The Quebec Superior Court Decision #nlpoli

-srbp-

The Jewel in the Crown #nlpoli

If you are a Newfoundland politics junkie who hasn’t been reading Uncle Gnarley,  then you’ve been missing out.

You can fix that by reading the latest offering from Gnarley – a.k.a. Des Sullivan – about Nalcor and the idea of having bureaucrats play at being entrepreneurs.

While you’re at it,  you might also want to read a couple of SRBP posts to go with it:

• “The sound of silence” and
• “Newfoundland and Labrador Hydra”

-srbp-

How not to bolster public confidence: the umpteenth Nalcor edition #nlpoli

The folks at Nalcor held a media briefing at 11:00 AM on Tuesday.  it was supposed to be about the release of the independent engineer’s review of Muskrat Falls done as part of the federal loan guarantee.

You may recall this was part of some great confusion a few months ago when the provincial energy department answered an access to information request by saying they didn’t have a copy of the report only to have it emerge that Nalcor had had the report since the previous November and briefed at least a couple of cabinet ministers on it in the meantime.

That led to a bizarro series of telephone conversations between energy minister Derek Dalley and the Telegram’s James McLeod that just added to the sense that Dalley  - among others – had no idea what was going on in the world. Later on the provincial government announced they were creating yet another form of Nalcor oversight regime all built around informing the public. That turned out to be a whole lot of nothing at all and, to cap it off, Nalcor missed its commitment to issue a financial update at the end of the last fiscal year. (March 31)

Not a very good way to bolster public confidence in a company after the Nalcor-induced blackouts in January.

Premier Confusing #nlpoli

Premier Tom Marshall has been in cabinet since 2003.  He’s held pretty well all the big portfolios connected to Muskrat Falls, including natural resources and finance.

He should know details about Muskrat Falls backwards.

That’s why his comments in the House of Assembly on Monday caused such a stir:

Nalcor Oversight #nlpoli

The provincial government will be establishing a committee of senior public servants to co-ordinate information on Muskrat Falls for cabinet.

VOCM faithfully reported Premier Tom Marshall’s comments to reporters outside the House of Assembly.  The people want more, says Tom, so the Conservatives are going to give the public more oversight.  The new committee will receive monthly project updates and quarterly financial updates from Nalcor, according to the VOCM story. The committee will issue an annual report.

All new stuff supposedly.

Except it isn’t.

Access to Information - some misunderstandings #nlpoli

A tale out of Ottawa reveals the extent to which access to information problems crop up in lots of places.

CBC News asked for a copy of a memo from the commander of the Canadian Army about leaks of information within the army.  CBC apparently had a copy of the memo or someone had seen it and so they formally requested a copy.

The tale gets interesting because of the internal dispute over how to respond to the request.  Most public affairs officers advised the commander to direct the CBC to file an access to information request.  Only one public affairs officer – a former political aide to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney – advised against that action and, ultimately, refused to be the one to tell CBC what to do.

The army relented, largely due to that refusal, and released the letter to the media without forcing them to go through the access process.

Nalcor following wrong energy path #nlpoli

Think back to last December.

A couple of Nalcor guys bragged about the company’s strategy of importing electricity when they needed during the months when prices were low and then exporting our own electricity when electricity prices were high.

Brilliant idea.  It worked for Hydro-Quebec for most of the past 50 years.

There’s only one problem:  it won’t work any more.

The Sound of Silence #nlpoli

With all the talk the past couple of days about the relationship between the provincial government and the provincial energy corporation, it might be a useful time to ask a fairly simple question:

What does Nalcor do?

Might seem like such an obvious question that it you are laughing, but hang on a second and let’s see what turns up if we go back and look at what the Conservatives said in the past about the energy corporation.

The Confidence Campaign #nlpoli #darknl

The provincial government started its campaign to gain control of the political agenda on Thursday with its announcement that it would appoint someone to do something sometime in the future.

The conventional media outlets didn’t report Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s announcement that way.  The Telegram, for example, called it an “independent” review but acknowledged in the second sentence of its brief story that Dunderdale “doesn't know the shape or scope of the review”. 

CBC went farther in its online story, saying that the “independent review” would “look at the current electrical system in Newfoundland and Labrador; how it operates, how it is managed, and how it is regulated as the province moves from an isolated system to an interconnected system.”

But really, all of that is just an unsubstantiated claim, given that the news release includes these words in a quote attributed to the Premier:

…over the next six weeks my government will work to draft terms of reference and identify an independent body to conduct a review.

