Nalcor Energy president and CEO Stan Marshall stood inside the converter building at the power station at Soldiers Pond and thanked the team of women and men who built it, who built and supplied all of the province’s billions-worth of new energy transmission assets.
Those assets are poles and transmission lines, but also switchyards, transformers, filter yards and synchronous condensers.
The work has been everything from raising power towers to incorporating new software.
“People don’t appreciate the transmission component (of the Muskrat Falls project). It’s cost, magnitude, complexity and where we are,” he said, trying to push — just for a moment — through public fear around power prices, tied in with the massive transmission build plus the generation plant still under construction at Muskrat Falls on the Churchill River.
He wanted a moment to applaud the work completed.
“I wanted to recognize the employees and their achievement, more than anything else,” he said, speaking at the Soldiers Pond transmission site about 40 minutes from St. John’s during a media tour on Wednesday.
The tour was part of a larger gathering organized to show off the facility and mark a milestone in the Muskrat Falls project: the flow of power from Labrador to eastern Newfoundland. Coming from Churchill Falls, it was a more than 1,500-kilometre trip not previously possible.
While early reports suggested flow of power happened on the day, the tour and subsequent corporate gathering was just to acknowledge the milestone, actually reached back on May 31.
“We’ve been flowing (from Churchill Falls) essentially on a daily basis now,” said John MacIsaac, Nalcor’s executive vice-president of power supply, also on the tour. He said power from Churchill Falls, or otherwise, will be available for the island of Newfoundland as a supply option for this winter, as part of the mix.
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In rate hearings at the Public Utilities Board, Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro has spoken in favour of using power imports wherever reasonable, to offset the use of oil power from their thermal generating plant at Holyrood.
The hum of electricity could be heard around the Soldiers Pond site as about 45 megawatts of power flowed. Marshall estimated it’s already saving about $50,000 a day, with more to come as operations can ramp up and more hydro power can be brought in.
“Most people don’t realize it. Right now, some of the energy they’re consuming right now is coming from the Upper Churchill,” he said, using the alternate name for the Churchill Falls power plant.
He made the point his criticism of the project has not been about the physical work. “What I’m criticizing is the concept,” he said, of the $12.7 billion project, the subject of an ongoing public inquiry.
As for when Muskrat Falls power might run across our new transmission assets, he said he’s not promising anything beyond his previous commitments, with first power from the new power plant forecast for the second half of 2019.
