Courtesy of bradlee9119@flickr. Creative Commons.

The triple bottom line has become both a catch phrase and, increasingly, a realistic goal for everyone from investors to activists and urban developers. But in Massachusetts, aging MBTA trains and infrastructure coupled with proposed fare hikes and service cuts stand in the way of achieving the triple-bottom-line promise of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD).

TOD projects are generally comprised of mixed-use or mixed-income developments that are situated within a half-mile of a mass transit station. They provide residents with easy access to the places they want to go (jobs, doctors, movie theaters, etc.) and place businesses within reach of employees and consumers along the mass transit system.

One of the advantages of TOD projects is their potential to achieve triple-bottom-line returns, providing economic, environmental, and community benefits simultaneously. By encouraging people to use mass transit and rely less on automobiles, TOD projects help to reduce both noxious auto emissions and climate-altering greenhouse gases. In fact, people in highly walkable neighborhoods drive nearly 40% fewer miles than their counterparts in the least walkable neighborhoods, which can reduce traffic-related emissions by as much as 2,000 grams of CO₂ per person per day. Furthermore, the increased walking (at least 10 minutes daily on average) reduces the risk of obesity, regardless of age, income, or gender.

So TOD opens up new opportunities for growth without requiring the costly, carbon-intensive infrastructure needed for cars, and contributes to healthful, walkable neighborhoods that attract both businesses and residents. Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, there’s a hitch. TOD projects rely on the assumption that the transit system is capable of supporting them. Here in Massachusetts, proposed MBTA fare increases and service cuts, as well as our aging transportation infrastructure, may prevent TOD projects from delivering on their promise. This is a bad thing for Massachusetts residents, for our economy, and for our environment.

The MBTA is old. After putting off badly needed maintenance on the Red Line for several years, an entire section has been shut down on weekends for emergency repairs, cutting off access for parts of Cambridge, Somerville, and beyond. And faced with a $161 million budget deficit, the T is now considering drastic fare increases and draconian service cuts, including potential elimination of over 100 bus routes as well as weekend service on the commuter rail and some subway lines.

The MBTA’s proposed fare increases and service cuts are unacceptable for MBTA riders and could prove disastrous for TOD projects, past, present, and future. Discouraging people from taking public transportation—either by eliminating MBTA service or making that service prohibitively expensive for riders—undermines the triple-bottom line goals of TOD. It may sound obvious, but TOD requires a healthy, functioning, financially accessible transit system to realize its full potential.

CLF is asking the state legislature and the governor to find a comprehensive solution to the MBTA’s funding problems, not just a band-aid for the coming year’s operating budget. And CLF Ventures is committed to finding triple-bottom-line solutions, like TOD, where profitable developments can also yield environmental and community benefits. Without continued investments in our transportation infrastructure in Massachusetts and a comprehensive solution to the T’s funding problems, TOD could become a triple-bottom loss for the economy, the environment, and for MBTA riders.

The nation’s attention may be focused right now on the twists and turns of New Hampshire’s First in the Nation primary. But new pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency put a more troubling spotlight on New Hampshire – and on its largest utility, Public Service Company of New Hampshire (PSNH). 

According to the data, PSNH is the region’s top toxic polluter, and PSNH’s coal-fired power plant in Bow, Merrimack Station, releases more toxic pollution to the environment than any other facility in New England. Because of PSNH, New Hampshire as a whole is first in New England in toxic pollution.

The numbers tell a striking story.  In 2010, Merrimack Station released 2.8 million pounds of toxic chemicals to the environment, mostly in air pollution.  That’s an astonishing 85% of the 3.3 million total pounds of toxic pollution released in New Hampshire in 2010. When you add in PSNH’s coal-fired Schiller Station in Portsmouth and its gas and oil-fired Newington Station in Newington, PSNH was responsible for a total of 3 million pounds of toxic pollution in 2010, more than 90% of New Hampshire’s toxic pollution. 

