BERLIN, VT - A banner reading “SHUT IT DOWN” was dropped Sept. 4 from an enormous fuel tank on the property of the Berlin 5 fossil fuel peaker plant. This comes just weeks after four Vermont residents were arrested for deploying a 175 foot banner from the smokestack of the oil and gas-fired Newington Station near Portsmouth, NH. The banner read, “No Coal No Gas,” and was visible to morning traffic crossing the I-95 bridge from Maine to Portsmouth.
No law enforcement were at the Berlin plant, so no arrests were made, but the No Coal, No Gas campaign has taken credit.
The group has recently conducted similar actions at the Schiller, White Lake, and Lost Nation peaker plants in New Hampshire, while in Vermont, local opposition to combustion-powered peakers has been spearheaded by community groups like 350 Vermont and VT Environmental Justice Network, with recent rallies outside Ascutney, Berlin, and Burlington peakers.
Despite operating only during intervals of skyrocketing electricity prices, fossil fuel peakers receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in payments from regional grid operator ISO New England simply for existing; these payments that are funded through ratepayer electric bills, while modest energy conservation by ratepayers would do the same thing and save all that ratepayer money.
Activists from Maine to Massachusetts are mobilizing for the shutdown of local peaker plants, galvanized in part by the shutdown of the region’s last coal-fired peaker in Bow, NH. “Collective organizing got us a shutdown date for coal in New England,” said Talia Trigg, who was arrested for scaling the smokestack in Newington. “Oil, gas, and biomass are hanging by a thread. you likely have a peaker plant in your area! If we band together with our neighbors to take these dinosaurs out, we can make a just grid transition possible.”
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