Issues & Concerns

Western Mass Towns for a Responsible Grid

ResponsibleGrid@gmail.com

September 21, 2026

Dear Governor Healey:

Western Mass Towns for a Responsible Grid urges you to prevent Eversource from unnecessarily clearcutting 278 acres in 11 towns. Their WT-11 project is the first of an extensive series of clearcuts they plan in Western MA, with another ~2000 acres facing the chainsaw next. State-designated categories of sensitive lands are included, as are places that generations of residents have cherished, with the surrounds of Buffam Falls Conservation Area as a case in point. People across the region would be furious and heartbroken to see your administration permit Eversource’s greed to ruin these places.

Of course we want Eversource to be a responsible steward of a reliable power grid, and of course that involves some cutting. However, Eversource’s actual goal for this project is not to improve reliability – which it wouldn’t, for the reasons below – but to boost Eversource’s own profits while doing nothing for affordability.

Eversource claims their intent is to improve reliability, but that’s a lie. Outages are almost never associated with large transmission lines. Unlike distribution lines, large transmission lines already have wide corridors, federally-mandated annual management, and redundant design for resilience.

• Not a single tree has caused an outage, ever, on the line that makes up 28 of this project’s 29.3 miles. Two have on the other, 1.3-miles of line, but it’s unclear if those trees should have been addressed by Eversource’s mandated annual management, and also whether the outages had any impact on customers or equipment, or were handled by redundancy.

• Large transmission lines have proven themselves decisively in real-world conditions. Even in the historic storm of October, 2011, across the entire Northeast, not a single large transmission line outage was caused by a tree outside the corridor width that Eversource already has cleared.

Eversource proposes to clearcut trees that couldn’t reach the lines. Their indiscriminate, straight-line swaths would approximately double their already-effective 125’-335’ corridor width. Thousands and thousands of the trees they’d cut are not hazards now – if they were, they’d have been addressed during annual management. Many of them will never become hazards, either. Even a cursory review of Eversource’s justification reveals biased assumptions and double-speak. For just one example, they propose to cut, now, every tree that might threaten the lines in the next 40 years. And, instead of a defensible way to project those 40 years of growth, they base their proposed cut zone on a fantasy that every tree will break current height records. With their proposal riddled by similarly faulty reasoning, we need government to demand objectivity and evidence.

So why is Eversource really pursuing this aggressive clearcut? Cutting 40 years of hypothetical growth in one fell swoop would cut Eversource’s cost of annual maintenance. Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of their proposal does Eversource broach the topic of their obvious savings, let alone any thought of passing them along to improve affordability. In fact, Eversource has been known to use the cost of projects like this to justify raising rates. Notably, Eversource raised rates even when their profits doubled in 2024-2025. 

Tell Eversource: No Clearcut for Profit. Don’t let them force a one-size-fits-all approach across an entire, multistate service area. WT-11 alone includes tiers of region-defining and state-designated environments (e.g., 86 acres of Priority Habitat of Rare Species; 47 acres of wetlands and riverfront; and 21 vernal pools). Verbally, Eversource claims they’ll encourage their subcontractors to be discerning in the most sensitive areas, but Eversource must be told:

1. Put it in writing. If they really do mean to be selective anywhere, that should be on their maps, and their precise intent should be detailed in their project narrative. 

2. Stick to selective cutting and pruning of soon-to-be hazardous trees wherever a substantial number of trees can be saved, at the very least in the environmentally sensitive areas of the project. This directive should apply in both the entire zone proposed for corridor-widening, and in the exceptional portions of the wire zone that Eversource has selectively maintained up until now.

The EEA issued their certificate for Eversource’s WT-11 Draft Environmental Impact Report, and despite hundreds of residents’ public comments before then and our attempted communication with that office since, without a bold statement from state leadership, we expect that Eversource will be allowed to proceed. In the absence of unbiased evidence that the project is necessary, and that its approach minimizes destruction, it must be stopped. Please step in to ensure that trees that don’t threaten the lines will be left to beautifully provide their irreplaceable benefits to habitats, the climate, our watershed, the air, and the residents of Western Mass. 

Sincerely,

Western Mass Towns for a Responsible Grid

More details at: NoClearcutForProfit.org