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The Nature Conservancy on Tuesday announced a landmark $168 million deal with Brookfield Renewable to purchase the company’s four hydroelectric dams on the lower Kennebec River, paving the way for their eventual removal.
The sale all but guarantees unfettered access for endangered Atlantic salmon and other seagoing fish from the Gulf of Maine to their historic spawning grounds upstream on the Sandy River for the first time since the Kennebec River was permanently dammed more than a century ago.
The four dams are located in and between Waterville and Skowhegan and are the last impediments between the mouth of the Kennebec River and its confluence with the Sandy River near Norridgewock.
The two parties finalized a purchase agreement on Sept. 15 that requires Brookfield to continue operating the dams over the next few years while The Nature Conservancy establishes a broader river restoration plan with stakeholder input, said Alex Mas, deputy state director for The Nature Conservancy in Maine, in an exclusive interview with The Maine Monitor.
“Ultimately, the bigger vision is a free-flowing lower Kennebec that restores the ecology and strengthens the economy,” Mas said.
The agreement does not include any of the five Brookfield dams farther upstream on the main stem of the Kennebec River and near its headwaters with Moosehead Lake, which experts say provides inferior fish habitat compared with the Sandy River.
In addition to the $138 million already raised for the purchase of the dams, Mas said The Nature Conservancy plans to raise an additional $30 million to complete the acquisition and fund the budget of a new nonprofit entity that will take ownership of the dams and continue to staff them with Brookfield engineers and technicians.
The nonprofit would then maintain the dams and ensure their continued energy production over the next five to 10 years or however long the lengthy federal regulatory process takes to decommission the dams. Meanwhile, The Nature Conservancy plans to solicit input from residents along the Kennebec River and others about how to remove the dams or redevelop their infrastructure.
That includes working with Sappi North America, whose paper mill in Skowhegan relies on water diverted by the nearby Shawmut dam for plant operations, to find a technical solution to continue to fulfill the mill’s water needs, Mas said.
Sappi employs 780 people at the Somerset Mill and recently completed a $500 million update that will double the production capacity of one of Somerset’s paper machines. It was the second of two multi-million-dollar improvements Sappi has made over the past decade.
“We are 100% committed to developing a solution with Sappi for the Somerset Mill and their long-term water system needs,” Mas told The Monitor. “The Nature Conservancy is a large forest landowner in the state, so we are very keenly aware of how important that mill is, not just to the economy in the region, but also to the forest products industry as a whole.”
It was only four years ago that Gov. Janet Mills’ administration recommended removing the Shawmut dam to improve habitat for Atlantic salmon and other seagoing fish. Sappi officials condemned the proposal and said Shawmut’s loss would cause it to close its paper mill.
The Maine Department of Marine Resources backed away from that proposal shortly after Sappi’s backlash and a lawsuit from the dams’ owner, Brookfield Renewable, demonstrating the contention around the dams and their role in Maine’s shrinking paper industry.
Sean Wallace, a vice president for Sappi North America, reiterated the company’s concern with removing Shawmut dam but said Sappi was open to negotiating a technical solution with The Nature Conservancy.
“We believe there are solutions that preserve the impoundment and allow fisheries to thrive without sacrificing the livelihoods and investments tied to the mill,” Wallace said in a statement.
Brookfield Renewable declined an interview request. In a statement given to The Monitor, CEO Stephen Gallagher said, “Brookfield remains committed to ensuring that Maine homes and businesses continue to benefit from reliable and clean hydropower on the Kennebec River and throughout the State.”
The return of the Atlantic salmon
Wabanaki officials, fishermen groups and others have advocated to remove the dams for decades. They hail the dams’ demolition as one of the last hopes to save federally protected Atlantic salmon from extinction after centuries of the species’ decline.
Once abundant across New England, today wild Atlantic salmon are only found in eastern Maine rivers. Roughly 1,200 total Atlantic salmon on average return to Gulf of Maine tributaries such as the Kennebec River each year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Of those, fewer than 100 adult salmon annually are captured at the Lockwood dam on the Kennebec River near Waterville and trucked around the three other upstream dams to their breeding grounds in the Sandy River, according to John Burrows, vice president of U.S. operations for the Atlantic Salmon Federation.
Improvements to the fish passways at the lower Kennebec River dams and others have only caused marginal gains for Atlantic salmon populations in recent years. Adults rely on truck transport to migrate upstream, and the juveniles they produce there often die when they migrate through the dams back downstream to the ocean.
“If the dams weren’t there, then we would have far better downstream passage and great upstream passage,” Burrows told The Monitor. “This run of adult fish could go from less than 100 on average to several hundred in a really short time.”
Ensuring unimpeded access to the cold, nutrient-rich habitat of the Sandy River is the single most important step to restore the species, state and federal officials have said.
“What’s so unusual about the Sandy is that it has kind of the best possible confluence of factors,” Mas said. “You have these incredible cold water springs, great natural substrate, shade and a huge abundance of high-quality habitat. Historically, before there were any dams, the Sandy River would have been one of the most important places in the state for Atlantic salmon.”
In addition to removing the four lower Kennebec dams, Burrows said two additional dam removal projects on tributaries leading to the Sandy River will open up 825 miles of river and stream habitat to the Gulf of Maine, creating a better chance for the Atlantic salmon’s survival.
