You know things are bad when even the people who back Muskrat Falls without question start challenging stuff that has long ago been proven correct.
The heir to the Moon Man’s crown got some things right. If you consider that the cost for Emera of building the Nova Scotia line is a trade for electricity, then they will get it for about 3.5 cents a kilowatt hour.
And then everything went horribly wrong for Jack.
Emera will get the power for 35 years, not 20 like Jack claimed. They will never see a price increase for it ever. That’s because they are getting the electricity for free, in effect.
Meanwhile, the people who own the river making the electricity will see their electricity go up regularly for those 35 years.
Around the 2:00 mark, Jack claims the line for the electricity will be more expensive than the dam itself. Nalcor’s figures put the cost for the dam at around $2.9 billion and the line to Soldier’s Pond at around $2.1 billion. Those figures are not correct but let’s go with them for now.
He claims it will only cost two or three cents a kilowatt hour to make the electricity. As Nalcor explained to the public utilities board, Muskrat falls electricity would cost about seven times that if you used the conventional way of pricing it. By spreading the cost over more than fifty years, Nalcor can get the price to consumers down to a mere two and a half times Jack’s number.
As things keep going, Jack just gets worse. By the time he’s done he claims that electricity for export will cost less than the electricity for people in St. John’s. He gets on with some malarkey about water otherwise spilling over the dam. The only reason Nalcor can give power to Nova Scotia for free under the proposed deal and think about selling it anywhere outside this province for less than it costs to make it is because the people of this province are going to pay for everything at Muskrat Falls, in full, plus profit. They will only use about 40% of the juice but they will pay for 100% of the project’s output.
Jack finishes with a flourish. Something about Internet bloggers or other. Seems he doesn’t like those people.
Then he adds that there are none so blind as those who will not see.
That is true.
Unfortunately for Jack, that is just another one of his “own goal” efforts. You see, Jack is sadly misinformed but thinks everyone else is wrong. What’s worse he fights with people like randy who try and correct him. You can’t get any more blind than that, Jack.
His best one to date, though, was at the public utilities board hearings. Swinimer finished off his presentation by admonishing the board to ignore ex-politicians, bloggers and…you guessed it …the people who call open lines shows.
Come to think of it, that last bit turns out to be good advice.
-srbp-