Ten Years Ago… The Challenge to GMP’s Stormwater System

Ten years ago, the Supreme Court of Vermont ruled against Energize Vermont.

 We had challenged the stormwater permits that Peter Shumlin’s Agency of Natural Resources had issued for Green Mountain Power’s wind turbines in the Lowell Mountains. When the Public Utility Commission (then known as the Public Service Board) rejected our challenge, we took the matter to the Supreme Court.

 We had assembled a dream team of water experts who analyzed Lowell’s topography, hydrology, geology, and aquatic ecosystems. They understood exactly what GMP was proposing, why they were proposing it, and what the results were going to be.

 Our experts documented the regulations from other states that would not have permitted the experimental system that GMP was building. (Regulators don’t call them experiments. They euphemistically refer to them as “new design-alternative systems.” They are not to be confused with “best management practices.”)

 Our experts conducted a master class in which they presented stormwater studies from around the country. The studies showed that GMP’s system could not work because:

1.      The Lowell Mountain slopes were too steep

2.      The system was undersized

3.      GMP was using construction materials that “routinely failed”

 Our experts described, in detail, what the results of the system failure would be:

1.      Erosion

2.      Creation of new channels

3.      Sedimentation

4.      Contamination

5.      Degradation of aquatic ecosystems

 They noted that some of these impacts would be hard to pin on GMP because the Shumlin Administration approved a compliance monitoring regimen whose sampling sites were thousands of yards away from the turbines. But the damage would occur nonetheless—and it would affect surface waters from the mountains all the way to Lake Champlain.

 It’s ten years later and all the failures that Energize Vermont predicted have happened—accompanied by all of the environmental damage that the failures caused.

 Oh, and what did the Supreme Court rule? They upheld the Shumlin Administration’s authority to approve a stormwater system that would not—and could not—work.