History’s Bitch #nlpoli

A half century ago, a bunch of very smart fellows – some of the smartest fellows of any generation ever – wanted to build a massive  plant in the middle of Labrador to make electricity.

One of the problems the project faced was a combination of costs and markets.  As Philip Smith recounts in Brinco:  the story of Churchill Falls,  the very smart men were concerned right from the start that nuclear power offered an almost unbeatable alternative to hydroelectricity for generating large amounts of electricity at relatively low cost.  The markets needed power and nuclear could do it cheaper.

Nuclear power also had a huge advantage hydro couldn’t match:  you can turn the plant on and off when you wish.  With hydro, you can make power only when you have the water.  Even with a massive reservoir, the generating output of the plant will go up and down during the year depending on how much water is available.

Get worried-er #nlpoli

Here are a bunch of stories all of which would deserve a post of their own but that are presented here cut down to the barest of bare essentials.

King of the Keystone Kops Strikes Again:  Not content to demonstrate his incompetence with his earlier budget shag up, justice minister Darin King (Twitter:  @King_Darin) announced on Thursday that 25 fisheries officers his department had booted out the door in the 2013 budget cuts would be rehired to a man and/or woman in very short order.

What can King possibly do to top this besides light his own underwear on fire during a live television interview?

Hide the matches, Tory staffers.

The other king named Darin:  Darin Pike will head the new Anglo school board for the entire province come the fall, the head of the provincial selection committee announced on Wednesday.

Pike’s experience includes a stint running the Eastern School district, which was the bureaucratic trial project for the creation of a single board for all English-speaking students in Newfoundland and Labrador.  Pike’s appointment is the penultimate act in the bureaucratic plan to eliminate public oversight of public education and replace it entirely with a system run by education bureaucrats who answer to no one except a cabinet minister who has no meaningful authority within the department. 

The plan started in 2004 when education department bureaucrats pitched the idea to the noob provincial Conservatives as a way of saving money.  In the event, they didn’t save a penny, but that was never the real purpose of the scam, err scheme. 

The plan did successfully consolidate de facto power in the hands of the deputy education minister and his four key subordinates, the chief executives of the districts.  The four district boards created under the re-organization scheme were powerless to do anything except as they were told.  This was perhaps most evident in the Eastern District where, from the chair, down to the lowliest anonymous character the board was populated with faceless cowards intent primarily on avoiding any public accountability for decisions they rubber-stamped.

Pike’s experience in implementing the plan makes him the ideal candidate.  D‘uh.

Faithful readers will recognise the similarity between an unaccountable education bureaucracy and the unaccountable provincial energy corporation, Nalcor.

Parochial or what?:  Apparently IOC has laid off some people.  The company won’t say how many.  The CBC story only talks about events in this province. 

The Quebec weekly Le Nord-Cotier broke the story a couple of days ago.  SRBP linked to it a couple of days ago.  The Quebec paper mentioned all the towns and cities where people got the boot, including the ones not in Quebec.

The World Stops at Donovans:  In Nova Scotia, the province’s utilities regulatory board is up to its eyes in the Muskrat Falls controversy.  Search the Internet and you’ll find a raft of stories about the UARB hearings and on public debate about the project.  On this side of the Cabot Strait, you’d be hard pressed to know there is anyone living there. 

The only local mentions of the story have been questions posed to Nalcor boss Ed Martin, who was characteristically vague and uninformative. 

Nice to be wrong Update (7:50 AM):  Telegram.  Top of Page 4.  Canadian Press story on Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter’s lack of concern about the Nova Scotia opposition to Muskrat Falls and the Maritime link.

The Norwegian Model:  Norwegian energy giant Statoil announced this week that was reconsidering a major offshore project in part because of changes to Norwegian tax rules. 

"In addition, the Norwegian government has recently proposed reduced uplift in the petroleum tax system, which reduces the attractiveness of future projects, particularly marginal fields and fields which require new infrastructure. This has made it necessary to review the Johan Castberg project," says Øystein Michelsen, Statoil's executive vice president for development and production in Norway.

The Norwegian government is a majority shareholder in Statoil.  Norway manages its state-owned companies like all others, though, subjecting them to the same laws as private sector corporations. 

The Nalcor Model:  On May 31, Nalcor cleared the final bureaucratic hurdle for the Labrador-Island transmission link for Muskrat Falls with news that the provincial environment department had accepted the company’s environmental impact submissions. It’s all in the minister’s hands now.  He must recommend to cabinet whether to approve the project or not.

