown renewable resources in remote areas to customers in southern New England.  With no plan, all we can do is react, piecemeal, to each private proposal that comes along.  Our energy and environmental agencies should be assessing the need for new transmission projects and then should consider only the best approaches that prioritize energy efficiency, minimize environmental impacts, reduce our reliance on the dirtiest power plants, and provide real public benefits. 

The recent delays in the Northern Pass review mean that the U.S. Department of Energy has a golden opportunity to help develop a regional plan, along with other stakeholders in the New England states and elsewhere in the Northeast.  CLF-NH Director Tom Irwin and a number of the other organizations that joined our motion to DOE seeking such a study make the case on the op-ed page of today’s Concord Monitor.  You can access the op-ed here.

It’s constant, it’s overwhelming, and it’s likely never to go away. What is it?  It’s information overload. We live in an age where everyone has an opinion, everyone wants a voice in the debate, and everyone thinks they’re right. With the Internet at our fingertips and the media hounding us with article upon article, it’s hard to know where to stand on hot topics like renewable energy.

We’ve probably all experienced that moment – eating our eggs and toast in our favorite diner, enjoying our cup of joe, and reading the morning paper – when we come across a letter to the editor arguing that wind power will improve energy security, energy prices, and climate change. Confusion sets in. You’re unsettled, perhaps even bothered. Didn’t yesterday’s article lambast wind power for its inefficiency, its price tag and its destructive scenic impact? Who has the facts right and who has the facts wrong? If wind is supposed to bring energy prices down, why is the electric bill creeping up month after month? If wind integration makes the grid more stable, why do you keep hearing that wind will only cause more power plants to be built? And if wind is so great, why are parts of the West disassembling their wind farms and halting project development? Why, wind proponents, why?

These are the right questions to be asking, and we’re glad you’re asking them.  These very same questions are being asked of wind project developers here in New England, most recently by the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC) in connection with First Wind’s proposed Bowers Wind Project, a 27 turbine wind power project to be located in the Downeast Lakes area of Maine. Opposition to the Bowers Project stems almost exclusively from the visual impacts the project might have on a portion of the local economy, guided fishing. In all other respects, the project is commendable – Bowers will make use of existing logging roads and transmission lines and anticipated environmental impacts from the project’s construction are expected to be minimal.

CLF supports this project and, anticipating the confusion under which LURC might be working, submitted testimony from two experts to dispel some of the myths that the wind debate has generated. Specifically, Dr. Cameron Wake testified on the impacts of climate change on Maine and New England’s natural resources and how wind power is one tool to be used in addressing that challenge; and Abigail Krich testified on the systemic benefits of integrating wind power into the electric market.

After peppering Ms. Krich with questions, the Commission walked away with two major takeaways from her testimony:

• Wind power does result in cost-savings because it brings the costs of generating electricity down. Unfortunately, those savings are all but wiped out by the increasing cost of transmitting electricity.
• Increasing the amount of wind power generated and used in New England will not require the construction of additional power plants to balance wind’s variability. The New England Wind Integration Study, performed by ISO-NE, concluded that even if 12,000 MW of wind power were integrated into the system, no new power plants would be needed to balance wind’s variability.

While CLF appreciates that the scenic impacts of these projects are, at the end of the day, a highly personal matter (or as my Latin teacher would say, “de gustibus non est disputandum” or “taste is not a matter of debate”), it’s important that objective facts not be obscured by subjective, and ultimately misleading, ones.

Photo credit: Beerzle, flickr

In 2007, Congress passed energy efficiency standards for light bulbs that will decrease air pollution, improve public health and decrease household energy bills. A no-brainer, right? Wrong. This week, the House will vote on bills to repeal those standards – and we need your help to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

The standards require new bulbs to use 25 to 30 percent less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs beginning in 2012, and 65 percent less energy by 2020. These standards will not ban the incandescent light bulb, but instead give consumers a wider range of bulbs to choose from, including new and improved incandescent bulbs, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) and light emitting diodes (LEDs) that are far more efficient than required by the 2012 standards. What’s more, several manufacturers, including GE, Philips Lighting and Osram Sylvania, already sell new energy-efficient incandescent bulbs that use halogen technology. These bulbs meet the 2012 standards and are already available for sale. Learn more about light bulb standards here.

