Is New England’s Biggest Renewable Energy Project Really a Win for the Climate?
By Tara Lohan
Is
renewable energy always sustainable — or just? Today we launch a two-part
series looking at the role of Canadian hydropower in helping the U.S. Northeast
meet its climate goals.
Construction could start soon on New England’s biggest renewable energy project, a 1,200-megawatt-capacity transmission line to deliver renewable energy to Massachusetts customers.
The proposed project, New England Clean Energy Connect, has cleared
most of its significant regulatory hurdles. But it hasn’t been without
opposition.
Some of the fiercest challenges have come from environmental groups, who question the purported green benefits. That’s because this isn’t a wind or solar project — it’s big hydro imported from Canada.
The power would come from a massive network of 63
hydropower stations and numerous large dams owned by Hydro-Québec, a monopoly
utility run by the province. Some of this energy could travel more than 800
miles from turbine to light switch.
And
in order to get the power to Massachusetts, 145 miles of new high-voltage
direct current transmission line will need to run through Maine — including
more than 50 miles slashed through the North Maine Woods.
The
project is regionally significant but also nationally important. New England is
getting serious about climate change, with all six states pledging to cut
greenhouse gas emissions 80% over 1990 levels by 2050. Neighboring New York has
even greater ambitions — and is similarly interested in importing Canadian
hydropower.
Hydro-Québec
already supplies about 17% of the electricity for New England and 5% for New
York, and the company has been banking on those numbers increasing. “We’re
poised to play a bigger role,” says Gary Sutherland, director of strategic
affairs for northeast markets at Hydro-Québec.
NECEC
would lock in a 20-year contract for Hydro-Québec and partner Central Maine
Power to deliver about one-fifth of Massachusetts’s electric power needs
to its utilities. But is the project worth hailing as a big step in fighting
greenhouse gas emissions, or is it committing the region to decades of energy
from a source that fails to live up to its environmental promise?
Project Selection
In
order to up its clean energy game, Massachusetts passed legislation in 2016
requiring its electric utilities to secure about 9.45 terawatt-hours per year
of low-carbon power by 2022. In a competitive bidding process to solicit
projects, the state received 46 clean energy proposals, many wind and solar,
but decided to go with hydropower — with a very long extension cord.
The
winning selection at the time, a project called Northern Pass, was pitched as a
200-mile-long transmission line — much of which would be buried underground or
follow existing corridors — to import Quebec hydroelectric power through New
Hampshire’s White Mountains.
But
New Hampshire regulators rejected the plan. The evaluation committee unanimously
found that applicant Eversource Energy “failed to demonstrate by a
preponderance of the evidence that the Project would not unduly interfere with
the orderly development of the region,” which includes tourism, property values
and existing rights of way. They also took issue with the project’s proposed
benefits in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Eversource appealed the
decision, but the state Supreme Court later upheld the committee’s ruling.
Massachusetts
then moved a state east and selected a similar project, New England Clean
Energy Connect, that would instead move the power through Maine in a
transmission line constructed by Central Maine Power, a subsidiary of Avangrid,
which is owned by the Spanish multinational utility Iberdrola.
Unlike the proposed Northern Pass project in New Hampshire, virtually all of the Maine project, which is estimated to cost Massachusetts ratepayers close to $1 billion, will be aboveground.
This includes a 150-foot-wide corridor stretching
53 miles through the North Maine Woods, the largest contiguous temperate forest
in North America. The transmission line would fragment forest and aquatic
habitat across a region that’s home to American martens, ovenbirds, endangered
wood turtles and threatened Canada lynx.
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| Ground-nesting ovenbirds could be imperiled by new transmission lines. Photo: Fyn Kynd (CC BY 2.0) |
Despite the project costs, Bay State residents are expected to see electrical rates drop between 2-4% a year — a savings estimated at nearly $4 billion over the two-decade-long contract, according to the project partners, Central Maine Power and Hydro-Québec.
All
the new infrastructure for the project will be built in Maine, but the primary
beneficiary will be Massachusetts. Some recent concessions sweetened
the deal for Maine residents, though, and helped bring around Maine Gov. Janet
Mills and environmental groups like the Conservation Law Foundation (which was
an outspoken opponent of
Northern Pass) and the Acadia Center.
