The Blob

Pell-Mell NL Energy Policy

“We started off with a renewable department of zero people,” energy minister Andrew Parsons told reporters last Friday when he announced the four successful bidders for Crown land in the race to develop hydrogen projects. You can watch the whole thing on the video that tops this column.

“We've had to build that [team] and you know we've gotten to a point where we've got a really great team.”

Parsons’ department crashed this team together over the past 20 months or so just as they have done everything else connected to the hydrogen-making projects, which Parsons continues to call “wind” even though wind is only the means of making some of the electricity to drive plants that make hydrogen. There’;s no wind for domestic use or wind for export.

They are flying by the seat of their pants. Changing policies and making up policies as they went. You can tell. In his speaking notes, someone gave Parsons a lot of numbers about how much had happened in that relatively short span from December 2021.  Dozens of companies looking for land.  Lots of departments, including the Premier’s Office. The actual start date was in April 2022 when the rest of us heard about it. parsons himself said at that time that they had no idea what would be involved but he didn’t foresee much of a problem. The reality is quite different.

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There was another part of the speaking notes where Parsons mentioned that there were a few companies that submitted proposals for land to use wind turbines to make electricity.  Those got tossed out, said Parsons.  In another comment, he mentioned that some proposals got the boot because they wanted more electricity from the grid than NALCOR can provide.

Meanwhile, NALCOR is moving ahead with a new thermal generating plant at Holyrood.  Some of you will recall that this turned up last year and essentially confirms that NALCOR isn’t really confident the Labrador-Island Link will ever work reliably enough to supply electricity to the island.

A big part of NALCOR boss Jennifer Williams’ pitch last year and again now that the public utilities board is dealing with electricity supply is that NALCOR thinks there’s a big spike in demand coming.  Double what the whole island currently needs, in fact.

Got all that?