By the numbers, these standards will:

• Save American households $100 to $200+ per year
• Reduce U.S. energy bills overall by more than $10 billion per year – energy savings equivalent to 30 large power plants
• Jump-start industry innovation and investment that is creating U.S. jobs
• Avoid 100 million tons of global warming pollution per year – equal to the emissions of more than 17 million cars

But we won’t see any of these benefits if the standards are repealed and we return to using traditional light bulb technology, which has changed very little since Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb some 125 years ago. This is a battle that we can’t afford to lose.

Here’s a bright idea. Send a message to your representatives opposing any bills that would weaken or reverse light bulb efficiency standards.

Photo credit: S1acker, flickr

As you hit the road this holiday weekend, you will be joining millions of others in filling up your gas tank and will watch in consternation as your paycheck pours into your tank. The sad thing is, you are probably driving a vehicle that gets far less than 45 mpg, so you might have to fill that tank more than once to get back home.

These days, Americans spend on average $369 dollars a month on gas. By contrast, the average monthly gas bill in April 2009 was $201. That’s a lot less money that you have to go towards dining out and hotel rooms this holiday weekend. The good news is that the EPA and DOT are currently contemplating raising fuel economy requirements to between 47 to 62 mpg starting with all 2017 model vehicles. That means  getting twice or even three times as far without having to fill up.

You would think that states buckling under the weak economy would rejoice at any effort that would give folks more money to spend. Unfortunately, Governor LePage seems to disagree.

In response to EPA and DOT’s effort, LePage joined a small handful of other governors this week in a signing a letter to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson cautioning them to be  “sensible” about raising fuel economy standards and claiming that “overreaching regulations can be a cost burden on individuals, families and businesses in our state” because the technology used for fuel-efficient vehicles makes them more expensive for consumers.

In other words, we haven’t learned any lessons, we couldn’t care less if our constituents have to spend half their paycheck at the pump and we have no problem with our addiction to foreign oil.

Fuel efficiency standards for 2012-2016 were set in 2007 at 35 mpg. When those standards were about to go into place, there was a remarkably similar wave of national hand-wringing. People were concerned that the new standards would have a negative effect on the auto industry and Americans’ perceived need to have large, affordable vehicles. Yet, the sky didn’t fall. Detroit had been teetering on the brink of survival not because of MPG standards but due to their failure to stay ahead of the innovation curve, like Toyota, in creating fuel efficient vehicles. The success of the Ford Focus speaks for itself.

Opponents to increasing the MPG standards claim that the government needs to stay out of this — market demand will dictate higher fuel efficiency.  But the data doesn’t bear that assertion out.  In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report on the effects of the CAFE standard. The report concluded that in the absence of fuel economy regulations, motor vehicle fuel consumption would have been approximately 14 percent higher than it actually was in 2002.

Americans are fully capable of stepping up to the plate and developing the affordable technology necessary to bring the higher standard to fruition. They’ve done it before and they can do it again. And here’s the thing– a whopping 78 percent of Americans think they should. According to a recent poll by the Mellman Group, the majority of Americans support efforts by the auto industry to reduce CO2 emissions. And if that also means saving money on gas, then Maine should be embracing the new standards and not trying to slow them down.

Today,  the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office and the state Department of Environmental Protection announced that they have settled claims over violations of air quality at the Mt. Tom Power Plant in Holyoke, MA.

“CLF is gratified to see the State take enforcement action to address the violations that were uncovered at Mt. Tom,” said staff attorney Shanna Cleveland. “Particulate matter is one of the deadliest air pollutants emitted by coal-fired power plants, and is a major contributor to the poor air quality that is sickening residents in Holyoke and surrounding communities. The State’s insistence on continuous monitoring is an important step toward ensuring that the plant cannot continue to violate emissions limits with impunity.”

Particulate matter is responsible for a wide range of health impacts, including heart disease, lung damage and an increased risk of lung cancer. The asthma rate in Holyoke is more than twice the statewide average of 10.8 percent.

Cleveland continued, “This enforcement action is a step in the right direction, but even with the pollution controls recently installed at Mt. Tom, the plant has continued to emit harmful pollution and violate emissions limits. Despite their significant investment in technology to clean this plant up, the reality is that a 50-year-old coal plant cannot be modernized enough to run in compliance with the law, and moreover, cannot run efficiently, or economically. The only way to stop Mt. Tom from polluting the air and making people sick is for it to shut down. We need to be thinking less about how to keep old, polluting coal plants operating and more about how to get our electricity from clean, renewable energy.” More >

This Saturday, June 25, thousands of people from all across the world will take part in an event known as “Hands Across the Sand” by taking a trip to their local beach and joining hands with friends, neighbors and total strangers to send a message to our leaders—no to expanded offshore oil drilling and yes to clean energy. Last year more than 100,000 people took part in this event in all 50 states and in 43 countries around the world.

