Provincial cabinet ministers like to accuse everyone else of not understanding what is going on or of being mistaken.
Here’s a typical quote from May 18 in Question Period:
MR. KING: Mr. Speaker, I realize members opposite are not in the habit of stating the facts, but I want to correct the member opposite,…
The problem for Mr. King and his colleagues, though, has been that they often don’t seem to have a sweet clue as to what is going on in the world around them. Some of them have about as much familiarity with facts and reason as a 12 year old girl looking for tickets to a Justin Bieber concert.
Take, for example, this claim – an old chestnut – by the province’s natural resources minister also made on May 18:
Nalcor has costed out the infrastructure that is going to be required to bring in the right number of megawatts of electricity to serve the Avalon Peninsula with the elimination of Holyrood. That is a stated goal of this Province. It is one of the major reasons why we are so focused on the development of the Lower Churchill, Mr. Speaker.
All of the infrastructure that is going to be required to bring the power onto the Island part of the Province, transmit it across the Province and eliminate Holyrood, and also create a subsea line to Eastern Canada and through to the United States is all part of the planning of the development of the Lower Churchill.
Got that?
Eliminate Holyrood.
Provincial government policy.
Spearheaded by the energy corporation, currently doing business as NALCOR Energy.
Someone needs to tell NALCOR, then, because here’s what the company said in its 20 year capital plan that it submitted to the public utilities board:
It is important to consider that whichever expansion scenario occurs, an isolated Island electrical system or interconnected to the Lower Churchill via HVDC link, Holyrood will be an integral and vital component of the electrical system for decades to come. In the isolated case Holyrood will continue to be a generating station; in the interconnected scenario its three generating units will operate as synchronous condensers, providing system stability, inertia and voltage control.
Holyrood: integral and vital component for years to come.
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