The provincial government set its budget this year based on an oil price forecast of US$124 a barrel in 2012.
As we move up on the midway point in the fiscal year (it starts on April 1), oil is well below that. The result is that the provincial government could wind up with a deficit of nearly three quarters of a billion dollars, according to the Premier.
Some people are amazed by this.
They shouldn’t be.
This fits a pattern.
“Nalcor’s position”, wrote the joint federal-provincial review panel on the Lower Churchill project, “was that up to 800 MW of energy from the Project would be required to meet provincial demand,…”.
And there are Nalcor’s forecasts that support the claim that out of the 3,000 megawatts potentially available from the Lower Churchill project, the province will need 800 megawatts.
There’s something about that number, 800.
Hmmm.
Yesterday’s offhand reference to Nalcor’s electricity demand forecasts brought home a couple of points to your humble e-scribbler.
The biggest one is that a great many people still do not know a lot of the basic information on this project despite the fact the provincial government announced it the better part of two years ago.
Well, never let it be said that this wasn’t a space where information was hard to find.
From April 2009, here’s Kathy Dunderdale – then the province’s natural resources minister – quoted in a news release on an historic agreement that saw Nalcor wheeling electricity from Churchill Falls through Quebec to the United States:
“This is a significant development for us to share our excess green renewable energy with the rest of North America through our transmission access through Quebec and our subsequent arrangement directly with Emera Energy,” said the Honourable Kathy Dunderdale, Minister of Natural Resources. “These markets are seeking clean, reliable energy, which we have in abundance. The recall block availability and this arrangement allows us to build our reputation and experience as a reliable supplier of clean energy now and into the future.”
Anything else you’ve been hearing is simply not true.
In the same news release, Danny Williams said the agreement was “free of the geographic stranglehold of Quebec”.
False information is pretty persistent, though.
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The Nunatukavut are a group of aboriginal people living in Labrador. They used to be known as the Labrador Metis.
In October 2003, Danny Williams told them – in writing – that his Conservative administration “will involve the Labrador Metis Nation, as we will representatives of all residents of Labrador, in the process of negotiating a Lower Churchill Development Agreement.”
Almost a decade later, the provincial Conservatives under Williams’ successor Kathy Dunderdale have decided to take a different view:
“They don’t have established land claims in our province,” she said. “We have land claims with the Innu people and we have an agreement in principle with the Innu.”
Dunderdale said she would consult with the group, but as for any new negotiations: “We’re not getting into those kinds of discussions at this point.”
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Nalcor’s forecast for electricity demand on the island of Newfoundland doesn’t really show a massive increase over the next couple of decades.
Earlier this year, Memorial University economist Jim Feehan suggested that one alternative to Muskrat Falls was demand management. That is, he suggested that Nalcor try some ways of getting people to use less electricity.
Wade Locke, Feehan’s colleague, and staunch supporter of Muskrat Falls, laced into Feehan. He dismissed Feehan at the time and, by extension, the role conservation might have as part of a comprehensive energy policy in the province. Locke did change his mind.
Equally dismissive of demand management, Nalcor boss Ed Martin tried on some pretty vicious rhetoric about old people and freezing in response to Feehan.
Apparently, your humble e-scribbler got on Steve Kent’s nerves.
The Conservative politician and his friends have been bombarding Twitter and Open Line shows since the middle of July will all sorts of their old poll-goosing tactics. So yours truly has been re-tweeting some of the little comments with an added remark like “Gee, you’d swear a poll was coming.”
Small stuff.
But apparently enough to go right up Kent’s nose in a bad way.
…who have suddenly discovered that the provincial economy is in serious need of diversification: a 2010 series called the Fragile Economy.
If they really want to get a handle on economic diversification, BOT chair Steve Power and his colleagues could start by reading the 1992 Strategic Economic Plan. What the Board of Trade has been slavishly been supporting since 2003 is diametrically opposite to the 1992 SEP and its call for diversification based on – gasp! – entrepreneurship, competitiveness, and innovation.
Frankly, it’s been pretty bizarre since 2003 to have a bunch of business owners who endorsed excessive public sector spending and clammed up about entrepreneurship, competitiveness and other subversive ideas. In November 2010, here’s what the chair at the time said:
Chairman of the Board of Trade, Derek Sullivan said government contracts give a competitive advantage for local businesses and “can be a very powerful and reliable revenue stream.”