A
small slice of discounted energy would go to Maine — enough to supply 70,000
homes or 10,000 businesses. But so far it’s unclear who the buyer for that
power in Maine would be. The deal also accelerates the distribution of a fund for
the state that includes $170 million in rate relief and clean energy projects,
including heat pumps and electric vehicles.
The Natural
Resources Council of Maine, however, wasn’t swayed by the new
stipulations. The environmental nonprofit, which works on statewide
conservation and climate issues, has fought the project at every turn.
Sticky
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Issues
One
of the biggest sources of contention with the project is how much it will
actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which is, after all, the driving
force behind bringing clean energy projects into the mix.
The
project partners say NECEC will reduce New England greenhouse gas emissions by
3 million tons a year by displacing dirtier fuels from the grid — the
equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off the road.
“And
that may be true, but it’s also irrelevant,” says Nick Bennett, staff scientist
at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. “It doesn’t matter if you reduce
greenhouse gas emissions in New England by 3 million tons if they just go up by
a corresponding amount elsewhere.”
Because
the project doesn’t involve the construction of new generating facilities,
Bennett says he’s concerned that Hydro-Québec will simply shift power from
existing customers in order to send it to Massachusetts, which is willing to
pay more.
“We
get this big power line pushed through Maine, Hydro-Québec and Central Maine
Power get rich, but there are no global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions
because other jurisdictions that get power from Hydro-Québec now are going to
lose that power and they’re going to have to make up for it quickly,” he
theorizes. “And that means natural gas or coal.”
Bennett
and the Natural Resources Council of Maine aren’t the only ones who share this
concern.
When
New Hampshire regulators rejected the Northern Pass route, they came to a
similar conclusion, finding in their decision that
“no actual greenhouse gas emission reductions would be realized if no new
source of hydropower is introduced and the power delivered by the Project to
New England is simply diverted from Ontario or New York.”
In
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s
office, which looks out for the state’s ratepayers, was also
concerned the contract language left open the possibility that hydropower
already being sold by Hydro-Québec would simply be moved to the new
contracts for NECEC, and it wouldn’t necessarily amount
to an addition of clean energy.
Representatives
from Hydro-Québec, however, say they have been ramping up their operations for
more than a decade in anticipation of exporting additional energy into the
Northeast U.S.
“We
have been developing our generation resources over the last 16-17 years because
it takes a long time to actually bring a hydropower generating station online,”
says Sutherland. “We went on a pretty extensive build-out phase in the early
2000s.” That, he says, should be enough to supply this new demand and existing
customers, although the company is also hoping to secure new projects in other
northeast states, as well, in coming years.
More
Tricky Accounting
Hydro-Québec’s
new capacity — an estimated 5,000 megawatts in recent years — is not without
environmental cost, either. But determining the greenhouse gas footprint of hydropower
isn’t straightforward.
Harnessing
the power of rivers was once thought of as a zero-emissions energy source, but
studies in the past decade have shown that’s not the case.
Reservoirs
can emit methane and carbon dioxide — in some cases on par with fossil fuel power
plants. But calculating those emissions isn’t as simple as measuring what’s
spewing out of a coal stack.
That’s
because a ton of variables affect what a reservoir emits, including the
geographic location, climate, the area of land that’s flooded, the type of
submerged vegetation, management practices, and the age of the
impoundment. This last factor is especially important because many reservoirs
emit more greenhouse gases in the first years (sometimes decades) after they’re
filled, as submerged organic matter breaks down. Measuring emissions five years
or 50 years after reservoirs become operational will lead to much different
numbers.
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| Churchill Falls in Labrador. The hydroelectric plant supplies power to Hydro-Quebec. Photo: Axel Drainville, (CC BY-NC 2.0) |
Studies have also shown that emissions are particularly high in tropical regions where there is a lot of vegetation that decomposes in warm waters. But a 2019 study in Environmental Science and Technology found that the best indicator of greenhouse gas emissions is the “ratio of reservoir surface area to electricity generation.”
