After 3½ years of preliminaries, FirstLight Hydro Generating Co. has filed its application with federal regulators as part of a relicensing of hydroelectric projects along the Connecticut River in Vermont and Massachusetts.
But groups that have been weighing in on the Turners Falls, Northfield Mountain and related FirstLight projects see Friday’s filing as part of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Integrated Relicensing Process as simply an opportunity prepare for the flood of studies they expect to be filed for the remainder of the year, according to Tom Miner, liaison between the Franklin Regional Planning Board and the Connecticut River Streambank Erosion Committee.
With FirstLight’s FERC operating licenses scheduled to expire in 2018 and with erosion, fish habitat in the river’s Turners Falls “dry stretches,” recreational river access and other issues being debated, Miner told the planning board last week, “It’s a quiet period for us now, but the rush is going to come, and we have to be able to deal with it.”
The eight-volume formal application, he said, includes “a lot of blanks,” since many of the required studies haven’t been completed and, in fact, were delayed by about a year because the shutdown of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant upstream in December 2014. One of the closing’s impacts “changed the temperature regime” with cooler water temperatures of the river so that fishery studies had to be modified.
“Every likelihood is that they’ll end up with annual extension of their existing license because of the work that’s unfinished,” Miner said.
Over the next months, predicted Miner, FirstLight’s consultants are expected to release a variety of studies, including an erosion causation study that he predicted could be released late this month. That study will be especially important for the multi-agency erosion committee, Miner said, because the company that operates the pumped storage hydroelectric plants is expected again to minimize the effects of its operations on river erosion and instead point to natural causes like high-flow events and riverboat wakes.
The 44-year-old underground pumped-storage power plant pumps Connecticut River water up the mountain to its reservoir overnight, when electricity prices are lowest, and releases it when there is peak demand and prices are highest, to provide power to the regional electric grid within a matter of minutes.
“The causation study for us likely will give grounds for what they will propose for reducing from the existing license,” Miner said, such as a requirement that the company prepare erosion control plans that need to be updated every several years. “In my opinion, we will continue to have problems, and that’s got to be part of a new license and conditions.”
“In the past, they’ve cited boat wakes as a significant contributor,” he added. “What will be the studies they will use to quantify that?”
The nonprofit Connecticut River Watershed Council has been raising money to pay for outside consultants to review the company’s studies and respond with recommendations to address the concerns from an environmental perspective, said Miner, a former eco-director of that Greenfield-based organization.
“It’s such a slanted process, with all the consultant work they’ve been able to fund,” Miner said. “We have very little funding, and then we have to wait until they drop a pile of materials in our laps. We’re in this hold period because there’s nothing to put our teeth into, and when it comes, it’s going to be very fast, with deadlines that apply.”
Although FirstLight was recently purchased by an investment group, Miner said, he was told recently that the new owners intend to retain the same consultants and management team.
Asked at last week’s meeting how effective the erosion-control measures have been along the banks primarily in Northfield and Gill where they’ve been employed, Miner responded that the various bioengineering techniques developed over the years “have proven fairly effective” at accumulating river soil that’s being washed downstream to establish “benches” that stabilize the banks.
“But something that concerns me,” Miner said, “is that we haven’t had a huge spring freshet. We haven’t seen a major flooding event. So these bank stabilization projects haven’t been fully tested. And that underscores the need in a new license for continuation of the requirement that they deal with erosion, because erosion is an endemic part of pumped storage.”
Miner said he also homes that the integrated licensing process will require better coordination between FirstLight and TransCanada, which operates the three Connecticut River dams upstream in New Hampshire and Vermont.
“The companies don’t talk to one another,” he said. “It’s as if they have to guess what’s coming downstream. It would be very good in the new license to say, ‘You have to coordinate.’”
On the Web:
www.nofthfieldrelicensing.com
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