PSNH’s pollution isn’t saving energy consumers anything – PSNH’s rates are among the highest in New England because of the escalating costs of maintaining PSNH’s old, inefficient power plants. And those rates are slated to steadily climb as PSNH customers – mostly residents and small businesses – watch large commercial and industrial customers reject the costs of PSNH’s above-market coal-fired power to buy from cost-effective, competitive suppliers. As a result, most New Hampshire residents are left with the raw deal of paying among the highest rates for the dirtiest power in New England.

The data is a fresh reminder of why CLF is fighting so hard to hold Merrimack Station accountable for violating the Clean Air Act. In November, CLF made the case in federal court that PSNH’s failure to obtain permits for changes at Merrimack Station has meant that PSNH has evaded requirements for state-of-the-art pollution limits that would reduce its emissions of a wide range of toxic and other pollutants.

It’s true that PSNH’s much-touted and hugely expensive scrubber project now coming online at Merrimack Station will ultimately reduce some types of toxic pollution to the air. But PSNH wants to increase its energy rates by 15% to pay for the scrubber. Other required pollution controls, including those imposed by important new federal rules, may lead to further costs. This will make PSNH’s power plants an even worse deal for New Hampshire ratepayers.

Merrimack Station also sends more carbon dioxide into the air than any other source in New Hampshire, and the scrubber won’t change that. Burning coal is a dirty way to generate power that imperils the climate, and it is time for New England to abandon it for cleaner alternatives that safeguard our health and environment and transition us toward a new energy system.

New Hampshire may never be willing to relinquish its leading spot on the presidential primary calendar. But living with New England’s largest source of toxic pollution despite its unacceptable costs – to ratepayers and the environment – is a distinction that New Hampshire should be doing everything in its power to lose.

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.

Are you concerned about the Northern Pass transmission project? Do you want to learn more about what it could mean for New Hampshire and New England’s energy future, for our climate, for energy rates, and for the communities and natural environment of New England and Québec? Do you want to keep up with the latest developments as the project progresses through the permitting process?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’ll want to sign up for CLF’s new email newsletter – Northern Pass Wire.  In a concise format, Northern Pass Wire will provide the latest news and analysis regarding the Northern Pass project direct from CLF advocates, with links to additional resources from CLF’s Northern Pass Information Center, our latest Northern Pass posts here on CLF Scoop, and CLF’s recent legal filings. Northern Pass Wire will also keep you informed about ways you can get involved and make your voice heard as the permitting process for the Northern Pass project continues. We expect to publish Northern Pass Wire about once a month, and perhaps more frequently when events warrant. The first edition can be previewed here, and you can sign up to get Northern Pass Wire here.

Please sign up and encourage your family, friends, and colleagues to do the same!

Click on the image to preview the first edition of CLF's Northern Pass Wire

photo credit: Hope Abrams/flickr

Here in New Hampshire, the leaves have turned.  What hasn’t changed is that the environmental review of the Northern Pass proposal remains stalled while the project developers – Northeast Utilities (and its subsidiary Public Service Company of New Hampshire) and NSTAR – seek a new route for the northernmost 40 miles of the project.  It’s a disgrace that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has so far refused to use the developers’ significant delay to assess the nature and extent of New England’s need for Canadian hydropower and to develop an appropriate plan to bring that power into the region, as CLF and others have been requesting since April.

While DOE is in a holding pattern, CLF is continuing to fight for a fair and comprehensive environmental review of the Northern Pass project.  Earlier this month, CLF filed new comments with DOE, supplementing the detailed comments we filed in April.  Our new comments address:

