MUN ELECTRIFICATION: A FORMULA FOR POLITICAL AND ACADEMIC STUPIDITY

Guest Post by PlanetNL 

PlanetNL42: Electrification at MUN + Broken LIL

A Formula For Political and Academic Stupidity

Government announcements issued on Friday afternoons are almost certainly bad news disguised as good.  Government will try to spin only the positives while the media and public must figure out the negatives.

So it was this past Friday when much enthusiasm was fawned over the planned conversion of Memorial University’s central heating plant from oil to electricity.  Provincial, Federal, and Memorial representatives lauded the emissions reduction that would result from 10.5 million liters less fuel consumption at Memorial. The $10.5M project will be funded 50/50 by Federal and Provincial programs specific to reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.  All that sounds great - there couldn’t possibly be any downside, could there?

Well, what if reducing 10.5 million liters of diesel consumption at Memorial requires the Holyrood Thermal Generating Station to burn 30 million more liters of heavy fuel oil, resulting in far worse provincial emissions and increased cost to ratepayers?  That’s the kind of info that does not get mentioned at these cheerleading events. 

BAY DU NORD: AN OPPORTUNISTIC PRIME MINISTER WITH A VICIOUS AGENDA

No matter which side of the issue you find yourself, one thing is clear: there has never been an occasion when the Government of Canada has told a Province to shut down a critical part of its economy, as the Prime Minister Trudeau is attempting, in the case of the offshore oil industry.

An arbitrary 40-day extentsion to the Bay du Nord decsion and a 90-day freeze on new land sales, the the Prime Minister has put a gun to Premier Andrew Furey's head. Furey has neither chastised the PM for his insult, admonished the GoC’s discard of the Atlantic Accord, or asserted our interests. The whole spectacle constitutes a new low point in Canadian and NL politics.

The public needs to be aware of how they are being undercut.

BAY DU NORD: SHEEP GET SHEARED

There are only 21 days left. The Prime Minister will decide the future of the NL oil industry, our economic future.

The noise gets louder. 

Is it Andrew? Has he returned from Ottawa? The decision on Bay du Nord?

No, its NOIA changing its name.

They have found another ass to kiss.

But Bay du Nord?

Furey says: Prime Minister, thy will be done.

People think its (just) Bay du Nord, when at stake is the whole offshore oil industry; Bay du Nord just the beginning.

Will Critical Minerals be a critical component of the future NL economy?

 Guest Post by Dr. Derek Wilton, PGeo.

Dr. Derek Wilton, PGeo. is an Honorary Research Professor, Earth Science, Memorial University, and Part-time Faculty Researcher College of the North Atlantic.

These are certainly fraught times. As bluesman Jimmy Rogers sang at the start of the last Cold War,  “World’s in a tangle”. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic caused disastrous effects to human health and the global economy. 

Aside from the ravages of the illness itself, Covid exposed glaring weaknesses in global supply chains, not only in finished goods, but also in primary mineral commodities. Before Covid-19, and progressing unrelentingly through the pandemic, human-induced climate change has been causing serious, cascading, calamities. And locally of course, as this Blog has been delineating all too well, the provincial economy is in a mess with little but dark clouds on the horizon.

HOW TO SOLVE CANADA'S CO2 EMISSIONS PROBLEM (without cancelling Bay du Nord)

 Guest Post by Cabot Martin

Introduction 

The worldwide situation with respect to Climate Change is like a boat that is in danger of sinking because it has sprung a number of leaks – some big and some small. 

Faced with such a situation, the experienced Captain would order all hands to plug the biggest leaks first. 

On the energy generation side, the biggest hole in the boat by far is represented by the use of coal to generate electricity, particularly in China and India. In the latter two countries, the overwhelming role of coal for the generation of electricity even largely negates the benefits to be gained from use of electric cars as a solution! 

The use of coal must stop and fast, and the use of natural gas especially when converted to and transported as LNG is the only fast, much lower carbon, reasonably priced, way of doing that. 

