EFSB ready to proceed with final hearings on Invenergy
BURRILLVILLE – It’s been a long and rocky road for Invenergy Thermal Development, but the company has satisfied the requirements for the state Energy Facility Siting Board to schedule a final hearing on its application to build the proposed Clear River Energy Center in Pascoag.
The EFSB announced yesterday that the hearing on the Chicago-based company’s application for the roughly 900 megawatt co-generation plant on Wallum Lake Road would commence on April 11.
The company’s application for an operating permit was filed on Oct. 29, 2015, but the hearings have been waylaid, in part, by Invenergy’s own missteps. The EFSB, for example, suspended consideration of the application for several months in the fall of 2016, citing shortcomings in the company’s plan for supplying turbine-cooling water to the plant.
The company has since entered an $18 million, 20-year pact with the town of Johnston to truck water to the plant, with a Hopkinton pool-filling company serving as a backup supplier, drawing water from the city of Fall River. But the EFSB suspended consideration of the application again last December when members learned that Invenergy had litigation pending before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that could have shifted millions of dollars in development costs onto future
customers whose electricity is generated by the proposed plant.
Preparations for the hearings resumed after Invenergy withdrew the legal action, but the town of Burrillville and the Conservation Law Foundation both continue fighting the company’s plans. Not only is there no market demand for the electricity that Clear River would produce, they argue, the plant would also decimate a tract of forest habitat and spew toxic vapors into the atmosphere. CLF and the town both have motions pending before the EFSB that seek the dismissal of the application, and the two are also plaintiffs in a Superior Court lawsuit challenging Johnston’s authority to resell water it obtains from the Providence Water Supply Board to an out-oftown, for-profit enterprise.
If Invenergy has its way, the EFSB will grant the company permission to build an electricity co-generation plant designed to run on natural gas, with ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel as a backup. The minimum generating capacity envisioned for Clear River Energy Center is 850 megawatts, but it could be as much as 1,000, according to the company’s application – nearly twice that of the existing TransCanada/ Ocean State Power co-generation plant off Sherman Farm Road, on the opposite side of town. That plant has a maximum generating capacity of 560 megawatts, according to Power Online.
With dozens of experts and other witnesses lined up to testify, the final hearing will actually be a series of hearings that will likely last for months before the EFSB is poised to make a decision. As the EFSB explained in yesterday’s announcement, once the session opens, “the hearing will continue from day to day, time to time, and place to place, as required.”
The hearing will open at 9:30 a.m. on April 11 in Hearing Room A of the Public Utilities Commission office building, located at 89 Jefferson Boulevard, Warwick.
The EFSB has already held a number of public hearings on the proposal in various cities and towns, including several in Burrillville that were attended by hundreds of residents who were overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of the Clear River Energy Center.
The final hearing will not be an opportunity to gather more feedback from the public, as those were.
“The purpose of the final hearing is not to rehear the evidence that was presented in hearings before designated agencies, but rather to provide the opportunity to address – in a single forum, and from a consolidated, statewide prospective – the issues reviewed and the recommendations made in the proceedings before the designated agencies,” the EFSB said.
The hearing will be streamed live at the web address: www.ustream.tv/channel/ WqQyXw296dg.