“Facing the emergency of climate change” in October 2021, this editorial board decided that the merits of the plan to develop an electric transmission line to bring Canadian hydropower to New England outweighed the demerits.
Almost 18 months on, that determination holds.
Since then, Mainers voted overwhelmingly against the New England Clean Energy Connect project. Far from putting the matter to rest, however, the 2021 referendum result has led to a series of labyrinthine legal battles; the controversy over the transmission line has been fiery and far-reaching. And it’s nowhere near over.
Some progress may have been made Thursday, when a nine-person jury ruled unanimously in favor of allowing construction of the line to proceed, affirming a state supreme court decision made last August. The verdict at the Business and Consumer Court in Portland, where jurors were satisfied that construction carried out prior to the referendum was done “in good faith,” was the third consecutive court ruling in favor of NECEC.
“The point was to get the job done,” Gerry Petruccelli, a lawyer representing the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, told the court the day before the verdict, defending the construction that took place before the vote.
Getting the job done still feels like a distant prospect; an obviously incredibly costly and time-consuming one for all concerned.
The challenges and counter-challenges bode poorly for all future clean energy infrastructure projects – and our collective ability to reap, in a timely manner, the environmental and economic benefits they can sow. Rather than letting it set a precedent, Maine must take exaggerated care not to wind up here again.
By one estimate, according to Staff Writer Tux Turkel’s reporting, the NECEC project has been subject to 38 separate legal and regulatory reviews. The evidence in the lawsuit decided Thursday came to 2 million pages (spare a thought for the jurors).
We don’t have time to do nothing, we noted in our 2021 endorsement of the transmission line and the critical decarbonization it can help achieve. We don’t have time for a repeat of this kind of saga, either.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
