The Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station is vying for a 50-year extension of its license. Comments to FERC are due by April 22, Earth Day.

This request is from a Canadian company, registered in Delaware, that takes all the profits from our river with them. This leaves the citizens who live along the Connecticut River near this dam with a damaged river that often flows backward, has eroded banks, and hosts millions of dead fish.

All the while we are enabling a greenhouse gas emitter and a net energy loser. Oh right, they gave us a picnic area. Yahoo.

We want our river back. We don’t want this plant relicensed. It should have never been built and if proposed today would never get off the drawing board. At the very least it should have been closed when the Vernon nuclear plant shut down, which supplied it with cheap energy.

A group of bike riders, called the solar rollers, are riding from Greenfield Common on Saturday, April 20 at 10 a.m. to ride along the Connecticut River to the Northfield plant to highlight the problems with this pumped storage operation. Feel free to join us.

Terry Plotkin

Greenfield