• Why CLF has renewed concerns about DOE’s control over its new environmental review contractors.  Based on our review of the Memorandum of Understanding between Northern Pass, DOE, and its new contractors, posted here (PDF), we explain that Northern Pass could still have an unfair and inappropriate influence on the content of the environmental impact statement and the schedule for completing it.
• What the Northeast Energy Link proposal means for the Northern Pass environmental review.  The recently announced Northeast Energy Link proposal, along with the Champlain Hudson Power Express project, makes it clearer than ever that we need a regional assessment of our energy needs.  These other two transmission projects also show that burying transmission lines in transportation rights-of-way is an abundantly reasonable alternative to overhead lines.
• How Northern Pass hasn’t clearly disclosed the source of power for the project.  We bring to DOE’s attention important information, obtained by CLF through its cross-examination of an executive of Northeast Utilities before Massachusetts regulators, that the source of Northern Pass’s power is likely to be new hydroelectric projects that Hydro-Québec is now in the process of designing and building.  CLF is especially troubled by the new information because the impacts of the project are much more significant if it causes the construction of new dams and the associated negative environmental impacts, including well-documented spikes in early greenhouse gas emissions from flooded land.  Northern Pass and its parent companies have consistently failed to acknowledge that these emissions undermine their claims about the reductions in emissions the project will supposedly provide.

A copy of our new comments is available here.  We also filed a Freedom of Information Act request with DOE, seeking to obtain a copy of the “Consulting Services Agreement” between Northern Pass and the environmental review contractor team.  The Memorandum of Understanding suggests that this separate contract includes important information on the budget and schedule for the environmental review, and the public deserves to know these details.

With the permitting process due to continue when Northern Pass announces a new northernmost route, CLF will be launching new ways to keep you informed about the latest Northern Pass news and the best ways for you to get involved and make your voice heard. Please stay tuned!

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.

Back in 2004 a group of researchers and analysts at Princeton led by Robert Socolow published the “wedge analysis” that captured the problem of greenhouse gas emissions reductions in a pithy way that presented solutions in a manner that a lot of folks found very appealing – they presented their own scenarios but did it in a way that was flexible and allowed readers to dial technologies up and down to reflect their own beliefs and preferences.

Socolow has revisited that work and done some meditating on why in the intervening seven years we have not only failed to start to solve the problem but in fact have been making the hole we are in deeper.

Andrew Revkin (in his continuing capacity as a New York Times blogger, even though he has left the reporting business as a day job at the Times in favor of generally nurturing and studying environmental journalism at Pace University) summarizes and presents that work and reactions to it in a way that really makes for truly required reading.

Employing one of the best things about the blog form Revkin collects in a new post email exchanges he had with Socolow and various academics and experts about the essay and conversations springing from it.

In the course of that conversation Socolow presents a bit of a searing critique of himself and all others who have been trying to provoke action on global warming:

Worldwide, policymakers are scuttling away from commitments to regulations and market mechanisms that are tough enough to produce the necessary streams of investments. Given that delay brings the potential for much additional damage, what is standing in the way of action?

Familiar answers include the recent recession, the political influence of the fossil fuel industries, and economic development imperatives in countries undergoing industrialization. But, I submit, advocates for prompt action, of whom I am one, also bear responsibility for the poor quality of the discussion and the lack of momentum. Over the past seven years, I wish we had been more forthcoming with three messages: We should have conceded, prominently, that the news about climate change is unwelcome, that today’s climate science is incomplete, and that every “solution” carries risk. I don’t know for sure that such candor would have produced a less polarized public discourse. But I bet it would have.

And one of the responding voices, (David Victor, author of “Global Warming Gridlock” and a professor at the University of California, San Diego) agrees with Socolow on substance but disagrees  with Socolow on specific strategy and tactics arguing that the policy advocacy community has actually been doing a pretty good job of broadcasting the messages that Socolow is saying need to be heard but that the problem is much deeper and broader:

Outside of a few hyper green countries—like the EU15—climate change is just one of many issues. Like most environmental issues it comes and goes. You can’t sustain action in these countries without either finding ways to make action costless (or at least invisible) or linking action to other things people care about. The costless/invisibility strategy is a big part of the reason why the world (notably the US) did so well in cutting ozone depleting substances.