This year’s Hands Across the Sand could not come at a more important time and that is why CLF has joined as a sponsor of the event. With memories of the BP Horizon disaster fading from the public memory, and gas prices hovering around $4 a gallon, the oil industry and their allies in Congress are mounting a major effort to dramatically expand oil drilling in US waters. They are even bringing back a proposal that seemed unthinkable a year ago—oil drilling on New England’s Georges Bank, one of the richest fisheries on earth. The truly scary part is that Big Oil is making progress. In Washington DC the House of Representatives recently passed 3 bills that would have required a massive expansion of offshore drilling, and a recent poll shows that public support for drilling is on the rise as gas prices tick up.

The drilling bill was rejected in the US Senate (no thanks to Senator Scott Brown) but the threat of oil rigs in New England’s waters remain a very real possibility, threatening New England’s critical fishing, tourism and outdoor recreation industries which employ tens of thousands and sustainably generate far more revenue than oil drilling ever could.

There is an old saying that if you give a man a fish he will eat for a day but if you teach a man to fish he will eat for the rest of his life. Drilling in New England might create a few jobs years down the road for as long as the oil lasts, but we would be risking far more jobs in other ocean industries such as fishing. However by improving the health of our oceans and fisheries, and promoting the responsible development of renewable energy, we will create jobs that last for generations to come.

That is why this Saturday CLF is joining with the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association to sponsor a Hands Across the Sand event at noon this Saturday, June 25^th on Pavilion Beach in Gloucester. Environmentalists, fishermen and beachgoers will all be there to join hands and say no to offshore drilling and yes to a clean, renewable energy future and yes to healthy oceans and the jobs they support. I hope you can join us in Gloucester but if you can’t make it, click here to find an event near you.

P.S. If you need another reason to come, the Gloucester Hands Across the Sand event will coincide with the annual Saint Peter’s Fiesta so you can speak out for our ocean and have a great time in Gloucester too!

A package of three major new renewable energy bills has just passed both houses of the Rhode Island General Assembly unanimously.  Taken together, the bills will give Rhode Island one of the best and one of the most coherent sets of renewable energy laws in the country.  Over the past three months, CLF staff have worked extensively with the leadership of both the RI House and the RI Senate on drafting the actual language of these major bills.

One bill addresses what is called “net metering.”  Net metering occurs when an electric customer’s meter can run not only forward but also backward.  Net metering is important to individuals and companies that have small renewable projects (like solar panels on the roof of a home) because net metering often makes the difference between those projects being economically viable and being non-viable.  Until now, net metering law in Rhode Island was a shambles:  for example, some renewable energy technologies qualified for net metering but (for no apparent reason) other did not qualify; moreover, many portions of the law were so vague (or incoherent) that no one was sure what they meant, and there was even litigation challenging net metering by alleging that Rhode Island net metering law conflicts with federal law.  The newly passed statutes fix all those problems.  The new law makes clear that net metering is available to all renewable technologies, gives a generous price to renewable energy generators, and outlines exactly the boundaries between Rhode Island and federal law.

Another of these bills addresses “distributed generation.”  The DG Bill seeks to fix an unforeseen problem in an earlier renewable energy law, the Long-Term Contracting Statute (LTC Statute) that the General Assembly enacted in 2009.  Long-term contracts are especially important to renewable energy developers because such long-term contracts enable the developers to get financing for their projects.  The LTC Statute turned out to have one unexpected problem.  It worked very well for large companies, like Deepwater Wind, that wanted to develop and build utility-scale projects.  But the LTC Statute was not so good at helping smaller developers that were unable to afford an army of lawyers to negotiate individual contracts with the utility.  The  DG Bill solves this problem.  The DG bill carves out a portion of the long-term contracting obligation created in the 2009 LTC Statute and sets that portion aside just for small, local projects (like a town that wants to put up a single wind mill at its Town Hall).  In order to obviate the need for that (expensive) army of lawyers, the DG Bill creates a very simple, standard contract for developers of small, local renewable energy projects.  Basically, the law says:  If you have a small, local renewable energy project, you do not need to negotiate your own contract with Grid; instead you can automatically get a standard, short, easy-to-understand two-page contract.  The DG Bill also sets a standard price for such small renewable energy projects — the price is set by a board and is designed to be high enough so that such small projects are economically viable, but low enough so that the public is not forced to over-pay for renewable energy.  The big, utility-scale projects can still be built; but the DG bill will now make it easier for smaller projects also to be built.

