Power play: Proposal afoot to pull plug on Green River dam

Morrisville Water & Light last month filed notice with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission of its intent to surrender its operating license for the utility-owned dam at the reservoir in Hyde Park.

The utility’s general manager, Scott Johnstone, said the state’s requirements limiting how much water the utility can use to produce — a requirement that the utility has fought in the state’s environmental and supreme courts for several years — makes it no longer worth using the dam to produce power.

“Unfortunately, due to the State’s Water Quality Conditions, we can no longer operate this hydro facility without incurring a significant financial loss — a loss that would end up on the backs of MWL ratepayers,” Johnstone said in an announcement released statewide Monday by public relations firm Leonine Public Affairs.

The announcement appears to have caught the Agency of Natural Resources off guard, especially the notion proposed by the Morrisville utility that the state take over the dam operations if it wants to maintain the popular, roughly 5,500-acre state park whose centerpiece reservoir was created 80 years ago by the dam’s construction.

“It is the appropriate role of the State of Vermont to manage this dam so Vermonters and visitors alike can enjoy this incredible resource and so that the dam can be appropriately managed for flood control,” Tom Snipp, chair of the utility’s board of trustees, said in the announcement.

Officials from the agency declined to take questions and issued a statement instead.

Stephanie Brackin, spokesperson for the agency, said Monday that the announcement “unfortunately” did indeed come as a surprise.

“MWL makes some significant commitments on behalf of the State, which have not been discussed, nor agreed upon by ANR,” Brackin said in an email. “While we appreciate the value of the Green River and have every intention of maintaining Green River Reservoir State Park and access to this remarkable state land, we have not seen a transition plan from MWL. Furthermore, funding for moving the responsibility of dam management to the State is not currently reflected in the budget or current Dam Safety staffing levels.”

Brackin said a feasibility study for the reservoir that the Legislature commissioned in the 2022 session — at a cost of $350,000 — is due this fall. She said the study will “review the liability and cost to the state.”

Long legal battle

In an interview Monday, Johnstone framed the 15-year court battle with the Agency of Natural Resources and environmental groups in familiar biblical allegory.

“Sometimes, David doesn’t beat Goliath,” he said.

In 2009, Morrisville began the process of filing for a new 30-year federal license — its old one was set to expire in 2015.

Seven years later, in 2016, the new permit came with state-recommended water quality standards attached to it that sharply cut the amount of electricity the utility’s dams could produce, but the utility fought those in court, and has continued running things the way it wanted.

Johnstone said when he came aboard in 2022, he committed to spending a year to try and come up with some sort of solution that would allow the utility to continue to draw down and create power while also satisfying the state’s standards for maintaining the place as a wildlife habitat and popular state park.

He said the state seemed open to negotiation, but the various environmental groups “didn’t come to the table.”

After 18 months in the job, he said it became clear that it was taking up too much bandwidth to keep up the fight.

“We just spent 15 years being told that we want to contaminate and destroy the place, and that takes a toll on an organization,” he said.

Johnstone said he has a unique perspective on the state’s position, having served as secretary for the Agency of Natural Resources from 2000-2003 and deputy secretary for two years before that. He said the agency could have forced all the sides to come to the table and hammer out an agreement, but said the agency deferred to environmental groups dead set against the utility being able to control how much water — and when — it sends over the dam.

“For whatever reason — and I’m not judging them for it — they weren’t willing to do so, and they gave a de facto veto to all the environmental groups,” he said.

The long shutdown

The March 12 filing was just a notice of surrender, not an actual application to do so, and Johnstone said the process won’t happen overnight — he estimated it could be another one to three years before the process is complete — and he and the trustees have not even designated a date as the last day of power generation at the dam.

He predicts that if the utility loses its court appeal over the permitted drawdowns, a decision he thinks will come soon, it would be “much more difficult to even turn the thing on.”

He said if the utility cannot generate power at the dam, there are only two uses for the infrastructure there, and neither of them are the purview of a small electric utility with roughly 4,000 customers.

The first option is to support the reservoir as a park, something Johnstone said is clearly the job of the state.

The second use for the dam is to provide flood protection from communities downstream, but Johnstone said the permit, once the appeal process ends, won’t allow the utility to draw down water to prevent flooding.

The utility did it last July ahead of the historic flooding that rocked the state, something Johnstone said would have been a necessary safety precaution regardless of the permit conditions.

Johnstone said it’s not feasible for the utility to shoulder the cost of decommissioning the dam, and possibly removing it, which would spell the end of the popular paddling and fishing destination.

He said knows the state has been reluctant to take over the dam, and he didn’t consult with the Agency of Natural Resources before filing the notice of intent to surrender with the federal oversight committee.

This week’s announcement may have caught the agency off guard — and Johnstone expressed some chagrin over the phone that Monday happened to be April Fool’s Day — but he said he had told the agency’s top brass “months and months ago” that if they weren’t going to make the environmental groups meet with the utility, then the utility would likely give up its federal operating license for that dam.

“I shared with them that they had all absolutely refused to meet with us, so none of this should be a surprise to them,” he said.

Johnstone said the utility will not ask for any money for the dam. He said the utility will continue to maintain the infrastructure until a decision is made on who will take over operations. He said Morrisville Water & Light crews visit the dam every day.

When asked Monday if the utility is trying to call the state’s bluff with its proposed surrender of its FERC license, he denied any gamesmanship.

“I don’t think of it as a game of chicken,” he said. “We’ve got to wait it out and get to a point where somebody says, ‘Yeah, it’s obvious the state needs to own this thing.’”