On Friday, environment minister Bernie Davis sent the John Risley- Brendan Paddick megaproject to a review under the provincial Environmental Assessment Act.
Legally and politically, Davis had no choice.
Let‘s be clear, though: the review doesn’t cover the whole project. It just covers the plant that will make hydrogen and ammonia, three gas turbine generators, and a wind farm. To really make a go of it, according to Risley, they will need three wind farms in total and the associated hydrogen/ammonia plants. Based on the application that’s a gone to review, there’d also be six more gas turbine generators for back-up when the wind doesn’t blow.
The application says these expansion phases would be subject to further review but let’s look at this as one big project, not three smaller ones.
Each wind mill will be 200 metres (656 feet) high, according to the application filed by Risley and Paddick’s company.
If you plunked one of them down at water level on the other side of Signal Hill, the pylon and the blades would stick up another 45 metres (150 feet) *higher* than Cabot Tower. The Confederation Building tower is only 65 metres high.
The three wind farms will have a total of 492 of these behemoths.
Charles Meneveau is the Louis M. Sardella professor of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Meneveau specialises in wind currents around tall structures. Using his research as a guide, you’d have to space these towers about 2.5 kilometres (1.5 miles) apart to get the best wind flows to make electricity.
If you put one tower every one and a half miles along the TransCanada Highway in Newfoundland, the wind farm would stretch from St. John’s to Port aux Basques.
You’d have 118 towers left over.
String them down the Irish Loop starting at St. John’s and you would fit them all the way back around to the TransCanada Highway again.
That’s a lot of towers.
This is a big project.
The bit subject to environmental review would come in at something like $2.7 billion. 1 That’s roughly the original cost of Muskrat Falls and the line to St. John’s when Danny Williams set us down the road to hell back in November 2010. Three wind farms and hydrogen plants makes this project about $17 billion, all in, according to the review application. The cost right now is closer to $15 billion that NACLOR-Hydro officials will admit and the line to the island still doesn’t work.2
That’s just the estimated cost now. You can imagine where the cost could go. It’s not like this hydrogen and ammonia plant is proven technology like a hydro-electric plant and power lines. When Risley floated this idea in public meetings last May, he acknowledged there’s only one plant like the one he wants to build.
There's only one scaled green hydrogen plant under construction in the world today, and that's in Saudi Arabia. And there's a very good reason why there aren't many. This is still early stages in the development of green hydrogen
Altogether, those three wind arms would have an installed generating capacity of 3,000 megawatts. That would make it the second largest wind farm complex in the world after one in China and twice as big as the current second placeholder in the United States.
The nine 50 MW gas generators Risley and Paddick will need as back-up to the wind would have about the same combined generating capacity as Holyrood.
Right now, there’s about 1966 MW of generating capacity on the island.
The three plants will need about 1500 MW to power them, all day every day. The island only uses that much electricity on a couple of days in the coldest part of the winter.
This is a very big project.
Risley and Paddick’s company also made a big deal about the local Indigenous groups. They used a Mi’gmaw word for the project that means the place where the sand blows. Miawpukek First Nation was originally involved in the deal, according to AllNewfoundlandLabrador.com but a couple of weeks ago AllNL reported that Chief Misel Joe and Miawpukek would take a pass on this project.
Joe’s explanation for the decision was bullshit, to put it bluntly. He said they would look for something closer to home, although he offered no explanation of why that w as an issue now but not an issue before. The project hasn’t moved.
Joe also said this project will happen on Qalipu First Nation territory and “we didn’t want to infringe on” what they are doing or planning to do. Funny thing, that, since Qalipu registered as a landless band. They have *no* territory and no claim to land, either.
Qalipu isn’t a partner in the project and as Qalipu Chief Brendan Mitchell explained to CBC, the only reason they provided a letter of support was because Miawpukek First Nation asked them it. Mitchell said the only interest Qalipu has in it would be a possible school to be set up in Stephenville. Mitchell also said when he first heard of the project it was to use offshore wind turbines.3 Sometime after he sent the letter, the proponents switched to a land-based project.
Having Indigenous partners and slapping an Indigenous name on it certainly looked good for Paddick and Risley. Nice optics as those who fancy themselves politically savvy would say. But practically, it didn’t matter. There’s no land claim to settle as neither Qalipu nor Miawpukek have one. That will save Paddick and Risley time and money.
The only money the pair might have to shell out to locals - might, mind you - is if they want to buy some local support, which is right now not nearly as enthusiastic as it initially seemed or Risley, Paddick, and their friends in high places likely hoped.
This is a big project and da b’ys want to start construction a couple of years from now. On Friday, they just took the real first step on what may prove to be a very long journey into the wind.
Editorial Note: The piece originally scheduled for today has been postponed due to unavoidable delays in research. Within the next two weeks we’ll look at the state of the government’s finances and the impact of current and likely economic developments globally.
Editorial Note 2: The footnotes below explain the numbers in the paragraph they are attached to on project costs and correct the bad math and hasty assumptions assumptions that gave the total project a cost of $5.0 billion in last weeks’s column. The project application gives a capex of about $2.7 billion for each phase, for a combined total of $8.1 billion. I also switched two sentences around in - the ones referring to $15 billion and $17 billion - for clarity.
The original version of this column used the incorrect figure of $5.0 billion. Less the decommissioning estimate,t he cost of the wind farm and plants is about $2.7 billion in the submission. Multiple by three for the three phases.
The project application refers to the ability to raise $17 billion in capital. This paragraph relies on that as the maximum figure. The $17 billion figure remains unexplained.
Note the proposed use of large offshore-size wind turbines in an onshore project. Mitchell’s interview suggests that the proponents changed the location of the wind farms hastily between the date on the Qalipu letter of support (10 May 22) and the submission of the project for environmental review (21 June 2022).
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