The New England governors and eastern Canadian premiers were in town on Monday for a quick meeting.
The only thing that seemed to make local news was talk about electricity sales. This is old hat for regular readers, but it is worth going over again.
New England wants to buy electricity. They can get lots of it very cheaply thanks to shale gas lately. How cheaply, you may wonder? Well, in August it was running around four to five cents a kilowatt hour wholesale, not including transportation.
To put that in Muskrat Falls perspective, it is less than half the cost of making electricity according to the estimate five years ago. Where the price is these days is anybody’s guess.
Where the price will be two years from now is a whole other thing. Premier Paul Davis told the governors that Muskrat Falls electricity will be available for them to buy in late 2017 or early 2018.
Davis is far more optimistic about that date than the guy running Nalcor. Ed Martin won’t promise when the thing will be finished. As it is, they won’t be cutting off the water to build the dam until the end of next year.
Regular readers will recognise these points and a bunch more is same argument from the recent post about Ontario. Take a second and read it, if you missed the post the first time around.
When you have done that, you will realise that what Paul Davis and Derrick Dalley were talking about today is absolutely irrelevant. Everyone in the room – except maybe the local reporters – knew that Davis and Dalley are full of crap. They can’t get Muskrat Falls electricity to New England at a price anyone will pay for it. Gull Island is just insanely expensive beyond that.
Davis and Dalley are also irrelevant because the pair of them will be looking for new jobs come Christmas. With any luck, Gil Bennett, Ed Martin, and the rest of Nalcor’s senior management will be working somewhere else.
What we should all be wondering is what Dwight Ball and the new crowd set to run the place will be like. Frankly, while Paul and the boys are in the jobs at the moment, their opinion doesn;t matter on anything that happens after December 2015.
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