But it won’t work on climate—or at least not yet—which means plan B. Talk about how climate links to energy security and such. That’s now happening and it is having an effect (across the board the polling data are much more favorable to regulation on greenhouse gases when the questions focus on other benefits). Obviously we can’t over-sell this approach because it won’t stop warming and it easily leads to mischievous policies that hide true intentions and lard the economy with lots of extra costs. But all else equal, the more “reluctant” a country is to do something on climate itself the more important it is to talk about other goals as well. The community of policy advocates—especially folks drawn from academic science and engineering—is shockingly naïve about politics and the strategy of political action.

Revkin also provides us with a quote from Prof. Victor on the literary and historical metaphor that should be expunged from the climate advocacy vocabulary:

A last word—a plea really. Let’s all stop evoking Galileo. Whenever someone feels under siege they look to Galileo because he was right and persistent and his critics were both wrong and egregious. But the metaphor is hard to use effectively because what really matters is ex ante. For every Galileo there were thousands of others who were hacks. Maybe the one thing that we have learned from Galileo is that it is unwise to punish dissenters, and that’s a good message. But it is interesting to read the Tea Party stuff on climate and see that they use Galileo as well. Everyone is dueling over the same metaphor—they just can’t agree on who is Galileo and who’s the Pope.

Obviously, we here at the Conservation Law Foundation think that crafting and advocating for environmental solutions is a very important thing to be doing and that when we have a job opening that the best, smartest, most tenacious and brightest folks should apply.

However, we know that we are part of a much larger network and community of people and organizations working to create positive change.  Some of those groups work largely out of the public eye – providing critical infrastructure for the flashier and more visible efforts.  An excellent example of one such group is the Appliance Standards Awareness Project (ASAP) which has done a phenomenal job of coordinating and advancing the work of the environmental and efficiency advocacy communities in the world of standards setting for appliances.  It might sound kind of boring but it is of critical importance – which I will lay out a bit more below.

But before I get to that here is the important part – they are hiring.  If you have what it takes to be a “Strategic Program / Technical Analyst” you should give them a look.

(more…)

National Public Radio offers an excellent in depth piece about how the long running and devastating drought is permanently changing Texas.

The climate science is absolutely clear that such droughts are part of the effects of a warming globe (if you are a real wonk take a look at the academic papers on the changing climate, drought and forest health).

Of course, reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases causing global warming is not a targeted attack on that drought – but it is the only way to slow (and possibly reverse) the trend towards a world where such horrific and wrenching events are commonplace.   A thought that should resonate here in already soggy New England as we brace for the impact of a hurricane and consider the climate science that tells us that a warming world will give us more extreme precipitation events.

The situation starts to veer towards the absurd when you consider that some leaders of Texas are denying the very existence of the phenomena playing out in their own state.  Could it be that the people getting arrested in front of the White House trying to stop a tar sands oil pipeline are serving the people of Texas (and the future people who will have to endure similar biblical plagues like droughts and floods) better than the elected officials doing all they can to hobble efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

The Eastmain Powerhouses from space (photo credit: NASA)

Beyond the discredited sales pitch that Northern Pass will lower electric rates in New Hampshire, the developers have repeatedly claimed that the power to be imported through the Northern Pass project will be “low-carbon,” “clean,” and “green,” with “no greenhouse gases,” and “no global warming.” The power will also, we’re told, “improve the quality of the air we breathe.” The developers have said, over and over, that the project “is expected to reduce regional carbon dioxide emissions by up to 5 million tons per year, the equivalent of removing from the road one million cars annually.” In fact, the study on which this claim is based – a report (PDF) commissioned by Northern Pass and authored by Boston-based energy consultant Charles River Associates – began with the assumption that hydro power is “zero-carbon.” Let me repeat that: the developers’ claim that the project will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by a net 5 million tons is based on their unexamined presupposition that the power to be delivered by the project has no carbon dioxide emissions at all.

There’s no other way to say it: this assumption is false.

You don’t have to take my word for it; read Hydro-Québec’s own research report (4.4 MB PDF) on the net greenhouse gas emissions of the Eastmain 1 Reservoir, flooded in 2005 (aerial shots here). In an Orwellian twist, the developers of Northern Pass have repeatedly cited this very same research.

