IT MIGHT surprise some people to hear a top government bureaucrat admit that Nova Scotia’s electricity grid couldn’t cope with the introduction of many wind energy projects, but it really shouldn’t.
That’s because the government and Nova Scotia Power have been talking about upgrading the province’s electricity grid since at least last fall.
Alison Scott, Nova Scotia’s deputy minister of energy, told a meeting of the legislature’s standing committee on economic development Tuesday that connecting many small-scale renewable energy projects onto the grid is too expensive.
Electricity generated by wind is too intermittent to be reliable and therefore needs a more secure source of energy as a backstop for times when the wind stops blowing.
A critic of Nova Scotia’s energy policy, Dalhousie University professor Larry Hughes, says he views Scott’s statement before the committee as finally an admission that grand attempts by government to introduce large amounts of wind energy into the system aren’t going to work as planned.
Hughes leads the energy research group at Dalhousie’s department of electrical and computer engineering. He says Nova Scotia has been late addressing climate change and now it is missing the boat on energy security, "which is barrelling down the track at us."
Hughes told me that employing wind power "the way they’re talking about it isn’t going to work in Nova Scotia. And it’s really for two reasons: one is supply, the other is infrastructure."
Because of that, he says, it is unlikely that Nova Scotia will be able to achieve the goal of generating 580 megawatts of electricity by wind turbines by government’s 2013 deadline.
The normal backstop for wind energy would be generators powered by natural gas, which could quickly respond to a downturn in wind production, but he doubts there will be enough gas from Sable or Deep Panuke to meet that need.
That means there is a growing requirement for a new source of natural gas and that means removing the moratorium on drilling for gas on the rich Georges Bank fishing ground.
Even if significant amounts of natural gas are found on Georges Bank, it isn’t likely to become available to Nova Scotia for many years.
As an alternative, there is the potential of adding power generated by Newfoundland and Labrador’s Lower Churchill hydro electric project.
Hughes says it could act as a backstop for wind, but it would be optimistic to expect that project will be able to begin generating electricity by 2015.
Nova Scotia’s energy security issue may come to a head sooner rather than later.
"If we’re going to look at energy security, we’re going to have to look at the electricity side . . . but transportation and heating are the two major energy demands in this province and the province isn’t addressing those," Mr. Hughes says.
More than 80 per cent of Nova Scotia’s sources of energy are imported, which could put Nova Scotia in deep trouble.
"What are they going to do and where is the energy going to come from?" asks Hughes.
Rather than pushing the intermittent power generated by wind onto the grid, he says, there are better ways to use that energy source by using it for space heating and transportation.
"If we use storage heaters, intermittent electricity works fine, and if we use batteries for automobiles, intermittent electricity works fine, because both of those could be charged intermittently. . . . We could take advantage of the wind if we looked at it that way."
Hughes says he has been proven correct on the climate change issue and he’s convinced he’s right about energy security, too.
Is anyone in government listening?
2 comments:
The debate over windfarms is over, finally, loud and clear, economists and governments across the globe are admitting they were wrong, wind energy is not viable, efficient or safe. It is a "disaster".
Windfarm supporters, please find another cause to throw your hats behind.
Please see the post about smarts grids elsewhere on this blog.
John McManus
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