Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission awarded a five-year contract to Louis Berger & Associates to prepare Environmental Impact Statements (EIS’s) and Environmental Assessments (EA’s). Working on behalf of the Office of Hydropower Licensing (OHL), Berger is assisting the agency in its regulation of hydropower plants throughout the United States. The OHL is responsible for regulating nonfederal hydropower development consistent with federal and state environmental laws, and ensuring that environmental and other concerns are adequately addressed.

This contract requires the ability to mobilize a nationwide staff with environmental expertise, and the ability to perform the work in an unbiased manner while interacting with applicants, agencies, and a variety of public interest groups. An important part of Berger’s services on this contract consists of defining the important environmental issues and assessing complex environmental impacts. The staff must which measures will reduce impacts to an environmentally acceptable level and then draft license conditions and other documents that will ensure that resources are adequately protected, mitigated, or enhanced.

Berger has principal responsibility for evaluating potential environmental impacts and for recommending protection, mitigation, and enhancement measures. Berger also has the principal responsibility for evaluating the many potential engineering issues such as the engineering and construction of hydroelectric facilities, project safety, and the need for the usefulness of project power.

Much of the work for this contract involves the preparation of EIS’s and EA’s, but the contract also involves preparing numerous other reports related to hydropower licensing and re-licensing. Some of these reports include amendments to license, exemptions from license, license and exemption surrenders, environmental compliance reports, special engineering and environmental reports, testimony for hearings, draft license orders, and other ad hoc analyses and reports.

Under this contract Berger is also conducting headwater benefits studies on several river basins. Headwater benefits studies require Berger’s energy experts to acquire, review and interpret daily flow, generation and storage data for each project studied. Conducting theses studies involves analyzing anticipated annual energy gains from each storage project and determining the fees each project should pay for the benefits.