The Hydro-Québec report found that net carbon emissions from Eastmain-1 were 500,000 tons in 2006 and 165,000 tons in 2009, and are projected to average approximately 158,000 tons per year on a long-term basis.  While certainly less than coal-fired power plants – PSNH’s Merrimack Station emitted more than 2.8 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2010 – 158,000 tons of net carbon emissions per year is far from ”zero-carbon” or even “low-carbon” power.  Based on our own survey of reservoir greenhouse gas research, we have some serious questions about the report, and there is reason to believe that it understates emissions over time and per unit of energy generated. But the report does confirm that Hydro-Québec’s reservoirs will continue to emit more greenhouse gases per year than the natural environment they flooded. These emissions are locked in for decades if not centuries – unlike a power plant that burns fuel, you cannot turn off a reservoir.

When compared with the power plants that Northern Pass’s power could displace, new hydroelectric projects in their early years of operation are no cleaner in terms of carbon emissions.  According to the report, ”it takes about five years for the accumulated CO2 eq. emissions to fall below the [natural gas combined cycle] value” (p.15). So, on a net and cumulative basis since its flooding in 2005, the Eastmain 1 Reservoir has had the same carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions as a modern natural gas power plant that has the same power output and began operating in 2005. 

The report also highlights what appears to be a clear difference between the net emissions of a newly impounded reservoir and the emissions of a reservoir that was impounded decades ago: a new reservoir emits more greenhouse gases, as the vegetation and organic material in the newly inundated area decompose.

This distinction is especially important when considering the contradictory stories we have heard about where Northern Pass will get its power. On the one hand, Northern Pass’s website claims (click on “Hydro-Québec” on this page) that “Hydro-Québec does not need to build any new generation to support this project.” On the other hand, it is clear that Québec is developing and planning vast new hydroelectric projects, many of which will require new inundation and reservoirs, as part of a concerted strategy to maintain and increase exports to New England and the northeast United States. See Erin’s blog post from yesterday for more on Vermont’s new long-term contract with Hydro-Québec. 

In fact, Charles River Associates’ fundamentally flawed estimate of carbon emissions reductions depends on the development of new hydro projects in Canada. And just ten days ago, in testimony to Massachusetts regulators, Northeast Utilities’ CFO David McHale stated under oath: “We already know for a fact that the utility Hydro-Quebec has initiated the construction of dams, and we’ve already entered into the record a discussion about the Eastmain Water Reservoir that will provide the water source. So this is not speculative. They’re building the dams and they will go into service; and that will be the primary source, if not the exclusive source, of energy that will flow over [the Northern Pass] line. . . . [T]hat is the full expectation.” What McHale was referring to is Hydro-Québec’s major new project in the vicinity of Eastmain-1 – the Rupert River project (project website here and explanatory animation here). Since 2009, this 918-MW project – now in the final stages of development – has newly flooded 346 square kilometers  - an area about the size of two Lake Winnipesaukees. That Northern Pass power will be coming from new projects means that Northern Pass will enable and contribute to the substantial carbon emissions associated with new reservoirs.  There has been no accounting of the potential emissions from the Rupert project and other future projects that Northern Pass may make possible, and how they would cut into the potential emissions reductions Northern Pass and Charles River Associates have claimed.

These inaccuracies and contradictions are being disseminated with hundreds of thousands of dollars in media buys, money which could have been invested in engaging in a collaborative process to rework the current proposal.  This situation makes CLF’s fight for a world-class, independent, and comprehensive permitting process all the more important.

CLF has been adamant that the Department of Energy must consider the environmental impacts – including greenhouse gas emissions – of the hydropower generation projects and any other power plants in Canada that will supply the Northern Pass project.  Given the developers’ recent announcement of new delays in their schedule, there’s still time for the Department of Energy to change course and answer our call for a regional, holistic analysis of the right approach to importing power from Canada, taking into account the truth about that power’s greenhouse gas emissions.