January 12, 2015 — Another round in the fight over adequate fish passage at the Union River Dam came to an end late last month, but the heavyweight battle to relicense the hydroelectric generation facility is far from over.
In September 2013, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered Black Bear Hydro Partners LLC to conduct 16 environmental studies as a part of the company’s pending application to renew the dam’s license in 2017 Black Bear operates the dam and is owned by the Bermuda-based, Brookfield Renewable Energy Partners, a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management of Toronto.
In October, Black Bear filed an initial report of its studies. Interested parties including the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service, the Department of Marine Resources, the Downeast Salmon Federation and the Union Salmon Association, among others, asked FERC to order that Black Bear do three new studies and do more work on five studies already required.
In a letter to Black Bear dated Dec. 30, FERC approved two of the requests, approved three more with some modification but denied request that the company conduct a new study of upstream passage beyond the dam for river herring such as alewives, and modify its study of upstream passage for the American eel requested by a conservation group and a comprehensive study to determine the “fish community” in the Union River watershed requested by, among other parties, NMFS and DMR.
Despite the split decision, Duane Shaw, executive director of the Downeast Salmon Federation, was pleased with the commission’s action.
“This is really good from our perspective,” Shaw said in a telephone conversation last week.
FERC’s earlier order “didn’t require any field studies,” to be conducted by Black Bear and Brookfield, “and now they are,” Shaw said. The possibility that those studies could be “very expensive,” Shaw said, has led Brookfield to agree to sit down with “a broad coalition” of interested stakeholders in an effort to come to an agreement on the studies’ scope.
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