Published: March21st in the Chronicle Herald, Opinions
IN A LITTLE-NOTICED bit of news this week, Energy Minister Barry Barnet announced that the Nova Scotia government plans to revise rules that bar Nova Scotia Power from investing in wind power companies, in hopes of helping the utility reach its green energy goals. As it is, NSP is forbidden from investing in wind turbine companies.
What this does is confirm that the Nova Scotia government’s alternative energy policies are all fog and no wind, and adds more weight to the increasingly obvious: that whatever alternative energy policy we have is what NSP wants, with the energy minister and top energy bureaucrats as faithful servants.
NSP is failing to meet its alternative energy targets, which were supposed to start with five per cent by next year. Independent wind-power contractors have not come up with enough viable projects to fill the bill, so NSP wants to do the job itself.
Off the top, this sounds reasonable enough, even economically inevitable. At a deeper level, however, there’s the harder point the alternative producers are making: that the whole thing was rigged to fail to bring about the present result – an increased monopolization of the energy field and energy policy by NSP.
This failure is in fact what they predicted – a logical result of the tendering system used to call up these projects, one that has mostly failed elsewhere. One furious wind-power entrepreneur accuses NSP of "successfully preventing the market from opening" and "driving dozens of potential independent power producers from the province or into failed-project limbo," then announcing that it’ll do the job itself.
In the "request-for-proposals" system chosen for Nova Scotia, a command-and-control utility like NSP announces a big project and calls for tenders from contractors. However, in these cases, the lowest-bidder system doesn’t work well. Often the lowest bid is too low to actually deliver as prices fluctuate and, according to some figures, as many as 50 per cent of tendered projects don’t materialize. In Europe, where differerent systems have competed for some 20 years, this approach has been declared a loser, abandoned notably by both Britain and France.
The winner is the system of "feed-in tariffs," where utilities are required to pay a set rate per kilowatt hour to anyone who produces electricity. This system has made Germany and Spain the leading alternative energy countries. Others are imitating them, meanwhile working out the bugs.
One of these jurisdictions is Ontario, which this week announced it would go ahead with feed laws, in the hope of creating 50,000 jobs in the process. Immediately, three major manufacturers of solar equipment have declared an interest in opening plants in Ontario, an early indication that the strategy will work.
One of the advantages of this system is that it unlocks the energy creativity of the society right down to the household level. Farms, co-ops, municipalities, apartment buildings and households can produce energy for their own use and if there’s a surplus, sell it to the utility at a fixed rate. Here, some do that but only after an arduous negotiation with NSP, and what they sell is at unfavourable rates.
Barnet said the appealing part was that NSP, "with a strong financial background," can inject money into wind companies. That strong financial background, remember, is basically because NSP has its hand in your pocket and mine as a private monopoly with regulated rates, and is immune to recession.
NDP Leader Darrell Dexter made the point that the province could help smaller companies by offering loan guarantees or having Nova Scotia Business Inc., the province’s private sector-led business development agency, invest in wind-turbine companies. Giving NSP total and final control "should be absolutely the last option that they proceed with," he said, pointing out that the rules keeping NSP from investing in wind energy were created to allow smaller energy producers to get a toe-hold in the province, and giving the utility the right to buy up those smaller companies now would defeat that goal.
According to Barnet, there was a "mutual coming-of-the-minds that this is the way we can meet each other’s objectives." A funny way of saying that in Nova Scotia, we have had chosen for us a failed system, one geared to advancing the energy monopoly and no doubt its shareholders, but not public energy policy.
Ralph Surette is a veteran freelance journalist who lives in Yarmouth County.
1 comment:
If our generation were to expend more effort educating their children to seek ways of doing that don't require electricity than we could reduce co2 emissions very quickly.
What is needed is a new breed of politicians/leaders with the vision to rationalize this as a viable approach to a solution for the future.
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