Vermont Stands Alone

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The antis don’t care. They prefer renewables—wind and solar. Never mind that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine, meaning that the state’s utilities would need backup power from the grid and that power would most likely be generated by plants that burned fossil fuels, producing carbon. In addition, there is the problem in Vermont of the regulatory minefield that must be negotiated before anything as ambitious as a wind farm can be built. Many have tried. At this point, two have succeeded—and one of them is still a little short of being a done deal. Furthermore, even if wind farms were built in all the prime locations, the power they produced would be insufficient to replace that now provided by the nuclear plant.

But wind is renewable, so even though wind farms will blight the ridgelines of the Green Mountains, creating an eyesore visible for miles around, they are beautiful in the eyes of the believers and they must be built. To drive this point home, the legislature passed a law requiring the state’s utilities to purchase a fixed amount of power generated by renewables at a price several times higher than what they were paying Yankee. In Vermont, not all megawatts are equal.

In their campaign to close down Yankee, the anti-nuclear forces routinely disparaged Entergy as a “big, out-of-state corporation.” Vermont’s largest private-sector employer, IBM, is also large and from out of state. The state’s iconic business enterprise, Ben & Jerry’s, is owned by Unilever, a British-Dutch conglomerate. One of the major Vermont utilities, which supplies Vermonters with electricity generated by Yankee, is owned by Gaz Metro based in Quebec. (Gaz Metro is attempting to buy the state’s largest utility and merge it with the one it already owns.)

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The fight went increasingly against Yankee, and in 2010 the state senate took a vote on relicensing the plant. (This requirement is unique to Vermont, where in 2006 the legislature passed a bill, pushed by Peter Welch, that barred the state’s Public Service Board from issuing a permit for the continued operation of Yankee without legislative approval.) The senate voted “no.” It was the first and last vote on the matter, even though the 2006 law specifically calls for a vote of the “General Assembly,” which comprises the house of representatives as well as the senate.

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