N.B. Power can't share 'ballpark' cost of proposed Tantramar gas plant

N.B. Power will not share, even with a "ballpark" figure, how much a new natural gas and diesel generating plant will cost over the next 25 years.  

St. Thomas University professor Andrew Secord asked the question on Monday, during the first day of a week-long hearing into the controversial gas turbine project proposed for rural Tantramar.

Secord said he hoped to give the public “some sense of what it's going to cost” the utility.

“Is it going to cost them $100 million, $50 million, $500 million, $2 billion, $6 billion?” asked Secord. “What are we talking about here?”

But N.B. Power vice-president Brad Coady said he could not share the total cost publicly.  

“What I would say is it would be more than a billion dollars,” said Coady, citing a figure he had previously confirmed to MLAs in a legislative committee hearing.  

But that billion dollars only reflects the capital cost to build the plant, he explained. 

N.B. Power would also be on the hook for the operation and maintenance of the plant over 25 years, as well as the cost of financing the project, among other things, said Coady.

The 25-year agreement that N.B. Power has signed with Missouri-based ProEnergy is part of confidential filings with the Energy and Utilities Board. But members of the public, or anyone who has not signed confidentiality agreements with N.B. Power, are not privy to the financial details of the agreement.

Coady was one of five N.B. Power executives to take the stand on Monday in a large meeting room at the Delta Beausejour hotel in Moncton. 

The Energy and Utilities Board is being asked to consider the prudence of the major gas plant project, and it will hear from a number of experts and interveners over the course of the week.  

Lawyer Kostantina Northrup, who represents the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, one of the registered interveners at the hearing, asked the utility’s executives about other measures they had considered to meet their stated need for 400 megawatts of additional capacity by 2028, including demand reduction initiatives and battery storage systems. 

Northrup wondered if N.B. Power had considered “the potential for multiple combined measures or initiatives to address that capacity need?”

Darren Clark, N.B. Power's director of corporate planning, said the utility had focused on one project instead of “trying to do seven or eight small things at the same time.”