Tagged: renewable energy
Hydro Quebecwick? Not just Danny’s problem
This promises to be a continuing Contrarian topic, but I will flag it briefly: NB Power’s apparently imminent sale to Hydro Quebec represents a tectonic shift in Nova Scotia’s energy options.
I mention this because, as is typical, the national news media seem to view the story as just another installment in Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams’s (to them) clownish battles with central Canada. Such a view is as witless as it is patronizing.
The sale poses huge problems for Nova Scotia and PEI, as well as Newfoundland. If Quebec can use its windfall profits from Joey Smallwood’s disastrous 1969 deal on Upper Churchill Falls to buy up all the available routes that might get Lower Churchill Falls power to market, you have to wonder whether Canada really is a country any more.
Nova Scotia needs desperately needs to get off dirty imported coal as an energy source. Of our three local renewable energy prospects—wind, biomass, and tidal—two are intermittent and require large amounts of dispatchable backup energy. (Dispatchable means it can be turned on and off quickly, unlike thermal plants, and when needed, unlike wind and tidal). Pt. LePreau nuclear and Churchill Falls Hydro are the two best only two prospects. To justify the cost of Churchill Falls, we need to be able to transit any excess electricity to New England.
Premier Darrell Dexter speaks bravely about turning the sale, and Newfoundland’s antipathy to Quebec Hydro, to Nova Scotia’s advantage by building an undersea cable from Yarmouth to Maine. That would add a third undersea cable to the project. (The first two would cross the Strait of Belle Isle and the Cabot Strait.) Maine Governor John Baldacci, keen on forging an energy alliance with NB, has previously rejected that idea.
Dexter may by hoping to keep the young’un’s spirits up by whistling past this graveyard, but he must understand that this is first big crisis to face his administration.
A sale would also blows a big hole in nascent plans for a green energy pool involving the four Atlantic Provinces, another potential solution to the problem of intermittentcy of renewable energy supplies.
The Globe and Mail reports that Quebec is holding out a sweet carrot to NB Premier Shawn Graham: wiping clean NB Power’s $4.7-billion debt, and cutting power rates to consumers and businesses by $5-billion. That will be hard for the province to resist, and it goes without saying that no national government would risk offending Quebec by blocking the sale, even if it cripples energy options for three poor-sister provinces.
More on this in the days ahead. Meanwhile, Costas Halavrezos has a good interview with Yves Gagnon, KC Irving Chair of Sustainable Development at Université de Moncton here, CBC-New Brunswick’s estimable Jacques Poitras has some cogent analysis, and, as always, AllNovaScotia is on top of the story (subscription required). Reaction from Williams here and here. The Fredericton Gleaner likes the deal, as does the New Brunswick Business Journal.
Larry Hughes responds
A few weeks ago, I posted a critique of an opinion piece in the August 25 edition of AllNovaScotia.com [subscription required] by Prof. Larry Hughes of the Dalhouse University’s Computer Engineering Department. Hughes is currently toiling as a visiting professor of Global Energy Systems at Uppsala University in Sweden. Shockingly, Contrarian is not yet daily reading in that particular corner of Scandinavia, so he only recently learned of my comments. Hughes writes:
Contrary to what you have written, [my article in AllNovaScotia.com] has nothing to with NSP’s existing 2010 or 2013 requirements. The article is about NSP’s new 25% renewables energy target for 2015 — this is made quite clear in the first two paragraphs.
The jumble of targets and deadlines set forth various provincial government plans, strategies, regulations for coping with climate change is confusing. Hughes is correct that I overlooked his emphasis on the NDP’s newly announced, and very tough, 2015 target of generating 25 percent of our electricity from renewable sources, but I’ll leave it to readers to judge whether this obviates my disagreement with several with his assertions.
No one thinks meeting the 2015 targets will be easy. Even if electricity demand remains flat between now and 2015, Hughes says NSP’s use of renewable energy “must grow from 1,068 GWh (gigawatt-hours) in 2008 to 2,919 GWh in 2015, an increase of 1,851 GWh.”
The Nova Scotia Power website gives slightly different figures. It puts renewable generation at 12 percent, or 1,560 GWh, of its total production of 13,000 GWh. That would leave a gap of 1690 GWh, assuming no growth. If NSP’s energy conservation and energy efficiency programs bear fruit, we could conceivably have consume less power by 2015.
No matter what route we take, it’s going to be a tough slog, which is another reason why the province should not be squandering $30 per year on subsidies to home energy consumption.
Drinking the feed-in tariff Kool-Aid
In his latest Herald column, the normally estimable Ralph Surette drinks the feed-in tariff Kool-Aid. Moneyquote:
Check out how they’re doing it in Ontario and other out-front jurisdictions, where “feed-in” laws or “standard offer contracts” are in effect — in which the utility is required to take power produced by entrepreneurs at a fixed rate, no haggling. Wherever it’s been tried, there’s been an explosion of energy entrepreneurship and new jobs.
The [Nova Scotia Power] system of calling tenders one project at a time didn’t work elsewhere, and it hasn’t worked here.
Ralph makes a few good points in the column, but these two paragraphs contain more foolishness than enough.
Ontario passed a bill authorizing the Minister of Energy to permit the use of feed-in tariffs just six weeks ago, and the regulations haven’t been written yet. So it hasn’t produced “an explosion” of anything yet, except perhaps hyped expectations among the uncompetitive producers who have been pushing for such a law here. As for other jurisdictions, in North America, Ontario is it: the first state, province, or country to pass a feed-in tariff law.
As for tendered contracts not working, that will come as news to generations of good governance experts. Elsewhere in the same column, Ralph rightly criticizes NSP’s attempt to win Utility and Review Board approval for an untendered biomass project. Read more »
