Issues → November/December 2011 → Features →

Battle Lines: The Northern Pass Energy Project

The Northern Pass project, a proposed 180-mile corridor of towering transmission lines across New Hampshire, has galvanized protesters' anger. The issues the project raises are questions of property rights, power, and profit. Who, ultimately, determines the fate of a region?

by Ben Hewitt

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Credit: Dana Smith

Gary Long

Credit: Dana Smith

John Amey

On a crystalline afternoon in mid-March, I left my home in Cabot, Vermont, and headed for Interstate 93 south. Within minutes, I'd crossed into New Hampshire. The view through my windshield was dominated by the White Mountains, standing in jagged relief against the cool blue sky. I passed through Littleton, then Franconia, then by the base of Cannon Mountain, where I watched a skier arc wide turns down a steep trail. Each turn threw a thin curtain of snow into the air, where it hung for a second or two before sifting gently to the ground.

I was heading toward Franklin, a small city of about 8,500 situated on the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers, where they join to form the Merrimack River. The Merrimack flows southward through the state capital of Concord and into Massachusetts, before turning northeastward to empty into the Atlantic Ocean at the town of Newburyport.

Like many New England communities founded near moving water, Franklin was once a thriving mill town. And like many once-thriving mill towns, Franklin is stuck in a decades-long struggle to reinvent itself. It's not exactly a depressed town; the unemployment rate is about a point higher than the state average, which was 5.8 percent at the time of my visit. Rather, it has the feel of a place that hasn't settled on its future, where things are hard, sure, but still good enough to imagine that the future might be better than the recent past.

"This town's coming back to life," Cynthia Vera insisted, when I asked her about Franklin's fortunes. Vera runs an antiques and auction company with her husband, Anthony, on Franklin's Central Street. Vera & Company Auctioneers is located just a couple of doors down from a small pawnshop, where, at the time I dropped in, a young man was trying to start a gas-powered leaf blower under the dubious eye of the proprietor. "It ran last fall," he said, but his voice was low and his eyes cast down, as if even he knew that last fall was a long time ago. He gave a little nervous chuckle: "I'm gonna have work pretty soon. Then I won't have to keep pawning all my shit."

I'd come to Franklin because I'd wanted to gain some insight into the community that is home to what is almost certainly the largest concentration of Northern Pass supporters in the entire state. The Northern Pass is a proposed 180-mile power transmission project that, if approved and constructed, would form a corridor of 80- to 135-foot towers carrying electricity from Hydro-Québec in Canada to Deerfield, New Hampshire. If the project is approved, Franklin is where the power will be converted from the direct-current (DC) electricity supplied by Hydro-Québec to the alternating current (AC) that flows into 99 percent of all U.S. homes. The impact on the town, Mayor Ken Merrifield told me, would be "staggering and historic," increasing the tax base by 44 percent and creating more than 300 jobs here during the construction phase. "What we'd be able to do boggles the mind," the mayor said.

But "staggering and historic" is an apt description for another aspect of the Northern Pass proposal: the near-ubiquity and overwhelming ferocity of the public's opposition to it. Resistance began immediately following the project's official announcement in October 2010, and over the ensuing months has only gained momentum, like a chunk of granite careening down a mountainside.

Within days of the announcement, the Web sites livefreeorfry.org and bury northernpass.blogspot.com had gone live, and protesters were composing, sending, and forwarding posts and e-mails. They spoke of obfuscation, profiteering, environmental degradation, and, perhaps most alarmingly, eminent domain. They listed dates of important meetings and legislative hearings. They urged defiance, persistence, and action.