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Spanish oil and gas company Repsol may be looking to sell its interest in the Saint John New Brunswick liquefied natural gas facility. The New Brunswick Telegraph Journal reported the news on July 21:
On Thursday, the Spanish oil and gas giant told shareholders it was considering the idea of getting rid of some of its liquefied natural gas business to help shore up its finances.
This includes the potential sale of the Canaport terminal in east Saint John, in which it has a 75 per cent stake. Irving Oil, Limited, owns the other 25 per cent.
The move comes on the heels of the expropriation of Repsol’s majority interest in Argentinian oil and gas company YPF by the Argentinian government. The government did not pay Repsol compensation for the seized assets.
Repsol is reportedly taking legal action and is looking at options to raise cash in the meantime. One of those options includes divesting of North American natural gas assets.
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Marni Soupcoff has got it right about the campaign finance scandal currently swirling around federal intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue (pronounced Pen-ah-shoe-ay). People should be concerned about the money Peter Penashue used to get elected:
The part that stands out is the involvement of a federal member of parliament who seems to have, in the absence of an ability to balance his own campaign books, used money that was meant for the Innu community to get himself elected. Not only has he has not been taken to task for this by his Conservative government. He remains a cabinet minister. Now that the media has discovered the loan and Mr. Penashue’s questionable campaign spending, he is finally being asked the sort of questions for which Innu residents surely would like some answers.
As Chief Justice Derek Green reminded us in his report on the the House of Assembly patronage scandal, the way officials and politicians respond to issues such as accountability is set by the tone at the top.
Soupcoff said:
If the Conservatives truly believed in maintaining a government of principle, they would be demanding answers from Mr. Penashue about why money that was meant for a deprived First Nations community ended up in his campaign coffers.
Let’s see what happens.
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Premier Kathy Dunderdale decided to talk about reality on Monday.
A reality check she called it:
“Everybody sees what’s happening with the price of oil, and I see every day what that’s doing to our budget,” the premier said. [CBC online story]
Dunderdale warned that the provincial government’s deficit this year might reach $700 million. her forecast in the spring was $250 million. Next year it could be a billion, she ventured.
Now that is on an accrual basis, of course. On a cash basis, the current provincial government will face a deficit of more than $1.06 billion if oil actually manages to average US$124 a barrel.
Via labradore, a chart that plots Conservative unsustainable public spending since 2003 with recently announced controls on discretionary spending.
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Muskrat Falls seems to be intimately connected to magic, at least in some people’s minds.
For a while there, the gang at Nalcor sounded like they had found a way to make electricity and then ship it back upstream to Churchill Falls where it would be converted back to water. Sort of a water to wine to water miracle.
Not surprisingly, it turned out to be crap.
That $350 million in sunk costs from Monday morning’s post wasn’t the whole story, of course.
You’ll find more detail – and lots more cash – documented in the public utilities board’s final report on Muskrat Falls.
Big screaming CBC headline:
Federal Liberals support Muskrat Falls project: Rae
Then you read the story.
The chart below is taken from a Nalcor information hand-out describing the project’s capital expenditures to the end of March 2011.
What that covers are the various costs for engineering, staff, advertising and communications and anything else that the Labrador project office has spent getting ready to build the project.
The pre-2003 figures include $57 million spent between 1998 and the end of September 2004, the details of which the provincial government released in 2004.
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According to information supplied to the news media – and widely reported already – the helicopter from 444 Squadron used for a training flight than ended with a bit of fishing for the crew six weeks ago was available for search and rescue missions.
And if that re-tasking wouldn’t have been enough, the squadron had another aircraft on stand-by anyway to meet any call for civilian search and rescue service, which, by the way, is not the squadron’s primary job.
None of that stopped CBC from turning a photo of the trip into a scandal. But to complain about that though would be to complain about dogs barking: that’s the shit they do especially when it comes to a potential ratings driver like a controversy spun entirely out of the imaginations of people in a newsroom.
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.
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Look up and you’ll see a new page: The Ghost in the Turbines.
You’ll eventually find there all the major SRBP posts on Labrador hydroelectric development from the earliest days to the latest ones.
We’ve started out with the recent series that – for want of a better title – is just going down in history as the July 2012 series. The rest will be grouped by series title (if appropriate) or by topic such as “Financial”.
There are a lot of posts on this topic, especially since November 2010, so it will take a while to get the links in place. Keep checking back, though because it will be done before too long.
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