What are the odds Tom Hedderson would suggest to cabinet  that Nalcor stop work?

More than Muskrat Update (7:50 PM):  On the top of page three of the Friday Telly, there’s a second story by Ashley Fitzpatrick about the Nalcor AGM.  The headline:  “More than Muskrat discussed at Nalcor AGM”. 

Sure there was.

According to the story, Nalcor senior management talked about how Nalcor spending (i.e. cost) is up across the board. 

The reason they didn’t want to discuss as such? 

Muskrat Falls: it’s been driving up everyone’s costs and that’s going to get worse before it gets better.  "It would be easy to blame Muskrat," according to Nalcor vice president Derrick Sturge.

Easy, yes.

Accurate?

Absolutely.

What else wasn’t Muskrat Falls? 

Energy marketing, which, of course, has nothing to do with Muskrat Falls except when the gang at the AGM talked about selling surplus power from Muskrat and all these other sales into markets that are not there.…
that’s right there in the story with the “Not Muskrat”  headline.

Big sales potential over the next three or four decades, according to Ed Martin. 

Really?

Interesting then that Nalcor hasn’t been able to nail down any long-term sales already (hence the reason to force taxpayers to buy 100% of Muskrat for only notionally using 40% of the power.

Sure.

They talked about a lot that wasn’t Muskrat Falls.

-srbp-

Get Worried #nlpoli

Not surprisingly,  a band of familiar faces turned up at Nalcor’s annual public meeting to put questions about Muskrat Falls to Ed Martin, the man more and more people are calling the de facto Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador.

And equally unsurprisingly, Ed Martin continued with the sort of uninformative or misleading comments of the sort he made most notoriously about water management and generating capacity in 2012.

The fact that Martin does not speak plainly and therefore honestly about anything Nalcor is doing should make people extremely nervous.

Hydro’s Problem Questions #nlpoli

As the Telegram reported on Saturday, the Public Utilities Board has suspended consideration of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro’s 2013 capital works application.

The company is having trouble answering a couple of questions.

Here are the ones that are causing problems.

Looking beyond the Hebron sandbox #nlpoli

ExxonMobil drew a line in the sand this morning, and the minister and I are here to draw another line in the sand, as far as this project is concerned.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale, 21 June 2012

Premier Kathy Dunderdale and natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy spent more than a half hour meeting with reporters on Thursday to talk about the provincial government’s position that a major module for the Hebron project must be built in the province.

Take a look at the scrum video.  There is a lot of talk.  There is a whole lot of talk.  Some of it tough-sounding.  There are threats.

But there is so much talk, and so much rambling, and so many threats that most of the talk is unconvincing.

A closer look at the history and the agreements pulls you toward the same conclusion.

Conflict of Interest and the Nalcor board appointments #nlpoli

2050 hrs – Mulligan Update – scroll to the end

Leo Abbass is the mayor of Happy Valley-Goose Bay.

He is a staunch of supporter of the Conservative Party.  He is such a staunch supporter of the Conservative Party – federal or provincial – that he can sometimes take on the appearance of the Pushme-Pullyou from Doctor Dolittle.

More Muskrat Fun: HQ, NALCO and PEI #nlpoli #nspoli #cdnpoli

The Ghosts of Hydro-Quebec and NALCO:  A pair of readers fired off separate e-mails to point out an alternate  explanation for the “anything cabinet decides they can do” clause from the energy corporation legislation than the tack SRBP took.

They both pointed to comments made over several years by different politicians about making the local energy corporation act like Hydro-Quebec.  In the province those same pols love to hate, HQ gets involved in all sorts of public works.

The HQ spending supplements what the provincial government is doing and, as some of those pols noted, helps to keep a raft of what is essentially provincial government spending from the prying eyes of the Equalization cops.  The result is that Quebec gets to collect more Equalization than it might otherwise get if they transferred the HQ cash into the provincial treasury and had it counted as provincial government income for the purposes of calculating Equalization entitlements. To paraphrase one e-mail, you can also bitch at the same time about Ottawa not doing enough for your province as you collect all this extra money.

Those readers are absolutely right.  Some politicians had that as part of their goal for the energy corporation.  Usually they tied it with nationalising Newfoundland Power to create One Big Crown corporation.

Just to refresh people who might not have followed the whole discussion going back five years, the SRBP view is that Nalcor was essentially supposed to be like the old NALCO.  That was a failed Smallwood-era plan to use one giant corporation that controlled all the province’s natural resources to broker development.

