No Respect, Just Wipe Your Feet, Please
The proposed Northern Pass project hasn’t gone away. Neither is it a “done deal,” as so many people presume.
Instead, the proposal to string an extension cord from Quebec to lucrative power markets in Hartford and New York City is in the Never-Never Land of the regulators and the courts, with the beauty of New Hampshire’s landscape caught squarely in the middle.
Many of New Hampshire’s people seem to have forgotten the project or are still totally unaware of it. This is changing as surveyors and the details and impacts on private property creep southward. This despite the fact that people in the state’s far North Country, land of lakes, mountains, farms and forests, are in their sixth year of fighting bitterly against a plan that would create a gigantic scar across their region.
Sometimes it takes a threat to your own territory and back yard to realize that you have a dog in a fight you thought was someone else’s.
Northern Pass and Eversource (nee Public Service Company of New Hampshire) have garnered a lot of mileage by preaching that the huge new transmission towers (up to 155 feet) would use “existing rights of way.” But this means not exactly all the way from Canada, but only from the nearest contact point just south of Groveton (actually the town of Northumberland).
As for the minor matter of how the line would get from the Canadian border down to Groveton, well, that’s a little detail that the lower two-thirds of the state seems to have put out of sight, out of mind, even though it’s their North Country too.
That “little detail” is 40 miles of entirely new right of way---a 150-foot strip carved out in the towns of Pittsburg, Clarksville, Stewartstown, Dixville, Millsfield, Dummer, Stark and Northumberland before it reaches the hookup in Groveton. It would be a huge scar across some of the most beautiful farm and forest scenery left in New England.
The project’s status in court is a bit bewildering. The Forest Society, which uses conservation easements as one of its major tools for preserving open space, is fighting against attempts by Northern Pass to circumvent its protections. Northern Pass is citing state highway utilities precedent as an argument for doing just that.
The project’s status in the regulatory process is a bit easier to understand. Currently New Hampshire’s final shot at having a say in whether its landscape gets used as a doormat is in the hands of the Site Evaluation Committee.
One of the SEC’s own alternate suggestions is to run the line underground alongside existing corridors, such as Route 3, which conveniently goes all the way from the crossing point in Pittsburg to the major New England Grid connection in Franklin.
Don’t bet on that happening, however, if Eversource has its way. Perhaps this is because if the line were buried along Route 3 or another highway or railroad bed, Eversource would lose out on millions in rent for letting Northern Pass use its corridors.
Burying the line, by the way, would create far more jobs than stringing the line overhead, and they would be mostly local jobs, because if there’s one thing New Hampshire’s contractors and Mom and Pop companies know how to do and do well, it’s dig, trench, haul and fill. The best overhead transmission line jobs, on the other hand, would go to out-of-state contractors---outfits whose workers go all over the country doing that particular highly skilled and demanding work.
One bottom line is that New Hampshire never asked for this project; the power was never intended for New Hampshire; and the New England power pool does not even need Northern Pass, given other projects planned to come online.
The other bottom line is that (a) Hydro Quebec, after despoiling its pristine Far North, has a staggering amount of power to sell; and (b) it is desperate to sell it, because its investors, impatient after 30 years of destruction, are calling in their chits.
And New Hampshire, unless the SEC stiffens up its back and says no to this madness, is twisting slowly in the wind.
Reprinted from the Meredith-based Salmon Press weeklies, covering the northern two-thirds of the state, and the News and Sentinel, Colebrook.