A Mighty Wind
We are an energy warehouse!
Hydro-Quebec imports electricity from the United States.
Every year.
In 2021, HQ paid a little over three cents a kilowatt hour on average for it but in 2022, the price was 13 cents a kilowatt hour on average. In 2023, HQ paid around 10 cents.
Under the New ‘69 deal, HQ is guaranteed a future price of about 2.2 cents a kilowatt hour on average (in 2024 dollars) for 50 years for the same amount of electricity it gets today from Churchill Falls. That’s about the price from 1969, once you adjust for inflation and factor in HQ’s discount, that is, the part of an annual dividend it gets as a 34% shareholder on the Churchill Falls operating company.
Now you understand how much Quebec got from Andrew Furey with no gain - precisely squat - for Newfoundland and Labrador.
A hugely bad deal.
Epicly, historically bad for Newfoundland and Labrador.
Meanwhile at the energy warehouse - still known as Newfoundland and Labrador - is anyone actually going to build any hydrogen plants in Newfoundland and Labrador to feed the always imaginary German market?
Ever?
The answer based on Newfoundland and Labrador’s centuries of experience with fly-by-night, carpetbagging BS artists and con men as well as their stereotypically Newfie enablers is a firm, loud, and chuckling “no.”
Flip back to April 2022. Andrew Parsons announces an end to the wind energy moratorium. It wasn’t an end to any moratorium. And it wasn’t about wind. It was actually about hydrogen. Wind energy is still effectively banned, even though there is demand for new sources of electricity and wind would be a great, easy, and profitable one.
But the key point: we were supposed to have the first production this year.
2025.
Lots of people said that was ludicrous but all the people pushing this new boondoggle insisted everything had to shift to make it happen. Andrew Furey was one of them. Transformative change and all that.
August 2023. John Risley: “Our project is on track to produce initial quantities of green hydrogen in 2025, so Canada has the opportunity to be a first mover and to become a globally important producer, consumer, and exporter of green energy.”
One year later - November 2024 - and Risley was promising only to make a decision on investment by the end of 2025 but likely in some other flash-in-the-pan.
A few months further on and the Mayor of Stephenville is still optimistic Risley will do something - maybe Bitcoin or AI or “e-fuel” or some other crack-pot idea - which means in all likelihood there’ll be nothing to come out of the hydrogen mania in 2022.
Well, not unless a desperate government finds cash to subsidize Furey’s Folly? It’s a strong possibility.
Oh yeah. The possibility is stronger given that the guy who bought the Stephenville airport with Risley-like promises of infinite riches coming magically from [insert trendy topic here] still hasn’t paid the half million bucks in property tax he owes to the town.
Add in the tariff “crisis” and you have a ready-made excuse for more public cash going down the drain of some scam or other. During COVID, the provincial government bailed out the oil companies in a panic with a few hundred million they didn’t need. This “crisis” can be a good excuse.
So much for transformative change.
Just more of the same.
Meanwhile, NALCOR still hasn’t finished Muskrat Falls. The link between the island and the mainland still hasn’t passed it’s full load test and if that wasn’t enough, the company is still trying to finish the power plant. One of the turbines is being completely rebuilt on the brand new plant that hasn’t operated at full capacity for months.
Oh yeah. If that weren’t enough, the Holyrood thermal plant is costing more in repairs as the date for its replacement - which was supposed to use hydrogen as fuel - is now pushed backed back further into the 30s despite claims a couple of years ago during the hydrogen lunacy that it wouldn’t last another five years.
Given the - [gasp of shock and surprise] - lack of hydrogen production, expect NALCOR to push back that date for a Holyrood replacement as they scramble to figure out a new plan.
Don’t be surprised if NALCOR CEO Jennifer Williams tells us they’ll build a second Labrador-Island link to use some of the electricity the crazy give-away deal let’s Newfoundland and Labrador recapture from its own plant at Churchill Falls.
After 2041.
It will be like branch lines to the old Newfoundland railway, the cost of which was one source of the massive debt that destroyed the entire government in 1933.
Just remember, 15 years ago, the first NALCOR CEO told us we couldn’t wait for 2041, which is why we had to build Muskrat Falls RIGHT NOW!
More like an energy whorehouse.