BAY DU NORD: OUR POLITICIANS GENUFLECT TO CENTRAL CANADA

 Last week’s post by Ron Penney, a member of the negotiating team that hammered out the terms of the “Atlantic Accord” for the joint Federal/Provincial management of NL’s offshore oil and gas, ought to remind us of its importance and hard-fought origins.

It should raise concern, too, that a process that began under Premier Paul Davis, with an amendment to the Atlantic Accord Implementation Act (the slippery slope) in 2015, was compounded in 2019 when the Feds made changes to their environmental legislation, which the Ball Government refused to oppose, which effectively gave the GoC control over offshore environmental assessments. This was not the intent of the Accord.  When the Feds stop approving Development Plan Applications, what is the function of the C-NLOPB?

THE GUTTING OF THE ATLANTIC ACCORD

Guest Post by Ron Penney

I’ve been following with increasing dismay what has been happening over the past number of years as the Federal Government has, through the guise of environmental protection, eroded the authority of the Offshore Petroleum Board created under the Atlantic Accord to jointly manage the oil and gas industry in the province. 

I was a member of the negotiating team which led to the Atlantic Accord, chaired by the late Cyril Abery, then Deputy Minister for Intergovernmental Affairs, reporting to Bill Marshall, the Minister responsible for the offshore negotiations, who in turn reported to the Planning and Priorities Committee of Cabinet, chaired by Premier Brian Peckford. 

These were a very difficult set of negotiations, particularly with the Liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and initially led by the Minister of Natural Resources, Mark Lalonde, who was succeeded by Jean Chretien. Those negotiations were unsuccessful because they refused to meet our two demands: that we would should be given the same right to collect royalties as if the resource was on land, and that it be managed by an independent board composed of equal representation from both governments. 

NOTE TO HYDRO CEO: THOSE “GROWING PAINS” MIGHT BE YOURS

The new Hydro President, Jennifer Williams, is either threading very softly with a Furey Government afraid of taking decisions or has already succumbed to Nalcor’s long established culture of deception.

Because Ms. Williams is still new, we can only hope that her comments to CBC last week are matters of misspeak rather than signs of an evolving attitude. There is good reason to be concerned.

CEO Williams suggested to CBC that it is common for new utility infrastructure to experience “growing pains”.

The comment left the impression that those “growing pains” include the major problems currently plaguing the Muskrat Falls project, which are limiting production to around a third of capacity. After spending nearly $15 billion and years behind schedule, growing pains should constitute only the minor problems identified in a punch list audit during commissioning.

THE LABRADOR ISLAND LINK IS “SUNK COST”

We should be worried that GNL will double down as big problems persist and costs continue to rise on Soldier’s Pond and the LIL, all the way to Muskrat Falls. It seems destined to be a victim of the "sunk cost" fallacy which describes a tendency to sink more money into a scheme in which a large investment of time and money has already been made, regardless of whether the costs outweigh any benefits.

Last week’s post described the chief conclusion of the second Haldar and Associates report that the Labrador Island Link transmission line (LIL) is under-designed and may need salvaging as often as every six years.

The Report was ultimately conducted for Public Utilities Board which wanted more data to help forestall a repeat of the 2014 outage known as #DarkNL.

#DARKNL WAS BAD. A NEW REPORT ON LIL WILL LEAVE YOU COLDER.

 The recent release by the PUB of the second Haldar Associates Report represents a timely and sobering analysis of the findings of its investigation into, among other things, the reliability of the Labrador Island Link (LIL).

The NL public should not need to be reminded that last week marked the seventh anniversary of #DarkNL. That was a week in which many people, especially those living on the Avalon, came face to face with the worst consequences of public sector incompetence, a matter confirmed and chronicled by the Liberty Consulting Group for the Public Utilities Board (PUB). 

It also caused the downfall of an incompetent Premier. Sadly she was replaced, successively, with a bevy of incompetent successors.