Big BANG Theory

The past 24 hours have seen a record number of hits on this blog along with several comments. I wish to single out Pam Laflamme's comments as well as her posting of the PUC web page that contains the material presented in Groveton on Tuesday 7/7/07, thanks Pam.  If you haven't read the material presented at that meeting you owe it to yourself and to your community to read it while keeping a copy for future reference. ...In today's The Berlin Daily Sun, Barbara Tetreault gives the account of the same meeting and only makes a slight mention of the most significant issue that this meeting revealed, the Laidlaw Energy project is on a collision course with reality.  Let me explain the best I can.....In order to put a power plant "online/on the grid", you have to do an extensive study of its impact on the whole grid system. The results of that study eventually leads to getting the necessary permits to connect the plant to the grid which allows the company to sell the electricity. This absolutely necessary study is known as "being in the Queue with ISO".  At Tuesday's meeting, ISO New England gave a list of projects (front page Daily Sun) of all the projects in New Hampshire, broken down by counties and by power producing capacity. There's a total of 7 projects in the Queue and here are 2 significant facts. Laidlaw Energy is not in the Queue and there's a total of over 400MW of generating capacity being proposed! Two more important facts. First, projects that are in the Queue are permitted on a first come first serve basis. Second, there's only 100MW of capacity on the existing transmission lines. How does this impact Laidlaw?  First, Laidlaw is not in the Queue and if they were to file today they would be in 8th place. Second, there won't be any capacity on the transmission lines for the 70MW they plan to generate in Berlin after the 7(?) other projects are built!   The only hope for Laidlaw Energy is that all the other projects fail or that they upgrade the existing lines at an estimated cost of $200M and a time frame of 3 to 5 years.  What are the chances that 7 projects will go down the drain when one of them (100MW wind project) is a JP Morgan financed project?  MY guess, "ZERO". Having said all of that, I still believe that it's important to voice our opposition to the Laidlaw Energy project because there's the real danger that they could purchase the mill property and then abandon the project leaving Berlin in the lurch again as with the Rite Aid deal.