Siting board hears proposal for Burrillville power plant
BURRILLVILLE – The Rhode Island Energy Facility Siting Board (RIEFSB) Tuesday granted intervener status to four of the 12 parties that filed motions to participate in the board’s proceedings relative to a Chicagobased company’s proposal to build a natural gas-fired power plant in Pascoag.
At a public preliminary hearing held at the state Public Utilities Commission office in Warwick, the RIEFSB approved motions for intervention filed by the Town of Burrillville, the State of Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources, National Grid, the Conservation Law Foundation and the Rhode Island Builders and Construction Trade Council.
Motions to intervene filed by the Burrillville Land Trust, Occupy Providence, Fossil Free Rhode Island, Fighting Against Natural Gas (FANG), Burrillville Against Spectra Expansion (BASE), Rhode Island Progressive Democrats of America and individuals Sister Mary Pendergrast, Dennis and Kathryn Sherman and Paul and Mary Bolduc, will be decided at the board’s meeting on Friday, Jan. 29.
All of those motions – with the exception of the Burrillville Land Trust – are being opposed by Invenergy, the company that is proposing to build the state-of-the-art Clear River Energy Center, which filed its project application with RIEFSB on Oct. 28.
Invenergy attorney Alan M. Shoer said Tuesday that the motions for intervention status filed by these particular parties do not meet the legal standard for intervention because those who have filed them are not directly affected by the project.
“Our objections to those motions should not be interpreted as the company not wanting to hear from the public,” Shoer said at the hearing. “On the contrary, we encourage public comment and believe it’s very important. We welcome that public comment at the appropriate time.”
The purpose of Tuesday’s public preliminary hearing was for the RIEFSB to hear its first presentation on the project by company officials and to determine which parties would be granted intervention status. Attending the hearing were several officials from Burrillville, including Town Manager Michael C. Wood, Town Planner Tom Kravitz, Town Solicitor Oleg Nikolyszyn and Assistant Town Solicitor Michael R. McElroy.
A handful of members from Fossil Free Rhode Island, FANG and BASE sat in the back of the hearing room, holding up signs reading “Save Burrillville: No New Power Plant.”
Public comment was not allowed at the preliminary hearing, but there will be at three public hearings to be held at a later date, said RIEFSB Chairwoman Margaret L. Curran, who heads the three-member RIEFSB, along with board member Janet Coit. A third seat on the panel is currently vacant.
In its application to the RIEFSB, Invenergy is required to address a number of concerns including site plans, project cost, number of facility employees, financing, required support facilities, environmental impact, lifecycle management, and possible alternatives, including the estimated costs of those alter- natives.
Once an application is filed, the EFSB has 30 days to accept and docket or reject it. In this case, Invenergy’s application was docketed on Nov. 16. The board then convenes a preliminary administrative hearing within 60 days of the docketing to designate state agencies that must file an advisory opinion. These agencies, known as “advisory agencies,” have six months to submit an opinion on the application.
Once this deadline has passed, the EFSB has a 45day window in which to begin final hearings in which all interested parties, including advisory agencies and members of the public, can convene and present testimony and evidence in an adversarial proceeding.
The board’s final decision is due within 120 days of the beginning of the final hearings or 60 days after the end of the hearings, whichever is shorter.
The applicant has a 10-day period in which to appeal a final decision to the State Supreme Court, otherwise the decision stands.
The parties seeking intervention were allowed brief remarks Tuesday. The Conservation Law Foundation argued that by increasing Rhode Island’s greenhouse gas emissions, the Clear River Energy Center would violate the Resilient Rhode Island Act of 2014. The foundation urged the board to terminate its deliberations, which would effectively deny Invenergy the permit it seeks.
Sister Pendergast, one of the individual intervenors, said: “I do not think that the spiritual and moral issues of environmental ethics will be adequately represented by excluding my testimony. Any decision the Siting Board makes that is good for the corporation, but not for the environment, is a bad decision and we will live to regret it.”
FANG, an out-of-state environmental activist group that has joined forces with BASE, a local organization, opposes both the Algonquin Incremental Market project and the Clear River Energy Center pipeline project. Members of both groups have been protesting proposed natural gas pipelines in Massachusetts and Rhode Island since last summer with public marches and demonstrations.
Gov. Gina Raimondo and Invenergy CEO Michael Polsky announced back in September that the company plans to invest more than $700 million in the proposed Clear River Energy Center, which would generate an overall economic impact to Rhode Island’s economy of $1.3 billion between 2016 and 20134. Facility construction (expected to take 30 months) would create more than 300 jobs for local workers, and once operational, it would employ 25 permanent skilled employees with a total annual payroll of $3.5 million. The Clear River Energy Center also will contribute millions of dollars in tax revenue each year to the Town of Burrillville.
Polsky says the plant will generate more than 900 megawatts of new, clean energy for New England’s regional grid, which is in need of new, cleaner, and more reliable energy sources as the region faces the retirement of aging power plants in the coming years.
The Burrillville project will play a major role in addressing energy reliability and affordability challenges due in part from aging coal and oil plant retirements, and is projected to result in $280 million in cumulative savings for Rhode Island consumers from 2019 to 2022, .
The Clear River Energy Center will propose connecting to the New England ISO. Once approved by state and local regulators, construction on the Clear River Energy Center is scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter of 2016, with commercial operations expected by the summer of 2019.