The Atlantic salmon isn’t the only species that would benefit from a free-flowing lower Kennebec. River herring, Atlantic sturgeon and American eel all rely on Maine’s freshwater rivers to either spawn or feed before swimming out to sea.
Atlantic sturgeon — prehistoric, armored fish — are listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. (That is a step down in severity from the Atlantic salmon’s endangered status.) River herring and American eel support Maine’s robust fisheries economy as both product and bait for Maine lobstermen.
“River herring are a crucial forage stock in our ecosystems” and a preferred bait for lobster fishermen, said Ben Martens, executive director of Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association. “So there are very real benefits to the commercial fishing industry, the lobster industry, in particular, of getting local sustainable bait in the spring.”
Mas, Burrows, Martens and other fisheries advocates all point to the 1999 removal of the Edwards dam near Augusta and 2008 removal of the Fort Halifax dam near Winslow as a sign of the potential upsides to removing the final four dams on the lower Kennebec River.
River herring runs on the Kennebec River increased by 228% after the Edwards dam removal and 1,425% after the Fort Halifax dam removal, according to a 2020 study.
After years of decline, Atlantic and endangered shortnose sturgeon are now rebounding in the Kennebec River, too, producing a spectacle near Augusta each spring when they leap above the water’s surface during their migration upstream.
Energy tradeoffs, property tax changes
The ultimate removal of the four lower Kennebec River dams would mean the loss of the 46 megawatts of total electric capacity they provide Maine’s grid.
The four dams accounted for roughly 6% of the state’s hydroelectric capacity in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and an even smaller sliver of Maine’s total renewable energy capacity.
The Nature Conservancy and other dam removal advocates have highlighted these figures as proof that the lower Kennebec River dams’ energy contributions are minimal and outweighed by the ecological impacts they have on the larger river ecosystem.
Earlier this year, however, federal energy regulators cited New England’s electricity needs as one of the core reasons for continuing the four dams’ operations and approving their new or amended licenses.
As The Nature Conservancy continues to operate the dams for the next several years, it will work to develop new renewable energy sources and storage facilities that can be phased in as the dams are removed, Mas said.
The dams’ removal will also result in the loss of more than $500,000 in annual property tax revenue for Waterville, Skowhegan, Winslow and Fairfield, municipal tax records show.
Kristina Cannon, president and CEO of Main Street Skowhegan, said she’s confident that revenue can be offset by her nonprofit’s development of a whitewater river park in downtown Skowhegan and other regional redevelopment efforts happening elsewhere.
The river park alone will bring in $625,000 through annual tax benefits, Cannon said, and she has broader hopes that the Kennebec River valley will continue to usher in new outdoor recreation opportunities.
“What people need to remember first and foremost is that this is not happening tomorrow,” Cannon said. “This was a private sale, so this is not something that any of us locally could control, but what we should be doing is thinking about growth opportunities with what comes.”
Wabanaki connections
Many current Wabanaki tribal citizens descend from the Kennebec River area and have a distinct cultural connection to the river, said Darren Ranco, professor of anthropology at the University of Maine and a citizen of the Penobscot Nation.
In 1724, English soldiers violently attacked the Indigenous community that lived near present-day Norridgewock, eventually driving survivors and other Indigenous people in the Kennebec River valley north toward the Penobscot River and New Brunswick.
Ranco is a member of The Nature Conservancy’s board of trustees and will work with other Wabanaki officials to advise the nonprofit during its next stages of the dams’ acquisition and river restoration.
He said he sees immense potential for restoring the Kennebec River ecosystem, opening up traditional hunting and fishing opportunities, and highlighting Indigenous stories associated with the river valley and its place names.
“I think once you start to really open those up, you start to see the vibrancy of the ecology and the stories we’ve connected to over the last several thousand years,” Ranco told The Monitor. “And I think opening up dams opens up that flood of connectivity to places in that really deep way.”
Next steps
Mas, with The Nature Conservancy, said his organization is consulting both Wabanaki tribes and municipalities along the Kennebec River as it decides its next steps.
As part of the sale, The Nature Conservancy will acquire many land parcels and pieces of dam infrastructure such as the historic powerhouse at Lockwood dam. The organization is open to redeveloping them for some community or commercial purpose.
“Our hope would be that we could find a path that works for each [town] and not try to force them too quickly and just sort of pace it in a way that actually works,” Mas said.
After the four dams officially change hands, Mas said The Nature Conservancy will need to raise at least an additional $140 million to fund the surrender of the dams’ federal energy licenses, in addition to their ultimate removal and redevelopment.
Dam deregulation is a lengthy, resource-intensive process that requires in-depth environmental impact studies and technical back-and-forth between attorneys, engineers and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The four dams will also need to receive their new and amended federal licenses to operate in the interim, which could wrap up in the next few months depending on some state approvals.
The Nature Conservancy has already completed some initial environmental reviews on the dams and their impoundments, ensuring no toxic sediments have built up over the years behind the dams that could be released with their removal, Mas said, but more in-depth studies will be needed for the formal decommissioning approval process.
“We’re committed to both restoring the ecology of the river and strengthening the economy of the region,” Mas said. “And that means each site is a project unto itself, and we need to take the time to get the plan right.”