Karl Meyer has been a stakeholder, intervenor, and member of the Fish and Aquatics Studies Team in the relicensing bids for FirstLight's Northfield Mountain and Turners Falls operations since 2012. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and he has not signed a non-disclosure agreement at any point.
GREENFIELD, MASS.-On Oct. 10, Tim Jones, the acting director of Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Wetlands and Waterways, presided over a public "information" session in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, to field questions about DEP's water-quality certification responsibilities under Chapter 401 of the Clean Water Act in the relicensing of FirstLight Power's Northfield Mountain Pumped-Storage Project (NMPS).
There, FirstLight managers sat in the front row facing both Jones and DEP's David Hilgeman, an engineer and wetlands scientist. Filling out the panel were MassWildlife Chief of Hatcheries Caleb Slater, Jesse Leddick, the assistant director of the agency's Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program, and Paul Jahnige.
They represented agencies that recently inked a sprawling "flows and fish passage" settlement agreement with FirstLight behind closed doors, as did agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service.
As described in a March 31 news release from FirstLight, "The Agreement follows a decade-long process involving dozens of scientific studies and stakeholder engagement, collaboration, and negotiation to reach an agreement on the construction of fish passage facilities, providing recreational and ecological flows, protection of federally and state endangered species and aquatic habitat, and future project operations."
For 51 years, the suction of NMPS has been reversing miles of current and killing fish by the millions on a three-state reach of the Connecticut River.
The DEP's looming decision in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission relicensing bid for NMPS could end the interstate carnage jointly shared with Vermont and New Hampshire. No agency or nongovernmental organization ever challenged operations that literally pull asunder the river's ancient "continuous surface connection to a navigable water" downstream - the Atlantic Ocean.
But with this "flows and fish passage" agreement, will it?
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Traditional hydropower - mostly imported - supplies a fraction of this region's energy. But Northfield is like hydro's evil twin. It runs off grid electricity, wasting 34% more energy sucking in the river than it later sends out through turbines as a few hours of twice-generated juice. Its unnecessary daily use in ISO New England's grid is a huge environmental burden. That 34% plug-in loss will forever be its baseline waste.
Further losses accrue in long-line electricity transmission relays - i.e., the electricity imported to run its pumps, and further as FirstLight re-exports electricity to New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey markets as prices spike.
ISO's bloated market overwhelmingly runs via fracked gas and nuclear power, aiding the blind consumption that fuels the climate cliff crisis. NMPS's buy-low-sell-high operation is essentially subsidized by ISO's over-contracted, over-produced electricity. FirstLight buys that bulk juice cheap - or even gets it for free at times - to turbo-suck the river.
Massachusetts, ISO-NE's biggest consumer, keeps racking up energy deficits for new online gaming, high-speed data centers, casinos, indoor cannabis-grow factories, and metro-Boston's glut of empty office towers.
The Commonwealth's plan is to continue to mine and re-shackle the horrifically battered Connecticut in endless round-trip electricity relays from ocean turbines hundreds of miles away to FirstLight's sucking turbines here - to later resend a few hours' juice back to big-consuming coastal cities.
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NMPS also profits handily when not generating. ISO pays FirstLight for contracts to simply hold back several hours of water for possible emergency use. It's ISO's cheap, embedded insurance for the organization's secretive, corporation-dominated "quasi-public" market. It's helped keep NMPS's waste in play for decades.
Ignoring the security distributed generation and micro-grid deployment offers, ISO keep us paying for a potential deployment that's enriching foreign investors on the off-chance of the rarest occurrence in their bloated market: a regional blackout. The last one was 2003.
FirstLight's "annual generation summary" to FERC stated NMPS consumed 751 million gross kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity to regenerate just 551 million gross kWh. The Turners Falls facilities generated 379 million gross kWh of actual hydro.
Subtracting 200 million kWh lost in river suctioning, 53% percent of FirstLight's hydro output was nullified by NMPS's waste - reducing it to just 179 million gross kWh.
In 2022, NMPS used 1058 million gross kWh to generate just 792, voiding nearly three-quarters of Turners Falls' 310 million. In 2020, NMPS chewed through 988 million gross kWh to return 740 million, a 249 million loss - erasing fully 75% of Turners Falls' 305 million gross kWh.
Meanwhile, its massive vortex keeps creating a netherworld of stalled, reversed, and scrambled currents, where, at minimum, hundreds of millions of eggs, larvae, and young-of-the-year fish from two dozen migratory and resident species perish annually.
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The Flows and Fish Passage settlement was hammered out at a private meeting this spring among representatives of FirstLight, the Massachusetts DEP, Inter-Fluve (a hydro engineering firm), the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, and the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
DEP Press Secretary and Public Affairs Director Ed Coletta made public the entities represented at the table but otherwise refused to supply meeting details, attendees' names, questions asked, or the state agency's responses.
That document now sits on FERC's desk, six years past the expiration dates of FirstLight's licenses. It would re-sanction both their reversing Connecticut River and massive yearly losses of ecosystem fish.
By October's meeting, Massachusetts agencies were already contractually committed to request that the DEP "accept and incorporate, without material modifications, as conditions to the Section 401 Certifications, all the [protection, mitigation, and enhancement] measures."
Left unchallenged, if DEP doesn't substantially deny the settlement's conditions and grants - or "waives," the Section 401 Water Quality Certificate required for FERC licenses here - the reversing flows and carnage in the crippled run of interstate river here will likely be cemented in place for a new half century.
FERC overwhelmingly rubber-stamps settlements. Massachusetts will then have essentially usurped the jurisdictional rights of Vermont and New Hampshire. Neither was party to the shrouded deals for shared interstate water.
Ironically, both states have negotiated nature-like - and exponentially-less-lethal - "run of river" flows with Vernon Dam owners for downstream flow that enters Massachusetts on New England's Great River.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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