CEO MORE POLITICAL TOOL THAN ECONOMIST

Guest Post by PlanetNL
PlanetNL25: Nalcor CEO – Economic Skills Are Non-Essential to the Position

At Nalcor’s Annual General Meeting last week, CEO Stan Marshall offered up a view on Muskrat not heard before.  He has chosen to reframe the Muskrat Project as a combination of a good generation project saddled down by the burden of much too costly transmission systems.  Stan further suggested that had Muskrat energy been sold exclusively via Quebec transmission routes, it would be considered an attractive project, the envy of those other provinces still building their questionably expensive hydro projects.

In the PlanetNL17 post, entitled Exploding Transmission Costs a Terrible Blunder, the cost of Muskrat Project transmission was analyzed and found to be just as stupidly expensive as Stan says.  It’s nice to agree with the utility occasionally.  His assertion that Muskrat generation could be economic, however, is a long way from reality.  This post does some quick calculations to show that Muskrat Falls generation in its simplest guise isn’t viable in any market.