A large, shallow area — characteristic of many reservoirs in Canada’s boreal forests — will release a lot more emissions relative to the power generated than damming a steep, rocky valley where more power is generated in a smaller space.
“Some
of Hydro-Québec’s reservoirs flood thousands of square kilometers of forest
land and they’re not all that deep,” says Brad Hager, a professor of earth
sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director of one of
MIT’s Low Carbon Energy Centers. “So they emit a lot of carbon dioxide, but
they don’t generate as much electricity per amount of water in the dam.”
In testimony to the Army
Corps of Engineers, Hager, who’s also a part-time Maine resident, said that
Hydro-Quebec’s operations are “definitively not the source of
green power that they are made out to be.”
Research
on the global carbon footprint of
hydropower showed that six of Hydro-Québec’s reservoirs rank in the top quarter
of the world’s biggest emitting hydro facilities.
A 2012 study published
in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles looked at
emissions from Hydro-Québec’s Eastmain‐1 reservoir, which flooded a boreal
forest in Northwest Quebec in 2006. The reservoir, constructed during the time
the company was ramping up to meet export goals, stretches across nearly 380
square miles with an average depth of 36 feet.
It’s
only one of numerous dams run by the company, and emissions are likely to vary
by project. Still, the results are illuminating.
The researchers,
including one from Hydro-Québec, found that during the reservoir’s first year
of operation it emitted 77% more carbon than a natural gas
plant. And it took five years for it to reach the same level as natural gas.
They
estimated that after 25 years, the reservoir’s emissions would be about 50%
lower than gas and over a 100-year lifespan it will “emit the equivalent of 40%
of the carbon emissions that the currently most efficient thermal power plant
would have for an equivalent amount of energy production.”
In
the long term, it’s an improvement over fossil fuels — but is that good enough,
considering the timeline of the climate crisis we currently face?
Hager
doesn’t think so.
“From
my analysis of the average greenhouse gas footprint of Hydro-Québec, the
electricity is not all that clean,” he says. “It’s probably on average a factor
of two better than natural gas, but it’s like a factor of 20 higher than wind.”
That
means that a contract to lock in hydro for two decades in Massachusetts could push
out cleaner sources of energy at a time when they’re desperately needed to
combat rising global greenhouse gas emissions.
“My
main concern is that the long length of the contract with Central Maine Power
and Hydro-Québec will put the dampers on renewables like solar and wind,” he
says.
That
could be a problem in Maine, too, in terms of transmission space.
Bennett
says limited grid connections in Maine mean that NECEC “will make it very
difficult for any other renewable energy projects to export their electricity.”
Other
Environmental Problems
Beyond
just the greenhouse gas issues are the obvious environmental harms that come
from damming and diverting rivers and razing carbon-sequestering forests in the
process. This includes damage to fisheries, loss of sediment and natural river
flows, and the accumulation of methyl mercury in
the aquatic food web — a human health risk, especially for Indigenous communities that
rely on subsistence resources.
“As
we all know dams irreversibly destroy rivers,” says Meg Sheehan, coordinator of
the nonprofit coalition North American Megadam Resistance
Alliance, which has been fighting the construction of big dams in
Canada and the exportation of energy to the United States. “Hydro-Québec’s dams
are so massive that they have obliterated hundreds of thousands of square miles
of forest, wetlands and permanently damaged rivers.” The company’s
Robert-Bourassa dam on La Grande River, for example, impounds a
1,000-square-mile reservoir.
She
doesn’t think hydropower generated from these large projects and exported to
the United States should count as green or renewable.
“You
can’t say that just because the water comes from the sky and ends up in their
storage reservoir where they hoard it, completely altering the natural flow of
the rivers, that the electricity that you produce is renewable,” she says.
Much
of this dam building in Canada has also taken place on the ancestral lands of
Indigenous nations. Hydro-Québec says they have signed 40 agreements with
Indigenous communities related to hydropower development and transition in the
last four decades.
But
roughly a third of Hydro-Québec’s power comes from Innu, Atikamekw and Anishnabeg
traditional territories, according to the First Nations communities,
who have sought settlement for decades with the
company.
