The latest meeting of the CLG, in Providence on Thursday, featured a panel discussion with representatives from the four companies mentioned above. The panel was pulled together with the help of Douglas Gablinske, executive director of The Energy Council of Rhode Island (TEC-RI) an advocacy group for energy company concerns. Readers of RI Future may remember that Gablinske was a vocal opponent of Cale Keable’s bill to reform the Energy Facilities Siting Board (EFSB).  He was also the only speaker at the RI Public Utilities Commission (RIPUC) to speak in favor of the pipeline tariff.

Gablinske surprised me by asking if I knew about any planned protests or disruptions. I said I didn’t. He asked me specifically about the FANG Collective. I had no idea of what plans they have, if any, I said. Then Gablinske said that he noticed Mary Pendergast on the list of people who had signed up to attend. Pendergast was sitting in the room, and he soon went over to introduce himself to her.

During the course of the presentation there was a disruption. As Invenergy’s John Niland gave his presentation to the room, Mary Pendergast stood and display a small sign that said, “No fracked gas Power plant.” Her protest was silent but it did seem to throw Niland off a bit, as his delivery seemed somewhat distracted.

It was during the third presentation that the disruptions became more pronounced. As Richard Kruse, vice president at Spectra Energy spoke glowingly about the need for bigger and better pipelines in our fracked gas infrastructure future, Kathy Martley of BASE (Burrillville Against Spectra Expansion), Keith Clougherty of the FANG Collective and Sally Mendzela stood up.

“Spectra Energy, Energy for Death,” said Martley as I headed for my camera. “Say no to Invenergy and tell Invenergy to go home,” Martley continued.

As the protest continued, Gablinske took the podium and said, “You have a right to be here but not be disruptive” as Clougherty continued to speak.

Lennette Boiselle, an ally of Geblinske and a lobbyist for the Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce got up and left the room, presumably in search of security. Readers might remember Boiselle as the person arguing against democracy at the public comment hearing concerning Cale Keable’s EFSB bill.

“The political correctness, of not allowing other people to talk is sweeping through this country,” said Geblinske, “It’s an incorrect assumption, this gentlemen has the right to speak…”

“We’ve been listening to you our whole lives, Pal,” interrupted Sally Mendzela.

Gablinske ultimately offered to set up a forum where “both sides” could be heard but it is unknown if this will actually happen. The protesters took their seats, no one was ejected from the forum, and Kruse finished his talk.

Amazingly, though, that wasn’t the end. During a brief question and answer period at the end of the presentations, Gablinske called on Clougherty to ask a question!

“I would ask for a question, not a speech or a statement,” said Gablinske, when he realized who he had called upon.

Clougherty then asked Niland, Kruse and Bill Malee, a National Grid VP, “Do your companies have any money set aside for restitution for the millions of people who are going to be displaced and killed by the infrastructure projects you all are proposing?”

There is no good answer representatives from these companies can give, yet Niland attempted one. As expected, it was not good.

I found the most interesting talk of the day came from Mary Louise “Weezie” Nuara, External Affairs Representative for ISO-NE.

“The region’s competitive wholesale electricity markets are really designed to maintain reliability through the selection of the most economically efficient set of resources,” said Nuara, but the states “have environmental and renewable energy goals that are beyond the objectives of the wholesale electricity markets.”

What’s happening is that states are setting goals to increase renewables and reduce greenhouse gas emissions (like the goals set out in ResilientRI, but all the New England states have some version of this idea.) ISO-NE is designed to deliver energy as reliably and cheaply as possible. As a market, it cannot deliver renewables or reduce emissions unless those options are cheaper and cleaner. In August, NEPOOL (which represents the interest of the New England states when dealing with ISO-NE)  began looking into how to adjust wholesale electricity markets to accommodate the goals of the states. It is NEPOOL’s goal to develop a “framework document” by December 2 to provide guidance to ISO-NE regarding potential changes. (A kind of advisory opinion, if you will.)

What makes this interesting, to my mind, is that if ISO-NE starts taking the climate change concerns of the states into account, plants like the one Invenergy is planning for Burrillville will have a harder time selling their energy into the markets.

ISO-NE is a little over a decade old, but already it’s finding that its systems are in need of being updated over concerns of climate change. By contrast, the EFSB here in Rhode Island was established thirty years ago, in 1986. The RI General Assembly has shown little inclination towards revising the EFSB’s mandate in lieu of climate change.

Below please find all the video from the CLg meeting except for the closing comments.

Rebecca Tepper, chair of the CLG Coordinating Committee and chief of the Energy & Telecommunications Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office introduced keynote speaker Rhode Island General Treasurer Seth Magaziner.

Douglas Gablinske, executive director, The Energy Council of Rhode Island

Jeffrey Grybowski, chief executive officer, Deepwater Wind

John Niland, director of business development, Invenergy

Richard Kruse, vice president and regulatory & FERC compliance officer for Spectra Energy

Bill Malee, vice president of regulatory affairs, for National Grid

ISO-NE Q&A

In September, the trio used reinforced pvc pipe to attach themselves to construction equipment at Spectra’s fracked-gas compressor site as part of a growing resistance to the oil and gas corporations “AIM” expansion project. The expansion of the Burrillville compressor station is a key part of Spectra’s plans to transport gas extracted via fracking in Pennsylvania to natural gas export terminals in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada. The protesters were charged with misdemeanor trespass and disorderly conduct, the maximum penalty being 1 year in prison and $1000 fine. Spectra Energy is demanding $30,000 of restitution be awarded as part of the criminal case.