NALCO with an R tacked on the end might not be able to control all resources but it would be able to assume an increasingly stronger role in economic development.  You can look at the exploration program and incentive grants created under the 2007 energy plan let Nalcor use its financial power to foster a leading relationship with smaller, cash-strapped local companies.  The fibre optic deal has Nalcor and the provincial government as the larger partner in the deal.  Even offshore, Nalcor’s exploration program can be seen as a way to step into areas where the private sector isn’t interested at the moment and where Nalcor can assume a dominant role.

Basically, though, the Equalization dodge and the One Big Corp idea aren’t incompatible with the idea of having the energy corporation assume a NALCO-like role in the economy.  The two ideas fit together rather neatly.

In a related story, federal New Democratic Party leadership contender Thomas Mulcair showed up in Prince Edward Island garnering supporter for his campaign.  Part of the story in the Guardian included this rather curious reference by a prominent Island Dipper:

"Tom supports policies which are good for P.E.I. including federal support for the Lower Churchill development which will give us a third electric cable and support for a moratorium on hydraulic fracking."

What Joe Byrne seems to be talking about is actually not a Lower Churchill project at all.  It’s a plan to run another line from the mainland to PEI.  There’s an SRBP post on it from January 2011 when the conventional media reported the federal government wouldn’t fund the project as a green initiative.

Other than that, the only time anyone talked about PEI and the Lower Churchill in the same breath was in 2005.  Back then a British Columbia company was looking at the idea of running a cable to PEI  directly from Labrador.  If memory serves, Nalcor was also thinking about the same option.  Apparently it never got to the point where anyone discussed it officially with the people running Prince Edward Island.

Of course with the Emera deal, there’s no reason to run another bunch of underwater lines to PEI. 

However, if the Islanders are happy to pay outrageous prices for electricity, the gang at Nalcor would be happy to speak with them.  They have just the thing you are looking for.

- srbp -

Aylward questions Nalcor on choice of consultant

Liberal leader Kevin Aylward has sent a letter to Nalcor boss Ed Martin asking about Nalcor’s use of Navigant as the consultant the company chose for a review of the Muskrat Falls project.

The Liberals posted the letter to the party’s campaign website on Tuesday but apparently didn’t give it wide circulation.

In the letter, Aylward asks;

1. When was Navigant retained to produce a report on the Muskrat Falls power project?
2. What is their investigative mandate?
3. Who, outside of Nalcor direct employees and contractors, will be consulted?
4. When and where will Navigant be conducting public consultations, if any?
5. What is the contract price?
6. When is the report contracted to be received?
7. When will the report be issued to the public?
8. How many other “independent reports” hitherto unknown to the public have been  commissioned or are currently under way?

Aylward criticises Nalcor for keeping the name and mandate of the consultant public until after the release of the joint environmental review panel.

The provincial Tories have used Navigant before on politically-driven projects.

In 2006, then Premier Danny Williams used Navigant to try and audit the books on the Hibernia project as part of his war with the oil companies over the collapse of Hebron talks in April that year.

Two years later, Williams used Navigant in his war against AbitibiBowater that led to the botched expropriation of AbitibiBowater properties in the province. Then natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale told the House of Assembly in early 2010:

Mr. Speaker, there was in fact approximately $8 million spent on professional services related to the expropriation of Abitibi by my department last year. We paid a substantial amount of that money to CRA, to Navigant Consulting, to Weirfolds, a legal firm, and Enda Searching, to do particular work around the expropriation itself, around land registry consolidation; CRA, particularly with regard to the remediation requirements in Grand Falls. That work informed our budget, Mr. Speaker, where we budgeted over $9 million to deal with the mess left behind by Abitibi in Buchans.

Dunderdale and Williams hid their mistake in expropriating the Grand Falls-Windsor mill and other environmental liabilities until early 2010 when they admitted to the shag up under questioning in the provincial legislature.

Dunderdale told the legislature in 2010 that when the government realised the cock-up they considered introducing legislation to retroactively un-expropriate the properties they’d seized as part of the screw up.

- srbp -

Nalcor Royalties: yet more information

•   Part 1:  Resource give-away
•   Part 2:  Nalcor Royalties – more information

Nalcor estimates the company will pay anticipated royalties to the provincial government totalling  $2.06 Billion dollars.

That’s from the second post in what has become a miniseries.

