On a bright, sunny Monday in the summer of 2016, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker sat outside the Bay State’s gold-domed statehouse to sign a bill designed to ensure that “Massachusetts and New England can remain a leader in clean and renewable energy production.” The bill sought to curtail the region’s carbon emissions without driving up electricity bills. To that end, the Baker administration was authorized to coordinate the purchase of clean electricity generated from, among other potential sources, wind turbines planned for the shallow water off the state’s southern coast and hydropower generated by dammed rivers in Canada. But because Massachusetts did not share a border with Canada, the new hydropower would have to travel through a neighboring state. And that, many quickly realized, would add several complications.
For starters, someone would need to build an enormous transmission line — the functional equivalent of a giant extension cord — from north of the Canadian border, across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire or Maine, and into the power grid serving Massachusetts. After evaluating proposals from a range of companies, Baker’s administration decided in 2018 to move forward with a plan to build a 192-mile transmission line south from Canada, through New Hampshire and into Massachusetts. The challenge would be to get the Granite State to agree.
But as details became subject to greater public scrutiny, New Hampshire began to balk. The line was slated to cut through the iconic White Mountain National Forest. Interest groups like the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests began to raise environmental concerns. Residents of the Granite State eventually concluded that their natural landscape was being sacrificed to serve the Bay State’s thirst for clean power. Late in 2018, an obscure New Hampshire siting board killed the project by declining to authorize its construction. Massachusetts would have to look elsewhere.
Baker quickly pivoted to see if Maine might step up. Situated right across a long border from New Hampshire, the state that styled itself as America’s “Vacationland” was led at the time by a bombastic Republican who governed in much the same mold as President Donald Trump. Gov. Paul LePage viewed Massachusetts’s thirst for Canadian hydropower less as a scourge than as a point of leverage. If the Bay State were willing to pay the cost, he could demand concessions. The line was poised, after all, to be constructed by Mainers. The line’s owner would pay Maine in perpetuity to lease the land. Maine might even be able to purchase and divert some of the Canadian power on the cheap. And so LePage was supportive when Central Maine Power, a subsidiary of the Spanish-owned Avangrid, proposed to step in to build a project to be called New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC).
Slated to cost a mere $950 million — more than half a billion dollars less than the original New Hampshire proposal — NECEC turned out to be more than a big extension cord. Engineers proposed that the new infrastructure also connect to several additional wind farm projects in western Maine. Avangrid, estimating that the new infrastructure would create 1,700 jobs, promised LePage that cheap power imported from Canada could act as a check on rising prices for traditional fuel, taking roughly $40 million off Maine’s utility bills. The communities touched by the new lines, Avangrid proposed, would harvest more than $18 million in new local tax revenue. And perhaps best of all, as LePage and Avangrid were keen to remind Mainers, Massachusetts would foot the entire bill. By almost any standard, this was poised to be a bonanza for Vacationland…