Eversource Energy's Northern Pass Project had received preliminary approval for the hydropower procurement under the energy diversification law. The following month, the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee rejected the Northern Pass Project's permit application to build a transmission line through New Hampshire, raising uncertainty to the status of Eversource's proposal. In March 2018, the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources announced that the state's electric distribution companies had "terminated the conditional selection of the Northern Pass Hydro project," and were concluding negotiations on the RFP runner-up proposal, Central Maine Power's 1.2 GW New England Clean Energy Connect project, as a replacement. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection approved the project in May 2020. Nuclear energy In September 2015, after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) downgraded the safety rating of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, Baker sent an open letter to the nuclear operations of the Entergy Corporation that owns and operates the plant, urging them to "perform an appropriate root cause analysis of [plant] shutdowns and to complete all necessary repairs and corrective actions." The following month, after Entergy announced that they would close the plant by June 1, 2019 rather than make expensive safety upgrades required by the NRC, Baker said that the closure was "a disappointment but it's not a surprise," with his administration stating that it "will work closely with Pilgrim's leadership team and federal regulators to ensure that this decision is managed as safely as possible, and we will continue to work with ISO and the other New England Governors to ensure that Massachusetts and New England has the baseload capacity it needs to meet the electric generation needs of the region." In August 2018, Entergy announced that it had reached an agreement to sell the Pilgrim facility to Holtec International to conduct its decommissioning, and the following month, officials from both companies met with NRC officials in Washington, D.C., to review the agreement. Offshore drilling In February 2018, Baker, along with the entire Massachusetts congressional delegation, wrote an open letter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke urging the Trump Administration to not include Massachusetts or North Atlantic waters in the administration's 2019–2024 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing program. Environmental policy Climate change In January 2016, Baker's administration announced that Massachusetts was on track to meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals. In September 2016, following the record breaking snowfall in Boston from