That
history hasn’t been lost on tribes in the United States, either.
Most
recently the Penobscot Nation came out against the Maine transmission corridor.
In a July 22 letter to the Army
Corps of Engineers, the tribe’s Chief Kirk Francis called for a thorough
environmental review and said the agency, “must consider not only the Maine
impacts, but also those in Canada,” including the harm to Indigenous people.
The
letter also cited the corridor’s potential to harm brook trout habitat and
endangered species such as roaring brook mayfly and northern spring
salamanders.
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| Attean Pond and forests along the transmission corridor route in Maine. Photo: Natural Resources Council of Maine / Jerry Monkman |
The forest is an important deer wintering habitat and is known for being some of the best brook trout habitat left in the United States. “From a perspective of a brook trout, you just couldn’t put this line in a worse place,” says Bennett.
Approval
Process
Despite
all these issues, the project has already received most of the approvals it
needs, including from the Maine Public Utility Commission, the Land Use
Planning Commission and the Department of Environmental Protection.
The
issue was set to come before Maine voters in November, when a ballot initiative
could have halted the project. But in August the Maine Supreme Judicial
Court ruled the referendum unconstitutional,
deciding voters don’t have the authority to override the Public Utilities
Commission’s decision.
Even
though the battle over the issue didn’t make it to the ballot on Election Day,
it was still costly. Political action committees backed by Central Maine Power and Hydro-Québec spent $19
million fighting the effort — a feat enabled by a loophole in Maine law that
allows foreign entities to contribute to ballot initiatives.
The
project does still need approval from the Army Corps of Engineers and the
issuance of a “presidential permit” from the Department of Energy because it
crosses an international border. Decisions on both could come soon.
The
Corps didn’t require an environmental impact statement, only a less-stringent
environmental assessment, which is being prepared by Central Maine Power.
Documents obtained by the Natural Resources Council of Maine, through the
Freedom of Information Act, found the Corps still had some questions about
the touted greenhouse gas and other benefits of the project.
Opponents
of NECEC are also challenging the approval on two legal fronts. The first is an
appeal of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection permit decision.
A
second legal challenge from opponents, including several state lawmakers,
concerns a piece of public land the state’s Bureau of Public Lands leased to
Central Maine Power back in 2014 that is now being used for the transmission
line project.
The lawsuit contends that
the Bureau did not get the necessary two-thirds vote from the legislature
required for leases that “substantially alter” public lands. Furthermore, it
argues, Central Maine Power would have needed to have the Public Utilities Commission
permit in hand first, before applying for the lease. But when
this lease was granted, the transmission project hadn’t yet been proposed.
Whether
these lawsuits can put the brakes on the project isn’t clear yet. Project
opponents are also considering another ballot initiative for
2021 that would require a two-thirds vote in the state legislature to approve
new transmission lines and to use public lands for the projects — and it would
retroactively cover projects from the preceding six years.
Bennett
thinks that instead of pushing a corridor through Maine, Massachusetts should
do more to develop its own renewable energy resources.
Remember
Cape Wind? The offshore wind project,
first proposed in 2001, could have brought 468 megawatts to the state but was
shot down by a barrage of litigation, including suits from wealthy residents
who didn’t want their view obstructed.
“Part
of the problem here is that Massachusetts has been real slackers in terms of
building wind in their own state,” says Bennett. “They need to build onshore
and offshore wind, and to stop exporting responsibility for generating their
own clean energy to other people who sometimes don’t want it.”
His
organization wants to see more clean energy in the region, but this project
doesn’t fit the bill.
“This
isn’t a case where, you know, we all have to kind of suck it up and take the
impacts in order to help the climate — that’s bogus,” he says. “This is simply
a for-profit venture that will have no climate benefits and will have terrible
on-the-ground environmental impacts for Maine.”
Tara
Lohan is deputy editor of The Revelator and has worked
for more than a decade as a digital editor and environmental journalist focused
on the intersections of energy, water and climate. Her work has been published
by The Nation, American Prospect, High Country
News, Grist, Pacific Standard and others. She
is the editor of two books on the global water crisis. http://twitter.com/TaraLohan