Bill the Children: NB Power’s Solution for Hidden Nuclear Costs

NB Power’s troubled nuclear power program is about to have a dramatic impact on the utility’s profitability and provincial power rates. After pursuing an aggressive accounting policy that hid from ratepayers about a fifth of the province’s wholesale electricity costs over a period of more than 4 years, NB Power is now showing the bill to …

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Wonderful Report on Electricity Sector Governance in Canada

The Council for Clean and Reliable Electricity, The Richard Ivey School of Business and the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy recently issued a valuable, insightful report authored by Professor Guy Holburn called “Guidelines for Governance of the Electricity Sector in Canada”.

AECL Nuclear Refurbishment Losses Quantified

The attached news report is the first time I have seen the losses being sustained by the federal government on Candu nuclear refurbishments quantified. Bruce Power, NB Power and Korea Electric power are receiving refurbishment services from AECL at far below cost. The news report indicates: “The Crown corporation lost $413 million on refurbishment projects …

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Update on AECL’s Commercial Disaster Happening in New Brunswick – October 2010

AECL has announced that it will re-remove the full complement of new calandria tubes that it had previous installed in the Point Lepreau reactor. Here is the very thin NB Power press release, a CBC news story with some useful history and context, and a Telegraph Journal newspaper article wherein I encourage New Brunswick to …

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New Brunswick’s Conservative Party Counter-Attacks

During the current New Brunswick provincial election campaign, the Progressive Conservative (PC) party commissioned a report on the province’s gas and electricity future and then adopted the main recommendation of the report — a rate freeze for electricity. I commented on the report in a column in the Saint John Telegraph Journal newspaper “Energy rates …

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Comment on NB Energy Politics: “Energy rate can’t be frozen responsibly”

The attached column in the Saint John Telegraph Journal newspaper discusses the Conservative party’s current energy platform in the ongoing election campaign. The platform is a depressing commitment to return to previous policy mistakes driven by arbitrary rate freezes and price roll-backs without corresponding cuts in underlying cost. This failure is particularly ugly given that the Conservative Leader …

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Politicized Power Governance Costing New Brunswick Consumers

The dominant paradigm in Canadian electricity policy for about a century was that public power, with its government-backed borrowing and tax advantages, would deliver lower cost power than regulated or competition-oriented private alternatives. As many supporters and detractors of public power have recognized, the vulnerability of this model was the risk of politicized business decision …

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