A U.S. district court judge in Massachusetts has granted NextEra Energy’s motion to dismiss claims the company violated federal and state antitrust laws in its efforts to block the New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) transmission project.
In a September ruling on an Avangrid lawsuit alleging that NextEra undertook an “anticompetitive scheme” to block the NECEC line, District Judge Mark Mastroianni found that Avangrid failed to prove NextEra exercised monopoly power.
NECEC is an under-construction 1,200-MW transmission line connecting Québec and New England. The project, which was selected in a 2018 procurement by Massachusetts, is intended to facilitate large-scale baseload imports of power into ISO-NE.
Avangrid’s lawsuit, issued in November 2024, alleges NextEra “has reaped hundreds of millions” from its efforts to stop or delay the NECEC line. Avangrid wrote that it has suffered at least $350 million in damages. (See Avangrid Sues NextEra over ‘Scorched-earth Scheme’ to Stop NECEC.)
NextEra, which owns more than 2,700 MW of generation capacity in New England — including the Seabrook Station nuclear plant in New Hampshire — opposed NECEC in regulatory proceedings in Maine and Massachusetts, funded a pair of ballot initiatives in Maine to block the project, and clashed with Avangrid over the upgrade of a near-capacity breaker at Seabrook that was required to interconnect NECEC.
The company’s opposition to NECEC appears to have successfully delayed its development for multiple years. While the referenda on the line ultimately were struck down in court and NextEra-funded political groups were fined for multiple campaign finance violations, the second referendum caused a two-year pause in construction on the line.
Avangrid initially expected to complete the project in late 2022; it remains in the late stages of construction.
NextEra filed a motion to dismiss Avangrid’s lawsuit in January, arguing that “all of the federal and state antitrust claims should be dismissed for the failure to properly plead monopoly power in a relevant market.”
In his Sept. 22 ruling, Mastroianni found that Avangrid failed to demonstrate that NextEra had monopoly power in New England.
“Avangrid has not identified NextEra’s percentage of market share in the relevant markets or even alleged, more generally, that NextEra possessed a predominant share” of ISO-NE’s markets, Mastroianni wrote.
“While Avangrid has alleged interconnection of NECEC was likely to lower NextEra’s revenue in the relevant markets, there are no facts from which the court could plausibly conclude NextEra was able to set above-market prices in marketplaces operated by ISO-NE,” he added.
Regarding Avangrid’s claim that NextEra resisted replacing the breaker at Seabrook to prevent new participants from entering the market, Mastroianni wrote that “a bottleneck that limits entry into the relevant market, on its own, is insufficient evidence of monopoly power.” (See D.C. Circuit Affirms FERC Ruling on Seabrook Circuit Breaker Dispute.)
“There must also be a basis for finding the defendant can ‘profitably set prices well above its costs’ or would gain such power through the challenged conduct,” he added.
“In the absence of sufficient allegations to support a finding that NextEra was able to charge supracompetitive prices within the relevant markets, or was likely to become able to do so if it could delay or prevent NECEC from entering those markets, the court cannot find NextEra’s multipronged campaign to delay or derail NECEC violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act,” Mastroianni concluded.
He wrote that the court intends to issue a separate order on other claims made by Avangrid alleging unjust enrichment, intentional interference with a contract and unfair business practices.