The third bill in the set makes it easier for renewable energy developers to connect to the electricity grid by setting a timetable and prices for such interconnections.

CLF worked long and hard on this package of renewable energy legislation, and we are very gratified to see its success in the General Assembly.  We were also pleased to see the package of bills highlighted in the lead editorial of the Providence Journal on June 21.

PSNH's Merrimack Station (photo credit: flickr/Jim Richmond)

I appeared on NHPR’s The Exchange with Laura Knoy this morning, and the topic was the potential energy and economic impacts of the Northern Pass project. The show provided a good opportunity to explain why the project is inspiring so much opposition, why CLF has been skeptical of the current proposal, and how Canadian hydropower could play a role in the New England electric system if pursued appropriately. There was also a segment on the project’s potential impact on property values. You can catch the replay here if you’re interested.

Joining me on the show was Julia Frayer, an economist hired by the Public Service Company of New Hampshire (PSNH) to tout the energy and economic benefits of the project. Recently, she penned a widely-reprinted op-ed and provided testimony to the New Hampshire legislature, suggesting the project will be a boon to consumers and the reliability of the electric system.

Unfortunately, and as I made an effort to point out on the show, the arguments for the current proposal are pleasant talking points without much to back them up. All the cited benefits are speculative, rather than firm commitments, and are not forthrightly presented alongside the proposal’s potential costs. As any student of economics can attest, an intelligent discussion about the economics of a project requires that we at least try to describe and compare the costs and benefits.  We know that the project may have significant negative impacts, ranging from the environmental impacts of generating the power in Canada to the potential effects of major new transmission lines on New Hampshire’s tourism and recreation industries. PSNH and the project developer, Northern Pass Transmission, LLC, have stubbornly failed to acknowledge these impacts, and there is no evidence they were taken seriously in the planning of the current proposal.

One point worth highlighting – the current plan calls for all of the supposed clean energy benefits and electric rate reductions to be delivered through the wholesale market, where Hydro-Quebec intends to sell the power delivered by the project.  But these benefits would mostly bypass the very residential ratepayers in New Hampshire who pay PSNH for electricity – because PSNH acquires very little power from the wholesale market. Instead, as customers of PSNH’s retail power, PSNH residential customers have been left to shoulder the uneconomic costs of PSNH operating several coal-fired generating units – and to pay the highest electric rates in New Hampshire as a result. Northern Pass does nothing to change this situation.  Many commercial ratepayers in PSNH territory have “migrated” in increasing numbers to other utilities that – unlike PSNH – do buy substantial power from the wholesale market to supply their customers. Residential ratepayers don’t have this choice – which means they’re saddled with PSNH’s higher costs, as PSNH loses more and more of its commercial rate base.  Again, Northern Pass does nothing to change this situation.  On closer inspection, the claimed benefits for New Hampshire consumers look more like phantom benefits than anything real.

The proposal promises to send huge profits to Hydro-Quebec, as it bids power into the wholesale market (easily paying back its investment in the transmission lines), and to provide a revenue stream of transmission payments to Northeast Utilities, PSNH’s parent company. But this structure makes very little sense because it means New Hampshire residents will continue to bear the burden of high cost power and dirty air from PSNH’s coal plants and will also face the environmental and economic impacts of a massive transmission project, while the power would only displace relatively less-polluting natural gas generation and may undermine the development of local renewable energy projects in the state. If it does indeed lower costs on the New England market, the effect will be to increase costs for PSNH’s residential customers as more large customers migrate to the competitive market and fewer customers are left to pay the costs of PSNH’s expensive coal plants.

The current proposal is coming into focus as a bad energy and economic deal for New Hampshire, and regionally the benefits seem less than impressive – especially because the emissions reductions made possible could be so much greater if there was a firm commitment to pair the new imports with the retirement of coal-fired units. As the project continues to wind its way through the federal and state permitting process, CLF will keep pushing for the project to make sense for New Hampshire and for the energy future of the region as a whole.

For more information about Northern Pass, 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.