“Oh what tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
— Walter Scott
In 2012, the island’s peak demand was 1,550 megawatts (MW). However,
the island’s (non-Holyrood) existing installed net power generation capacity is 1,500 MW — a capacity shortfall (not including Holyrood’s capacity) therefore of only 50 MW.
Why then is Nalcor using two (and sometimes three) large oil-fired generators at Holyrood (producing more than 300 and up to 450 MW of power) to cover off a 50 megawatt shortfall? Why is it that our already existing non-Holyrood generation capacity is not being used to its fullest — before firing up Holyrood?
Why is 300-450 MW of Holyrood power being used (at an annual cost in the range of $100-$150 million for oil) to replace the island’s already existing installed and underutilized non-
Holyrood excess island capacity — when the real shortfall is only in the range of 50 MW?
Is the island’s already existing installed non-Holyrood capacity being underutilized intentionally?
In 2011 alone (the same year that we spent more than $100 million for fuel oil for Holyrood), Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro spilled 694 gigawatt hours of energy-equivalent water (about $100 million in value) over the island’s existing hydro dams.
But if Nalcor did not use Holyrood extensively, how else could government and Nalcor justify an unneeded Muskrat Falls project? If Holyrood were not used extensively, the very need and justification for Muskrat Falls, the supposed $2-billion cost advantage of the project, would go right out the window.
Isn’t it time for both Nalcor and government to come clean with island ratepayers?
The Muskrat Falls multi-billion-
dollar project is a house of cards — a “manufactured right here” $2-billion cost advantage illusion.
The hundreds of millions in annual Nalcor/government revenues are, in truth, nothing more that hundreds of millions of dollars unnecessarily removed (by stealth) from the pockets of low- and middle-income ratepayers and shifted to Nalcor’s and government’s coffers — and then touted as revenues.
In truth, it is money taken out of one pocket (yours and mine) and shifted to another pocket (Nalcor’s and government’s). And for whose benefit?
For Nalcor, the government, Nova Scotia and multi-million-dollar mining companies. A manufactured right here solution — for a non-existent problem.
Maurice E. Adams
Paradise
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