Nalcor followed up with some further information on how much oil they estimate is involved and how much they estimate the gross revenues will be.

Here’s the verbatim paragraph from Nalcor’s e-mail:

Nalcor Energy's total anticipated royalty payments of at $2.06 Billion dollars is included in a total projected gross revenue of $7.58 Billion.  These revenues are expressed in nominal terms meaning they are the sum of un- discounted cash flows.  The calculation uses the "PIRA Brent Reference" pricing issued November 2010.  Each project has a different oil price project owing to its differences in crude quality.  As an approximation, $92/bbl [$92 per barrel] in 2010 [dollars] can be used escalated thereafter. Total Nalcor Energy reserve volumes used for the calculation was 52.8 million barrels (proven and probable).

Nalcor may not have to pay any royalties from Hebron even though Nalcor’s projection assumes it will.

Under the Hebron financial agreement, the provincial government can exempt Nalcor from paying any royalties at all on its 4.9% interest.

The escalation is two percent per year.

- srbp -

Misleading the House: recall the whole recall power story

Why would Nalcor mislead the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, asks finance minister Tom Marshall with all the seriousness he can muster.

Yes folks, the fellow with one of the worst cases of pinocchiosis politica ever seen in this province wonders how people at a Crown corporation who hang out regularly with politicians some of who are infected with P. politica could catch the same disease.

Let’s leave the question of motivation out for a second and look at whether or not Nalcor and the provincial government are misleading people about Muskrat Falls.

The answer is undeniable:  yes, they are.

Take recall power as a classic example.

The province will need more electricity within the next decade, according to Nalcor.  For the sake of this post, let us assume that this is correct.

And what’s more, let’s go with the idea that the extra electricity is measure on the scale of several hundred megawatts.

Where to get that extra juice?

Muskrat Falls, says Nalcor.  Gigantic project, but we have to do it because the power is needed and it will be cheaper in the long run.

Again, for the sake of this post, let us allow all those things.

Recall power, sez someone on a morning open line show.  Bring power back from Churchill Falls.

Not enough.

Only 300 megawatts, total.  Some is already sold and used in western Labrador and the rest just isn’t enough to meet the need.  One of Nalcor’s communications people even sends the radio show host and e-mail making the point.

While the information is correct, it leaves out a whole bunch of other stuff.

And that’s what makes Nalcor’s version of recall power grossly misleading.

Under the law that is supposed to ensure the people of the province get the electricity they need at the lowest possible price, the public utilities board could recall as much electricity from Churchill Falls as the people in the province need.

Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation – the people who make the power – and Hydro-Quebec – the people who buy it – would get paid for their lost power.  They’d get compensation.  

We don’t know at this point how much the compensation would be but the cost would be not even half what Muskrat Halls power will cost people in this province.

Heck, your humble e-scribbler would lay odds it would not even be  even ten percent of what the Muskrat falls power is going to cost local taxpayers.

All the provincial government would have to do to make that happen is tax take back an exemption Nalcor got from the provincial government while Beaton Tulk was interim Premier.  The exemption makes sure the PUB can’t control electricity in the province.  It also ensures Nalcor doesn’t have to deliver power at the lowest cost to consumers, if the company doesn’t want to do that.

All that Nalcor would have to do is run a line from Churchill Falls to Soldiers Pond. And gee, isn’t that line what they already have planned and costed at less than $2.0 billion.

Poof.

Job done.

Total cost:  not even half of the current estimate for Muskrat Falls and all the transmission lines.

No question:  Nalcor is misleading the people of the province about recall power.

But why would they do it, asks the finance minister?

Well, only the gang at Nalcor can say for sure, but let’s just recall what Fortis boss Stan Marshall said once about the problem with Crown corporations like Nalcor and expensive projects:

“Simply when things go wrong we’d like to be able to rectify them,” he told reporters.

“If you’re going to go in with a partner you’ve got to know that partner very, very well, have a lot of commonality.

“Governments … their agenda can be very, very  different than a private enterprise.”

Government’s agenda can be different from that of private enterprise.

In other words,  Crown corporations might do things for political reasons instead of sound business reasons. Muskrat Falls gave Danny Williams the political cover he needed to quit politics.  Now Muskrat Falls is the Tory party’s election platform.

Nalcor couldn’t disown this project even if they wanted to.

It’s politics.

So they have to tell only half a story, like the misleading story they tell on recall power.

Or, for that matter, like the story Tom Marshall tells about the public debt.

