Quote:
Originally Posted by ishoot308
|
Hello Everyone,
It has been quite a while since I weighed in on this Winnipesaukee Forum site. You may recall I was active last summer and fall regarding the plans for a sailing center at Ellacoya and that project is still very much in play, but off the front burner for a while as the State of NH does some master planning of its facilities.
I do however want to weigh in on the Northern Pass issue. 14,000+/- feet of this proposed power line run right through the middle of my project up in Campton, the Owl's Nest Resort & Golf Club, and it would wreak havoc if it were ever to be built. I say this because as I speak to you about the Northern Pass (NP), I want to be up front about the bias I have against this project. This having been said, I want to address a few of the issues that have been brought up by others as factually and as objectively as I possibly can:
1. New Hampshire (NH) does indeed produce a lot more power from generating sources within NH's borders than it uses. In 2010, NH companies generated 188% of our own state's power needs and the excess was delivered into the New England Power Grid. Massachusetts, on the other hand, had a serious deficit of intrastate power production, generating only 76% of its own state's needs in 2010 and this problem is going to get worse, especially when the Salem (MA) Harbor Power Plant shuts down in 2015 (refer to
www.smartergridconsulting.com for more details).
MA has been very reluctant to bite the power bullet, often fighting against possible new sources of power. The Cape Wind project is on an indefinite hold while it looks for companies to purchase its power. National Grid has acted very responsibly by ageeing to buy half of Cape Wind's power, but N-STAR, the old Boston Edison, has refused to step up to the plate and as a result, the future of that project is very much in doubt making a bad situation in MA even worse. It is N-STAR that is counting on the Northern Pass hydro power to get bailed out of a bad situation that it has essentially created and is continuing to make worse.
NH on the other hand, has 66 separate power generation sources within its borders including nuclear, coal, natural gas, hydro, biomass, solar and wind, and many new projects are on the drawing boards. NH's power future is bright indeed. Furthermore, NH's citizens have been using less power, largely through conservation techniques, year after year since 1997.
2. The Northern Pass project continues to insist on bringing its power down from Canada on huge steel towers through many of our state's most sensitive and scenic regions. To succeed, NP must forcibly take hundreds of properties by eminent domain causing untold destruction of people's lives, damaging dozens of businesses, many of which will fail, and putting far more people out of work than it will ever put to work. The NP, when completed, will provide employment to about five permanent workers in its power conversion plant in Franklin.
What you have been hearing about--1200 jobs--is fundamentally untrue. There will be 200 t0 300 temporary woods related jobs for a year, possible a little bit longer, but all the high paying jobs will go to out of state unionized high tension line crews brought in to assemble the towers and to string the cables.
3. NP has been saying for months that it's too expensive to place its lines underground, but just yesterday, National Grid announced that in combination with Bangor Hydro, it will be bringing an underground 1100 Mega Watt HVDC line from wind farms in northern Maine and hydro projects in the Canadian Maritime provinces 230 miles underground starting in Orrington, ME down to Tewksbury, MA. All of a sudden, Northern Pass has gone very silent and the politicians that PSNH has bought in Concord are nowhere to be found.
There's a lot more going on, much of it behind closed doors in the NH Statehouse where PSNH's paid lobbyists are button holing every legislator they can get there hands on and I will come back to this site as issues pop up and as more of you have questions that need answers, but most of you seem to be on the right track. Because this is classified as an "Optional Project" by ISO-New England and because it has not been classified as needed for "System Reliability" it does not get to use Eminent Domain. Back in 2006, over 85% of New Hampshire's voters passed Article 12-a of our state's Constitution denying the use of Eminent Domain to private interests engaging in private, for profit projects. Northern Pass wants to be able to generate a guaranteed return of nearly 13% per annum on its $1.2 Billion Dollar investment and to not be regulated by the NH Public Utilities Commission That type of company is not eligible for Eminent Domain.
Thanks for bringing this issue to light on the Winnipesaukee Forum. I can be reached at 603-759-2510 or by e-mail at
tntmullen@owlsnestgolf.com if you would like to discuss these matters in person.
Regards,
Tom Mullen