N.B. Power is looking at the wrong metrics to determine its needs, expert witness says

Five days of expert testimony concluded Friday in the Energy and Utilities Board hearing into N.B Power’s proposed gas and diesel power plant for rural Tantramar.

Over the course of the hearing, the board heard conflicting testimony on two key questions in the debate over the plant:

Does N.B. Power need the 400 megawatts of additional power capacity the plant could provide?

And if it does, are there more affordable alternatives to the new fossil fuel-powered plant?

The conclusion of Jeffrey Palermo, an energy system consultant based in Florida who appeared before the board Friday, is that N.B. Power does not actually need 400 megawatts of additional capacity.

And even if it did, he said, battery storage is a viable alternative to meet that need.

One of Palermo’s key criticisms of N.B. Power’s decision to pursue the gas plant was its mix of methods to determine its capacity needs. 

He said the utility used shorter term “operating-type analyses” instead of relying on long-term planning standards and criteria.

He said that in calculating its need, the utility used “the method that found the largest capacity shortfall.” 

N.B. Power lawyer John Furey took issue with that analysis and pointed to tables showing weeks-long periods in the winters of 2023 and 2024, when the utility had crossed into negative "net margins" and used more power than planned. 

Furey asked if Palermo agreed that during those times, N.B. Power was “really potentially one generation-unit outage away from rolling blackouts.”

Palermo countered the utilities have a series of tools they can use in such situations to avoid rolling blackouts, such as lowering voltage and dipping into reserves. 

“Mr. Pollock and his team, I think, are competent system operators,” said Palermo, referring to Jonathan Pollock, N.B. Power’s executive director of system operations. “It is a judgment call as to what steps you can take before you interrupt customer load.”

Furey then asked Palermo to consider Point Lepreau, N.B. Power’s nuclear generating station which he said was capable of producing up to 715 megawatts of power.