Reduce power costs, keep the lights on, lose the nuclear albatross!

The Point Lepreau nuclear plant has been out of service for more than five months. NB Power says the main generator will be fixed by mid-November but the extent of the damage suggests the outage will continue long past that date.

After mid-November, as electric baseboard heaters are turned up, NB Power will need to generate even more power from the expensive and polluting fossil fuel-fired power plants on the grid. Meanwhile, the utility continues to pay the huge carrying costs of Point Lepreau even while it’s producing nothing.

We need a prudent plan to get out of this mess. Modern renewable energy and storage technology can help us do that.

Nuclear power is expensive

Nuclear power stations are very expensive to design and build resulting in large carrying costs. The original build and the refurbishment of the Point Lepreau plant are responsible for about three-quarters of NB Power’s debt. To be profitable, nuclear plants need to produce maximum power almost all, typically 90 per cent or more, of the time. If they don’t deliver, the power gets even more expensive.

That’s happening now. The frequent unplanned outages at Lepreau translate into more costs which means higher rates for customers and more requests for huge rate increases as the problems grow.

This year, the Point Lepreau plant will likely produce less than 39 per cent of maximum power. Yikes! No wonder NB Power needs rate hikes. Even the lifetime performance of the plant, according to the World Nuclear Association, has only been 72 per cent from the time of construction up to 2023. Not good.

Point Lepreau uses mature CANDU nuclear technology. Why does NB Power believe that the results will be any better from experimental small modular reactors (SMRs)?

Renewable energy is cheaper and reliable

NB Power and the rest of the world know very well that wind and solar are far cheaper sources of power than nuclear. Pro-nuclear idealogues say we should worry about the wind sometimes not blowing and the sun sometimes not shining. That tired argument is, frankly, ridiculous.

When it’s not raining, should we worry that water will not flow from our taps? No, because municipalities have built infrastructure to capture, store and treat rainwater so that clean, usable water flows 24/7 into our homes.

In the same way, a modern electrical utility uses energy storage, transmission, and demand side management so that power from wind turbines and solar panels can keep the lights on all the time. That is why wind and solar power now produce more electricity in the world than nuclear power. In fact, wind and solar recently started producing more electricity in Europe than burning fossil fuels.

Renewables will work for New Brunswick

To understand the effect of moving to wind power and energy storage in New Brunswick, let’s look back at the NB Power fiscal year of 2020/21. During that year the electricity was generated from nuclear, hydro, coal, oil, natural gas, and a small amount of wind and solar. NB Power reports how much power was needed during each of the 8,760 hours that year. Analyzing the data on wind speed during each hour of the year gives us an estimate of the power that could have been provided by wind turbines.

If NB Power had added 2,000 MW of wind power and 910 MW of long duration storage prior to the start of 2020/21, the utility would not have needed to burn any coal or oil. Power generation costs for that year would have dropped by more than $100 million. Oh, and the climate changing emissions produced by electricity generation would have been 99 per cent lower. Not bad!

Staying with fiscal 2020/21, what would have been the effect of the additions proposed in the NB Power 2023 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP)? The IRP base case scenario B calls for the addition of 1,400 MW of wind, 200 MW of solar and 750 MW of SMRs. These additions would have reduced the climate changing emissions almost as much as the previous scenario but would have increased costs by more than $20 million due to the SMRs.

NB Power claims to not know the expected cost of SMRs, so the above calculation uses the average cost estimate from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in the U.S. Unfortunately, the actual cost of SMRs is unlikely to be that low. The only SMR project to commit to a delivery cost had an estimate of double the NREL estimate: the recent NuScale SMR project. The NuScale project imploded almost immediately when potential customers balked from sticker shock.

New Brunswick can reduce power costs while keeping the lights and heat on. The first step is to stop wasting resources on trying to develop nuclear SMRs. The next step is to invest in harnessing renewable energy, especially the huge wind resources we have in New Brunswick. Using the wind to generate power is cheap, cheaper than burning uranium, oil, gas and even coal. Storage does add to the cost, but wind produces power so cheaply that we are still far better off. Finally, we need to get the nuclear albatross off out necks by starting to plan for the shut down of the trouble-prone and expensive Point Lepreau nuclear plant.

Affordable and clean are the hallmarks of renewable energy. It’s past time to fully embrace a transition to clean affordable renewable energy. We, the next seven generations and our climate can’t afford not to. Let’s use our collective ratepayer voice to guide NB Power along the path to a renewable energy future.

Tom McLean is a core member of the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick (CRED-NB).