Tagged: Caroline Wood
Psst: your bias is showing
A recent story by Andrew MacDonald in the online journal AllNovaScotia.com included the following sentence:
NSP has begun slowly moving its 500 workers out of the Barrington Tower office to a new $54-million HQ on the Halifax waterfront, dubbed the Bennett Bunker for NSP ceo [sic] Rob Bennett [emphasis in the original].
The phrase, “dubbed the Bennett Bunker,” is noteworthy for having been cast in passive voice, a grammatical form journalists often decry as a way for politicians and similar miscreants to evade responsibility for their actions. Who exactly “dubbed” NS Power’s office building “the Bennett Bunker?” Why, AllNovaScotia, that’s who.
It invented the phrase on July 3, 2008, the day conversion of the building (which is actually rebuilt, not new) was announced, and shortly after Bennett assumed the company’s top job. As best I can tell from a Google search, no one other media outlet has ever used it. This failure to gain traction elsewhere hasn’t discouraged AllNovaScotia’s writers, however. The journal has used “Bennett Bunker” in 35 subsequent stories. Wouldn’t the honest thing be to write, “which we at AllNovaScotia.com call the Bennett Bunker?”
The cutesy alliteration hasn’t caught on because it conveys no fresh insight about the building or Bennett’s term as head of NS Power. Writers usually apply “Bunker” metaphorically to the fortified redoubt of an uncommunicative public figure who hides out to avoid critics or public accountability. The record shows that, as chief executives go, Bennett is reasonably forthcoming. He testifies before the Utility and Review Board, makes public appearances, takes questions, speaks to editorial boards, gives interviews, and participates in public engagement sessions.
AllNovaScotia’s use of “Bennett Bunker” is of a piece with the starkly hostile coverage NS Power receives from some of its writers, and from Nova Scotia media in general, who report electricity cost issues as if NS Power were solely responsible for rising world energy prices, ever tighter environmental regulations, and the Buchanan government’s understandable, but now regretted, decision to overcommit to coal generation in the 1980s.
The fact that unhappiness over increasing electricity costs has focused public hostility on NS Power does not relieve journalists of responsibility for reporting the reasons for those cost increases competently, honestly, and evenhandedly. (And, yes, the same could be said of opposition politicians.)
[Disclosure: I have done occasional contract work for NS Power, mostly writing.]
Troublemaking semicentennial – corrected
Friends and admirers gathered in the Midtown Tavern’s antiseptic new digs Thursday evening to honor journalist-businessman David Bentley’s 50 years of afflicting the comfortable.
Among the crowd were foot-soldiers of the late, lamented Halifax Daily News (née: Bedford-Sackville News), the once salacious Frank magazine, and the meaty, fact-packed AllNovaScotia.com, which today ranks Nova Scotia’s premier newsgathering organization. As Frank might put it, all three began life as Bentley organs.
In 1974, Bentley, his wife, and two partners founded the weekly B-S News, modeling it after the sordid tabloids of his native England. Five years later, he took the enormous gamble of moving the paper downtown, transforming it into a daily, and taking on both the stolid Chronicle-Herald and the nacent, corrupt Buchanan administration.
After selling the daily to Harry Steele’s Newfoundland Capital Corp. in 1987, Bentley and business partner Lyndon Watkins founded Frank, a legendary tweaker of toffee-noses. In 2001, with daughter Caroline Wood, he founded AllNovaScotia, an online publication that is, ironically, today’s must-read for Nova Scotia’s ruling elites.
When future historians recount Nova Scotia’s late-20th Century transformation from a staid, British colonial outpost to an almost modern society, Bentley will emerge as an unsung central figure. He taught the province that ritual deference to one’s betters is the surest guarantor of mediocrity.
Our betters are still smarting from the lesson.
Fittingly, the quinquagenary brought out longtime Bentley protégé, celebrity shooter, and onetime Frank co-owner Cliff Boutillier, shown honing his lens in preparation for next week’s edition. The Glace Bay native grimaced at the intrusiveness of today’s bloggers with their pesky iPhones.
“Whoever told you sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander,” he demanded.
David Bentley, that’s who.
Prof. Hughes gets it wrong
Two weeks ago, AllNovaScotia.com, the excellent online journal run by daughter-father team Caroline Wood and David Bentley, ran the latest in a series of occasional pieces by Larry Hughes, a computer engineering coordinator at Dalhousie University.
Hughes is something of an energy policy gadfly. He expects energy will soon be in short supply globally, so he places a lot of emphasis on energy security, by which he appears to mean energy produced within Nova Scotia.
Nevertheless, Hughes opposes Nova Scotia Power’s plan to mix wood waste with coal to burn in its thermal generating plants. His piece, in the August 25 edition of AllNS [subscription required], makes a concise, persuasive case that wood waste would be better deployed in home heating.
Unfortunately, Hughes’s argument is marred by a string of misstatements about wind generation in the opening paragraphs. After noting that NSP is scrambling to meet a legislated requirement for increased use of renewable energy by 2010, he adds, “Until recently, ministers and NSP insisted wind would easily fill the gap.”
In fact, the contracts NSP signed with independent wind producers two years ago would have easily filled the gap, but when the world economy went into a tail spin 13 months ago, several of the producers lost their financing. It’s been clear since then that NSP would be hard pressed to meet the timetable.
But Hughes puts the financial meltdown far down the list of factors behind wind’s inability to fill the gap.
At the top of the list he puts the grid’s limited capacity for intermittent power. This is simply incorrect. Two years ago, NSP and the Nova Scotia Department of Energy commissioned a Wind Integration Study to evaluate the grid’s capacity to absorb intermittent power sources. It determined that the grid has enough capacity to handle the 2010 targets and, with careful management, the even greater requirements for 2013.
Beyond that, Hughes is right: If we want to keep ramping up our use of intermittent energy sources like wind, solar, and tidal beyond the legislated 2013 targets — and we do — Nova Scotia will soon have to invest very large sums to beef up our electrical grid.
Hughes also cited “the poor economics associated with wind in Nova Scotia.” In fact, the economics of wind power are better than average in Nova Scotia, because wind speeds are higher than average here. The price gap between wind and conventional energy sources has narrowed, and given the likelihood of future fuel price increases, it has probably already closed on a net present value basis.
Hughes also lists “multi-year delays” in wind turbine deliveries as a factor. That will come as news to Gamesa Corporación Tecnológica, a large Spanish wind turbine manufacturer. Gamesa announced in May that it would not meet sales targets because so many buyers had canceled purchases in the face of the economic meltdown.
In 2007. neither NSP, nor the Department of Energy, nor Larry Hughes, nor Parker Donham knew that the following summer, the world would experience the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Based on what we all knew then, the wind power contracts were a sensible approach to the need for more renewable energy. There is no need to invent reasons why it didn’t work out when the real reason is as clear now as it was unforeseeable then.
Finally, in describing the scramble to replace the likely-to-be unfulfilled wind power contracts, Hughes claimed that the province’s 2009 Energy Strategy expanded the term “renewable” to include “green” natural gas.
No it didn’t.
Natural gas is certainly the greenest of the ungreen fossil fuels, far less polluting and GHG-genrating than coal or even oil. But the revised energy strategy does not reclassify it as a renewable energy source, and while its use could help NSP reduce emissions, but it will not contribute to meeting the legislated renewable energy targets.
[Disclosure: I know this because I had a hand in the revised strategy, having been under contract with the Department of Energy as a writer on the project.]
Contrarian would be pleased to publish a response from Prof. Hughes.
