NORTHFIELD — It was a super-surprise Valentine’s Day visit by two top federal officials to three Franklin County energy installations.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission member Neil Chatterjee paid a visit to FirstLight’s Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage hydroelectric station for a tour, as well as to FirstLight’s Turners Falls and Cabot Station hydro plants — all now undergoing review by FERC for relicensing.
An EPA press release said Pruitt and Chatterjee visited the 1,168-megawatt underground generating station to see how it uses the Connecticut River to produce electricity. But there was no advance notice given to municipal officials or environmental groups who have been working for five years on the relicensing process.
“We were all stunned,” said Kimberly Noake MacPhee, a resource planner for the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, who with Andrea Donlon of the Connecticut River Conservancy and Northfield Select Board member Julia Blyth, all met with FirstLight officials the day before to discuss the relicensing.
“It’s too bad that those two ‘big fish’ visited and we didn’t know. It would have been nice to discuss stakeholder concerns.”
Len Greene, manager of government and regulatory affairs for FirstLight, said the trip was planned in advance when the company received a request from the administrators’ travel team to tour Northfield Mountain.
The first EPA administrator or FERC commissioner in recent memory to visit the facilities, Pruitt and Chatterjee toured Northfield Mountain for a couple of hours, said Greene.
“Commissioner Chatterjee and I saw firsthand the way this facility uses innovative technology to power the region,” Pruitt was quoted in the press release. “EPA will continue to work with our partners in the states to make responsible use of our country’s tremendous natural resources.”
“It was a privilege to host (Pruitt and Chatterjee) at FirstLight’s Northfield Mountain and a great opportunity to demonstrate and explain how Northfield Mountain ensures the grid is reliant and resilient,” said Senior Vice President FirstLight Power Resources John Shue.
The Northfield plant uses Connecticut River water pumped up the mountain overnight, when electricity prices are lowest, and releases it when there is sudden need for additional power and prices are highest, thereby acting as a giant storage battery for power plants that run constantly.
The Turners Falls station is one of the oldest running hydroelectric facilities in New England, according to Greene. Cabot Station is a 62-megawatt facility, built in 1912.
In its reporting on the visit to Franklin County, E&E News, a publication for energy and environmental professionals, reported that this was second stop of the week by Pruitt at a renewable-energy business, following his meeting with members of the forestry industry to discuss an EPA policy on biomass.
Even as Greene called Northfield Mountain “the largest energy storage facility in New England,” FERC prepared to finalize a rule requiring Independent System Operators like ISO-New England and regional transmission organizations to more fully incorporate energy storage resources into wholesale electricity markets.
In response, Burcin Unel, energy policy director at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said in a statement Thursday, “FERC has taken a significant step toward integrating energy storage into the electricity grid. It’s eliminating barriers to energy storage and allowing multiple revenue streams based on all of the energy, capacity and ancillary service benefits it can provide, giving the right price signals for efficient expansion of energy storage.”