If Tom Marshall wants to know why Nalcor misleads people, he need only look in the mirror.

- srbp -

The truth is out there…Nalcor version

The truth is out there.

You just really have to read Nalcor’s stuff really carefully to find it.

Take, for example, a recent letter in the Telegram by Greg Jones,  Nalcor’s manager of business development:.

In a nutshell, the option of wind energy storage didn’t pass Nalcor’s initial test based on the most basic of screening criteria, specifically commercial availability.

The technology is simply not there to make it commercially viable.

…

Another consideration is the average service life comparison of generating assets: hydro plants (about 100 years), thermal plants (typically 30 years), wind turbines (average 25 years) and fuel cell stacks (these are a major

part of a wind energy-to-hydrogen-to-electricity storage system and have a life of five to 10 years depending on design).

You can check out Nalcor’s senior management blog for more information but what you’ll get is more of the same:  carefully word rationalisations for conclusions already reached. 

To make matters much worse, the posts don’t link to any concrete information anywhere else – even to other posts on the same blog on the same topic – that would back up the Nalcor claims.

Very bad sign.

Big zero on the credibility meter.

But just for the sake of curiosity, read Jones’ short bit in the Telly carefully, though. 

Very carefully.

More carefully than most people would actually read it. 

Do the same with the posts on the Nalcor blog.

What you’ll quickly realise is that the wind energy option Jones is talking about is one carefully constructed to fail the conditions Nalcor has selected to justify its pet debt project.  It’s called situating the estimate, as opposed to estimating the situation.

Another phrase for it is “playing with words.”

Jones is not talking about wind power generally.  he’s speaking very specifically about wind power in a system where the island remains cut off from the rest of North America.  So when he says wind couldn’t get beyond the basic requirements, he is really talking about a version of wind power that is set up to fail.

Nalcor doesn’t talk about wind power with an interconnection to Nova Scotia that would allow surplus power from wind and hydro to be sold off to the export market when it isn’t needed on the island. That would likely beat Muskrat on every count, by miles, including cost to consumers.

There’s more.  Scroll back to the bit where Jones says that the “technology is simply not there”.  He’s referring to storing up the electricity wind would generate when the grid doesn’t need it.

The technology to deal with surplus is there. it’s the interconnection to Nova Scotia.

Wind should be part of the province’s energy future and Nalcor’s plans for today.  The problem is that Nalcor doesn’t want wind energy since it would interfere with its Muskrat Falls megadebt project.

So they carefully construct scenarios in which they claim their debt monster is the only solution.

Now Nalcor does put a little star beside its assumptions sometimes. Take this July 6 post attributed to vice president Gil Bennett in which he gives the reasons why Nalcor doesn’t want to develop wind energy for Newfoundland and Labrador:

2) The island of Newfoundland is an isolated grid. When we have surplus wind generation, we can't export to our neighbours, like Denmark or other European countries can; we also can't import power to our province when we have a shortage of wind generation.

A couple of paragraphs later he adds the asterisk:

The Labrador-Island Transmission Link and the Maritime Link will resolve these issues in the future by providing connections to the rest of North America.

And there you have it.

Connect the island to the mainland – even via the Maritime link alone – and the Nalcor objection to wind energy evaporates along with the rest of its rationalisations against any alternative to forcing consumers to carry the costs of its multi-billion dollar boondoggle.

Interestingly enough what the Nalcor gang also don’t tell you is that right now, today, their beloved hydro has a storage problem.  Nalcor has more generating capacity on the island than it has demand.

In fact, they’ve got so much surplus that their storage system  - the ponds and reservoirs of central and western Newfoundland – can’t store all of it.  As a result, they issued a news release on August 4 warning travellers that they will likely be dumping water throughout their hydro system on the island.

What a waste.

If only there was some way to ensure that there was some way to prevent that…

Like say a line to Nova Scotia, currently estimated to cost less than $2.0 billion. That’s less than one third of Nalcor’s current estimated cost for Muskrat, the supposed lowest cost means to meet the province’s energy needs.

Then Nova Scotians could displace all that dirty and expensive thermal power and buy some of our hydro and maybe even some newly installed wind power. 

The hydro has all been bought and paid for.   Nalcor wouldn’t have to sell that electricity at a huge discount as they will be doing with Muskrat power, if it gets built.  In fact, Nalcor could sell their surplus power today at current market prices in Nova Scotia and make a tidy profit.

The truth is out there. You just have to read Nalcor material; awfully carefully to find it.

- srbp -