The owners of four dams on the Kennebec River are proposing changes they say will make it easier for fish to reach their spawning grounds.
The changes are outlined in the environmental impact statement that is part of the dam owners’ relicensing applications submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The four dams are Shawmut and Weston, both owned by Brookfield White Pine Hydro LLC, plus Merimil Limited Partnership’s Lockwood project and Hydro-Kennebec. FERC released the environmental impact statement at the end of March and the public may comment until the June 4 deadline.
The dam owners first applied for relicensing in 2020 and then revised their applications in 2021 to include increased protections for Atlantic salmon and other anadromous fish species.
The existence of hydroelectric dams on Maine’s waterways has been a hot-button issue between the businesses that own them and environmentalists for decades. Hydropower operations harness the water’s energy to produce electricity. Environmental groups say the dams do more harm than good and are killing some of the state’s native species, such as Atlantic salmon.
The major changes in the dam owners’ proposals would add systems by which fish can swim into a fishway on their own, plus fish lifts at Weston and Shawmut dams and an access road to maintain the fishway at Lockwood, according to the environmental impact statement.
Downstream modifications would increase survival by installing mesh on power intakes to protect salmon kelts — the fish that have spawned already and didn’t die — from turbines at all facilities and guidance booms at Shawmut to help the fish find the fishways.
Brookfield also proposes operational changes so that salmon, sturgeon and eels have access through the dams for a longer period by increasing the length of time the fish passageways are open each year. FERC proposes extending those periods even more.
But the Natural Resources Council of Maine says those measures are not enough.
The proposed fishway system has not worked in other states, the council said in a press release. The group said native Atlantic salmon have all but disappeared in the Connecticut and Merrimack rivers where FERC tried a similar approach.
The group recommends more upstream fish lifts on all of the dams, finer mesh screens on the turbines, strong performance standards for what is there to help the fish, and a plan for making changes as necessary between licensing reviews at the very least.
The ideal solution would be total removal of the dams, the council said.
