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Comment by CircleSpokes | Hacker News Reader

Protecting woodlands is important but cutting through woodlands for transmission lines shouldn't be a big deal. Hydro is pretty clean power so it seems silly not to bring more of that in. Plus they have already cut most of it..

"More than three-quarters of the corridor has already been cleared, with about 100 poles installed, Avangrid said last week."

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The opposition is less about cutting trees and more about being bossed around by “big energy”. People don’t like being told what they can and cannot do.

How does building a powerline offend the independent nature of Maine voters?

It has little to do with the line and a lot to do with who wants to build it. CMP probably polls below the DMV when it comes to customer satisfaction. Of course the answer to "we want to do a thing that makes us money but doesn't benefit you or harm you" is "haha GTFO".

Arguments were effectively made that it’s not all hydro power - it’s a connection to the grid not a single source of energy.

But in the end this was doomed by the route. If it were economically possible to go around the north woods it would have had little opposition.

Which is a nonsense argument as easily seen by a single google search of Hydro-Quebec's energy sources.

The 'greenwashing' risk is real. They may provide their electricity via hdyrothermal, but could potentially resell energy from any other source connected to their grid.

They could.

They agreed to sell to Mass. at 0.05$/KWh. I don't think there's anything apart from hydro they can sell at this price (and still make a profit on).

Hydro Quebec only generates hydroelectricity in the main grid. Some islands that aren't connected may use thermal generators.

So no, there is no such risk.

I heard that as well and it really detracted from the 'green' component of the project. Did HydroQuebec give any contractual guarantee that this would indeed be hydro-power and not just whatever's surplus in their grid?

It's 100% complete bullshit. There are no non-renewable sources connected to the Hydro-Quebec main grid. Fossil fuels are only used for some islands that aren't connected to the main grid.

Good to know, can you link me to further explanation about this?

How effective can those arguments be? Quebec power is 95% hydro, you can argue about the remaining 5% but wait it's actually 80% (4%) wind!

I think there are arguments about sovereignty, not being reliant on a foreign country for power that could be made, but saying "what if we get the 1% diesel in the mix" is a terrible one.

Effective doesn’t mean “right” - it just means it worked.

The thing is, how much are they really cutting for transmission line poles? Their footprint is probably really small, inconsequential, really. It's not like they're building a highway :-)

75 feet wide over a 53 mile section of land already owned by the local power company. https://www.pressherald.com/2021/10/17/qa-on-question-1-will...

75 ft x 53 miles is a total of 0.74 square miles. The North Maine Woods are 3.5 million acres, or ~5500 square miles.

The total area consumed by the corridor will be about 0.014% of the woods.

It pretty much is like building a highway. Transmission tower lines are very big and wide. We (in Maine) also suffered the results of a natural gas pipeline installation, with people’s yards taken by eminent domain laws to make way for the construction.. I’m not surprised people voted against it this time around.

By size maybe. Way less disruptive than a highway though.

I'm confused, how could they be like a highway?

Don't your power lines look like this?

https://energytransition.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Wind...

1 pole of maybe... I don't know, 30m by 10m, every several hundred meters? That's a tiny footprint.

Isn't the rest just electrical cables hanging 20m in the air?

Sometimes they'll make a clearing for construction and/or maintenance that is basically a road.

It's not involved as building a highway, but from what I've seen, they need to clear a huge swath of land along the path of the wires.

https://videohive.img.customer.envatousercontent.com/files/9...

It's always hard to judge scale perfectly in pictures, but the base on those towers would be at least 2 traffic lanes, if not 4 wide. They didn't say what size highway.

EDIT: According to another comment[1], the cut is 75ft wide. That's enough for 6 lanes.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29101500

I don’t know if they were going to do it in this case but frequently they clear-cut the entire path the width of the towers between the towers.

The land beneath and to the sides of the lines needs to be cleared to install and maintain the line. It doesn’t look bad in that photo because it’s not cutting through the forest.

[edit] forgot a word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Power_lines_through_... They cut down all the trees nearby so its basically a clear cut strip thats as wide as the poles are tall.

Correct, and many towers are airlifted in by helicopter to minimize transportation time. But the problem for many locals is the maintenance of the right of way, and the false belief in negative effects due to proximity to electro-magnetic radiation. If you own the land adjacent to the right of way, you are generally paid by the transmission utility, but there are encumbrances placed on what you can do with your land within a certain proximity of the transmission corridor.

It is a huge wide swath, 20m-50m wide, with a road for maintenance access.

While not necessarily a huge footprint, it has an outsized environmental impact - this is because it forces and maintains a field ecosystem through the middle of the forest, effectively breaking the forest in two. While it isn't quite as bad as a highway, it greatly disrupts the ecosystem on both sides for 100s of meters into the forest, by bringing in more forest edge predators, vermin, diseases, etc.

Ecologically, the net effect may not be quite as bad as a highway, but it is still basically a kilometer-wide disruption band, breaking a single broad deep forest into two far smaller forests. Contiguous zones, not mere square acreage are turning out to be critical for the biosphere, and this is just another big disruptor.

Thank you for explaining this better than I could have. Just looking at the total land being clear cut really understates the ecological impact.

Basically they cut down all threes that have any potential to touch the line when falling down. And this has to be maintained, so it's better to go bit more. Considering height of the line it's not exactly small space required.

Looks pretty terrible to me. I wouldn't want this in my backyard just to benefit people in Mass:

https://static-35.sinclairstoryline.com/resources/media/78d2...

It does look quite terrible, but the last bit is an awful reaction in my opinion. NIMBY.

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