The state Department of Environmental Protection has thrown out testimony offered by a highly credentialed expert on rivers for a hearing on the Russell Biomass plant.
The hearing focused on the water withdrawal permit the state has issued for the wood-fired electricity generating plant proposed for Russell. The plant would be located on the Westfield River, one of the Valley's finest fishing rivers, which since 1993 has enjoyed the federal designation of Wild and Scenic River.
Before the hearing, testimony concerning the permit had been filed by Prof. Piotr Parasiewicz, now director of the Northeast Instream Habitat Program at Mount Holyoke College. Parasiewicz, who has held research positions at Cornell and UMass, has assisted with the Index Streamflow Report for the Massachusetts Water Resources Commission. He developed a computer simulation model for fish and mussel habitat restoration planning that is used in the formulation of instream flow standards in New Hampshire.
Parasiewicz was not the only specialist who had filed testimony before the hearing. Joining him were Andrea Donlon, river steward with the Connecticut River Watershed Association, Peter Schilling, an attorney representing Trout Unlimited, and Henry Warchol, a Westfield resident who, like Schilling, has expressed concern that the downdraw of water will threaten the Atlantic salmon, which was restored to the Connecticut River region in a decades-long program at a cost of $600 million. The Westfield is a major tributary of the Connecticut.
The DEP ruled that testimony from all those sources was "irrelevant" because it related to discharges of pollutants regulated under federal law, not to water withdrawal, the subject of the state permit. But that mischaracterizes Parasiewicz's testimony, which analyzes the withdrawal in detail. And Margaret Sheehan, an attorney representing the Rushing Rivers Institute of Amherst and the other river activists, says the ruling misrepresents the pertinent state law. In an email Sheehan told the Advocate, "The Water Management Act, Mass. General Laws, Chapter 21G, Section 7, says in granting a permit for someone to take water from the river, DEP 'shall consider& reasonable protection of water quality, fisheries, wildlife, recreation,' and the ability of the river to absorb wastewater from the plant that is taking the water. It is a well-established scientific fact that a river's ability to absorb pollutant discharges from a plant is directly related to the amount of water in the river."
The permit authorizes the plant's developer, Russell Biomass, to draw up to 885,000 gallons of water a day from the Westfield River to cool the facility, which will produce 50 megawatts of power. According to the permit, the water will not be returned to the river, but in the DEP's view the drawdown "will not have significant or detrimental effects on the Westfield River's stream flow, based on the stream flow analysis submitted by the applicant, and its own internal review of the site hydrology…" The fact that the stream flow analysis was done by the company and not by an independent entity was one of Parasiewicz's objections to the permit.
Parasiewicz's testimony, filed more than a month before the hearing, began with a reminder that many rivers and streams, notably the Ipswich, have been documented as dry in Massachusetts, and that with losses of coldwater fauna from rivers predicted here, "excessive" water withdrawals should be avoided to ward off drought. According to his calculations, 30 percent of the water in the Westfield River during "low flow" in August is already withdrawn from the river by local industries.
Parasiewicz concludes that the DEP "lacked a sufficient factual basis" for granting the Water Management Act permit because, among other things, Russell Biomass had not provided readings of the continuous flow and temperature of the river for one to two years at the location in question, or estimations about future scenarios using simulations programmed to take climate change into account.
"They could use air cooling without drawing any water, but it is a little more expensive," Parasiewicz told the Advocate. While Russell Biomass says air cooling has a larger carbon footprint than water cooling, the permit says air cooling was taken off the table because it would add an estimated $50 million or more to the cost of the project.
Parasiewicz and the others had filed testimony Dec. 22 for the Jan. 27 hearing, but Russell Biomass filed a motion asking the DEP to keep their testimony off the record, and the DEP acquiesced. Said Sheehan, "My partner and I have done environmental cases for 44 years and have never seen legitimate citizen testimony excluded like this."
The issue of water withdrawal for the Russell Biomass plant, and the state's willingness to allow financial concerns such weight in its decision to allow water cooling rather than requiring air cooling, expose an irony stemming from unresolved conflicts in the financing of green energy as the state and the nation move to alternative and renewable sources.
In 2004 the Russell Biomass project received a loan of $150,000 from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, which administers the state's Renewable Energy Trust, to do preliminary design work. By now the venture involves, according to the water withdrawal permit, $1.1 million in federal renewable energy production tax credits and $11.7 million in Renewable Energy Credits.
So over $12 million in public money is going into a supposedly green project that will draw billions of gallons of water from a river that is still clean enough to support salmon—a fish that shuns polluted environments and was restored to the Connecticut River and its tributaries at a cost of millions of dollars in public funds. Is tax money working at cross purposes here? Critics are asking if this is what green was supposed to mean.
