Terms like “renewable energy” and “clean energy” mean different things in different places at different times, and Canadian hydropower is in a grey zone that sometimes counts and sometimes doesn’t.
Even at the federal level, Canada and the United States use the terms differently. Natural Resources Canada, a Canadian federal agency, uses something like a dictionary definition of renewable energy: “Energy derived from natural processes that are replenished at a rate that is equal to or faster than the rate at which they are consumed.” It puts hydropower on the same level as solar or wind.
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency defines renewable energy similarly, as “resources that rely on fuel sources that restore themselves over short periods of time and do not diminish.”
But it also makes an interesting distinction. Large-scale hydropower is, by definition, renewable power. But it’s not green power.
“Green power is a subset of renewable energy and represents those renewable energy resources and technologies that provide the highest environmental benefit,” a term that allows only for “low-impact small hydroelectric resources,” according to the agency.
“Some renewable energy technologies can have an impact on the environment,” the Agency continues. “For example, large hydroelectric resources can have environmental trade-offs on such issues as fisheries and land use.”
The U.S. Energy Information Administration goes further, by underscoring the carbon and methane emissions associated with large scale hydropower.
“Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane may also form in reservoirs and be emitted into the atmosphere. The exact amounts of greenhouse gases that form in hydropower reservoirs is uncertain,” it writes. “The greenhouse effect from the emissions from reservoirs in tropical and temperate regions, including the United States, may be equal to or greater than the greenhouse effect of the carbon dioxide emissions from an equivalent amount of electricity generation with fossil fuels.”
At the state level, the benefits of large-scale hydropower have also been only tepidly embraced by regulators.
For years, various New England states have been using both incentives and mandates to push utilities to increase their “renewable energy portfolios.”
When Maine first created a renewable energy portfolio in the early 1990s, it “was new and leading edge public policy,” according to former Maine State Sen. John Cleveland, who served his first stint in the statehouse from 1990 to 1998.
Cleveland introduced a landmark bill that changed how Maine’s electricity industry would be regulated, and also created the first mandatory renewable energy portfolio requirement.
Continue reading here: https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/our-power-their-pain-what-do-r...
By Matt Hongoltz-Hetling
Despite years of permitting delays and hundreds of millions in unanticipated expenses, the proposed Central Maine Power transmission corridor is on-schedule and on-budget, according to the company.
“We believe all permits will be completed in 2020 and the project’s COD (commercial operations date) remains December 2022,” CMP wrote, in response to written questions mediated by Serra Public Affairs.
While CMP has not budged on its completion date for the New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC), the construction window is significantly shorter than was anticipated when the project was conceived, according to earnings reports that executives from Avangrid, CMP’s parent company, have made to investors as part of their legally mandated filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
James P. Torgerson, the CEO and director of Avangrid, Inc. told investors earlier this year how the NECEC proposal came to be.
“And we look, similarly, in Western Maine, where we've always thought about having some kind of intertie into Quebec,” he said in February. “And so we basically took the next couple of years and plotted out what we viewed was the optimal path for transmission in these 2 areas, a path that would avoid any national forest, would avoid any sensitive areas, but would obviously then enable clean energy into New England. And that is really where NECEC was born.”
During the time period Torgerson is referencing — early 2017 — the company had ample reason to be optimistic about NECEC’s chances to sail through the permitting process.
In February 2017, Avangrid Networks CEO Bob Kump painted a rosy picture of the company’s prospects for continued growth in Maine, based in part on support from then-Gov. Paul LePage and the then-sterling reputation of CMP. Maine’s largest utility company, Kump noted, had recently been recognized for “excellence in customer service and satisfaction” by J.D. Power, an industry tracking and consulting firm.
The company had also just completed a $1.4 billion upgrade of its infrastructure, called the Maine Reliability Power Program, and hit few permitting snags or public opposition.
“Did that on time, on budget. And through that entire process, we got tremendous support not only from legislators, politicians but our regulator as well as communities, believe it or not, who view this as an opportunity for economic development,” Kump said at the time. After filing for NECEC permits in September of 2017, Avangrid unveiled the NECEC pitch to Massachusetts in response to a massive clean energy RFP, and stated at the time that the company was “confident in the permitting schedule.”
In a February, 2018 press release, CMP President and CEO Dough Herling cited the “strong support of communities and stakeholders in Maine,” while predicting that, having filed for all relevant permits in mid-2017, “the company expects to receive state approvals later this year, and final federal permits in early 2019.”
In response to a question from investor Jingren Zhou during a February 2018 earnings call, Avangrid CEO Kump said the application to Maine PUC for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity was going well. “We’d no interveners virtually at all in that, or our presidential permit. So again, we feel like we’ll have all permits and approvals in hand by first quarter next year.”
Another investor, Michael Sullivan, asked for more information.
“Bob, can you just give us a little more detail on the permitting process? I mean, you spoke to it — to being no interveners, but is it just one approval? And when does that happen? And then similarly for the federal permit as well.”
“Those 2 big ones are just that,” Kump replied. The state permit, he said, would be done by the end of 2018. “We've been told already because of the lack of interveners that it will just be an environmental assessment. So it gives us comfort that we'll be able to get that permitting done by first quarter.”
That optimism remained in place for a few more months. In a July 2018 earnings call, Torgerson said “And we really have strong support from the Maine governor and the local community. All but one of the communities along the path have filed letters of support and those ones that didn't just have said they are supportive, they just haven't filed the letter in support of it at this point.”
But from that point on, very little has gone right for CMP in the arena of public opinion. An unrelated pricing scandal undermined public faith in the company, communities along the proposed transmission corridor began to object, and environmental groups began filing hostile testimony before Maine’s regulatory agencies.
Earlier this month, JD Power ranked CMP dead last among 667 national utilities in business customer satisfaction — which, as critics pointed out, ranked it below PG&E Corp, the Californian company associated with massive intentional blackouts for millions amid wildfires.
As Avangrid executives gave continued updates to their investors, they remained upbeat. But in the details of their reports, a more complex picture was beginning to emerge — the permitting process was actually much more complicated than the early summary suggested, executives stopped emphasizing the public support as a main selling point, and timeline projections began to shift.
In addition to the Maine PUC and the Presidential Permit, the proposal has to clear a separate review process by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and the Maine Land Use Planning Commission. It is also undergoing a review by the ISO-NE, the entity that regulates New England’s power infrastructure — the ISO-NE first has to judge whether the project is in compliance with a federal code known as 1.3.9, and then will consider issuing a certificate of approval. The proposal also needs to pass an environmental assessment by the Army Corps of Engineers, which, in response to a request from U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, is holding a public hearing on Thursday in Lewiston.
Though nearly every regulatory benchmark has changed in response to delays, CMP has not wavered in its commitment to a 2022 COD.
The third-quarter report, released on Oct. 30, showed just how dramatically the permitting timeline has shifted:
The presidential permit, issued by the U.S. Department of Energy, is required for any energy project that crosses national borders. Its main purpose is to ensure that national security, and federal environmental laws, are not compromised by a proposed project, and it relies in part on local analyses of reliability and environmental impact to make a decision. Avangrid applied for its permit in September of 2017.
Continue reading here: https://www.mainepublic.org/post/our-power-their-pain-cmps-timeline...
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U.S. Sen Angus King
Maine as Third World Country:
CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power
Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.
Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT
******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********
(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/
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Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future
"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."
https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/
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