“Spectra is spewing toxic chemicals from their compressor stations, damaging communities with their pipelines, all to expand the fracking industry’s profits at the expense of public health, safety and the environment.  Spectra should be the ones paying restitution for the real harm that they are causing” said Matt Smith, an organizer with Food & Water Watch and one of three defendants in the case.

Spectra’s “AIM” expansion has come under fire recently from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as well as US Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, who have asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to halt construction on the pipeline’s New York segment over safety concerns. Of particular concern is a 2 mile stretch of pipeline that would push volatile compressed gas within feet of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. Located just 30 miles north of Manhattan, Spectra’s pipeline expansion near the aging plant creates a situation that puts 20 million residents and the entire economics of the United States at risk. A Spectra pipeline which connects to Spectra’s “AIM” expansion exploded in Salem Township, Pennsylvania last month, creating a massive fireball that left a local resident with third degree burns over 75% of his body.

“These fracked-gas facilities are dangerous on many levels: they are accelerating climate change, constantly off-gas poisonous chemicals, destroying communities where the fracking occurs, and are one shoddy weld away from exploding,” says Keith Clougherty, a defendant in the case.

The Rhode Island portion of the “AIM” pipeline expansion involved doubling the size of an existing compressor facility in Burrillville. The project faced sustained resistance from state wide activists and local community members. In August Invenergy announced plans to build a 1000 megawatt power plant immediately adjacent to Spectra’s compressor station. The fracked-gas used at the plant would be delivered through Spectra’s pipeline system.

Opposition to the power plant has steadily grown in intensity since the project was first proposed. Last week hundreds of people rallied at the Statehouse in support of a bill that would give Burrillville residents the power to vote on any tax agreement negotiated between the town and Invenergy. That same week nearly two dozen national environmental and public health organizations sent a letter to RI Governor Gina Raimondo urging her to demonstrate real climate leadership by rejecting the fracked gas power plant proposal.

Recently Spectra announced plans to expand their Burrillville compressor station a second time as part of the “Access Northeast” project.

The FANG (Fighting Against Natural Gas) activists who locked themselves to Spectra construction equipment in September to call attention to the methane pipeline expansion project in Burrillville are facing a $30,000 restitution payment.

Nick Katkevich of Rhode Island, Keith Clougherty of Massachusetts and Matt Smith of New Jersey were handed an itemized bill by Spectra’s lawyers that supposedly covers the construction time lost as police and fire crews attempted to unlock the protesters. Ultimately the protesters unlocked themselves, and there are no reports of any damage done to any equipment.

“Spectra hired  a contractor to perform some work,” said Oleg Nikolyszyn, the Burrillville town solicitor, in a phone interview. He was prosecuting the case until yesterday, when the defendants requested a jury trial in Superior Court.

“The contractor bills Spectra for the time they have certain equipment and men” on site, he explained. “As you can imagine they charge a ton of money by the hour, and the machines have to be there to do the job. If they could have been utilized somewhere else they could have been generating income for the contractor, but the contractor was required to be on site. So all this money for the contractor was billed to Spectra, and Spectra’s out of pocket for a lot of money.”

Katkevich, one of the defendants, said the district court judge was considering making the payment of restitution a condition of whatever deal is worked out. If applied, that would differ from the judge’s decision in the district court case of Sherrie Andre, who delayed construction with a tree sit earlier in the summer. The judge in that case refused to make payment of restitution a condition for settling the case and told Spectra that they should pursue any lost monies in civil court.

So far that hasn’t happened in this most recent case.

Solicitor Nikolyszyn said that in Superior Court, “Spectra will be asking a judge to order restitution, to make Spectra whole, for what these three individuals did. That’s up to the judge as to what to do. That’s who will order restitution and if so, how much.”

“It’s out of my hands as of yesterday,” said Nikolyszyn, “So the future of what happens in this case will be up to the Superior Court judge. Those cases in Superior Court are prosecuted by the Attorney General’s department.”

According to Katkevich, the activists are ready to take the case to trial in Superior Court and are preparing to make a “necessity defense.” This defense allows a person “to act in a criminal manner when an emergency situation, not of the person’s own creation compels the person to act in a criminal manner to avoid greater harm from occurring.”

The emergency situation, the defendants will argue, is climate change. The first successful use of the necessity defense for climate-related civil disobedience was in September of last year when Massachusetts District Attorney Sam Sutter dropped charges against climate activists Jay O’Hara and Ken Ward when they used their lobster boat to block a coal delivery to the Brayton Point Power Plant in Fall River. Solicitor Nikolyszyn says that the necessity defense was never brought up to him.

Defendant Keith Clougherty said a multinational corporation charging restitution is “an intimidation tactic used against grassroots organizations. If Spectra wants money they have the means to do a civil suit, and restitution is for those people who don’t have the means to go through with a civil suit. I think its ridiculous that Spectra can even use something like restitution through the legal system to punish us.”

Clougherty went on to say,

I think there’s a real conversation to be had around what restitution means. If we’re paying Spectra restitution because they’re the “victim” then I feel there’s a much larger conversation to be had around companies like Spectra having to pay restitution for years of damage and poison to communities that they operate in.

There are long standing health effects of the compressor station, their pipelines have leaked, and while they have been fined significantly in the past for specific violations, I think Spectra should be paying restitution for the damage they’ve been doing on the order of millions of dollars in health and property damage.

I think not just Spectra but all fossil fuel companies should have to pay really significant restitution to the communities all over the world that are facing the catastrophe of climate change right now.

I’m sure people are working on these kind of theories out there, I haven’t encountered them yet, but I think that’s something we really need to start talking about.

People interested in contributing to the defense fund can follow this link.