Will the NB Power Review finally shake up NB Power?

NB Power desperately needs a very big shake up. The NB Power Review report published on Monday rattled the utility but not nearly hard enough.

The NB Power Review was meant to chart a path to a better future for the public utility. Launched last April, the three-person review panel was tasked with reviewing the utility to address: “rising electricity rates, system reliability, and financial challenges, including a high debt-to-equity ratio.”

The shake-up needs to happen at the top. The report is rightly highly critical of NB Power’s organizational culture that lacks not only “operational excellence” but also basic project management procedures and practices. NB Power, the report clearly states, does not have the capacity and skills to manage all the projects planned, including “large hydro refurbishment, complex plant conversions, large software replacement, and transmission and distribution expansions.”

NB Power’s grid is a mess. The big power generators are liabilities more than assets. The Mactaquac dam needs repairs that will cost more than $9 billion. The Belledune coal-fired plant is federally mandated to close by 2030. The Point Lepreau nuclear plant performs so badly that the utility is losing millions, with millions more for costly repairs on the horizon. NB Power’s big fossil fuel generators – oil-fired Coleson Cove and gas-fired Bayside – need to wind down for the same reason Belledune will need to stop burning coal: the climate emergency.

Yet, the Review report does not mention the word “climate,” or “weather” or “storms” or give any indication that “Fit for the Future” (the title of the report) must include resilience and mitigation strategies for climate change.

As reported last April when the Review was announced, the panel’s mandate did not include consideration of climate action, which is evident in the report. For example, after pointing out that many homes in the province rely on baseboard heating, the report recommends “increased deployment of natural gas for heating purposes” suggesting that these homes should install gas furnaces. Heat pumps, the obvious and more cost-conscious and environmentally-responsible option, are barely mentioned and not included in the report’s 50 recommendations.

The report also misses an important opportunity to highlight the potential of wind energy and external financing for wind projects with Indigenous communities. A table in the report appendix lists NB Power’s power purchase agreements, including from three wind farms co-owned by Indigenous communities: Nuweg (25 MW capacity) Wisokolamson Energy (18 MW) and Wocawson Energy (20 MW) – without mentioning that these are Indigenous-partnered projects.

New Brunswick has tremendous wind resources, and First Nations in the province and their partners are building wind farms at a rapid pace, also not mentioned in the report. In fact, the most exciting energy infrastructure developments currently ongoing in New Brunswick are wind projects with Indigenous communities co-financed with the federal government.

In 2024, the federal government announced up to $1 billion in funding for new Indigenous-partnered wind projects in New Brunswick and currently five new Indigenous-partnered wind projects are in development. The Review panel should have mentioned this and recommended that NB Power actively explore with Indigenous and government partners how more of these wind projects could be developed and added to New Brunswick’s electric grid.

Where the report stands out is its lengthy discussion of nuclear power and NB Power’s capacity to operate a nuclear plant. The report includes only several paragraphs covering the challenges at the Mactaquac hydroelectricity plant and Belledune coal plant, but nuclear power gets five pages, plus an excellent four-page appendix with the history of the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station detailing the operational problems.

The report’s considerable emphasis on NB Power’s nuclear operations is justified: the plant’s poor performance is the main reason that the utility cannot lower its debt to asset ratio and loses money almost every year. As the report notes: “The benefits of nuclear are only achieved when the asset performs at a high-capacity factor…. A structure and organization that is focused on excellent nuclear performance is needed and it is not clear to us that this is possible under the existing corporate structure.”

The panel acknowledges that NB Power does not have the capacity to operate the nuclear plant with New Brunswick talent. Currently the nuclear plant is managed under a contract with Laurentis Energy Partners, a business venture of Ontario Power Generation, a contract the review panel suggests will not alone achieve the needed improvement in the plant’s performance.

Unfortunately, the main recommendation for the nuclear plant will simply kick the white elephant down the road. The review panel recommends that the Point Lepreau plant be operationally separated from the rest of the utility’s power generators and that a new entity, Point Lepreau Nuclear, be set up with its own governance team of nuclear experts focused on the performance of the plant. The report also noted that the utility’s debt related to nuclear power was $3.6 billion and suggested that an appropriate amount of debt be assigned to the new entity, presumably with the remaining debt picked up by taxpayers.

It was almost amusing to read the review panel’s statement that hiving off the utility’s nuclear operations into a separate entity will “reduce stress and accountability” for the NB Power management and board. For sure, saying “it’s not my problem” is a good way to reduce stress but it doesn’t make the problem go away.

What about the stress experienced every month by New Brunswick ratepayers who can’t afford their utility bills? The panel, in its report and media event, acknowledged that electricity rates will continue to rise, energy poverty is real, and that “government needs to step in and provide financial support for those New Brunswickers who are considered vulnerable or for those targeted customers” but does not recommend developing such a program as one of its 50 recommendations. In any case, using general revenues to subsidize the costs of the nuclear operations is not a long-term solution.

As the panel clearly identified, the Point Lepreau nuclear plant is a big, central, problem for NB Power. If, as the report states, the contract with Laurentis Energy Partners is not enough, what will be enough? The existing contract with Laurentis is $88.4 million over three years (the value is not mentioned in the Review report). What will be the cost of hiring outside experts to set up and run the proposed Point Lepreau Nuclear entity? Does anyone believe that another group of outside experts will be able to magically bewitch the Lepreau plant so that it will make money, rather than lose it? “Silk purse” and “sow’s ear” come to mind.

If there is any silver lining, it’s that the report barely mentions small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), and at the media event, the panel stated clearly that New Brunswick should not go down that road. As reported earlier by the NB Media Co-op, the NB Power review “could be the last nail in the coffin for the controversial technology in New Brunswick.”

However a further recommendation in the report is that the government consider “initiating the planning assessment phase for an additional large scale, proven technology nuclear plant to be sited alongside the Point Lepreau facility.” At the media event for the report launch, the review panel stressed they were not recommending a second reactor but rather that the utility take the time to conduct a thorough review about the future of nuclear in New Brunswick.

Another “big” reactor? Currently in Canada, only two firms are competing to build proposed big nuclear projects, in Ontario and Alberta. AtkinsRéalis (formerly known as SNC Lavalin) is proposing a CANDU design and Westinghouse its AP1000 design. The CANDU design has not made cost estimates public but two AP1000 reactors were recently completed in the U.S., at a cost of about $24 billion each in Canadian dollars.

This NB Power Review should have been the thorough review required to put NB Power’s future nuclear ambitions to rest. After its detailed discussion of NB Power’s debt problem and failure to operate the Point Lepreau nuclear plant successfully, it defies belief that the panel would recommend considering another nuclear reactor, one that would cost tens of billions of dollars. This is the very definition of nuclear hopium, not the big reality shake that the government and NB Power so badly need.

Susan O’Donnell, a member of the NB Media Co-op board, is the lead investigator of the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University and co-author of a recent report on SMRs in Canada