N.B. premier looks for alternative sites for Tantramar gas plant

Premier Susan Holt says she’d still like to find a different site for a controversial natural gas power plant now planned for a rural area in Tantramar.

Holt told CBC News in a year-end interview on Dec. 16 that she’d like the plant to be built somewhere where it’s acceptable to the local community.

“We've been having the conversation about alternate locations because it's clear that there is a lot of resistance to this location from this community, and I can understand why,” Holt said.

She said she’d received a Facebook message the day before suggesting that a site “20 kilometres down the road … would be a better spot” for the plant that would provide N.B. Power with 400 megawatts of power.

“We need to do it somewhere where it is going to be accepted by the community, and right now that's not the case in Centre Village,” the premier said, referring to a rural area in the municipality of Tantramar.

Holt also did not provide a clear answer when she was asked if she had confidence in N.B. Power’s leadership, its management and its site selection process.

“I think that N.B. Power has done a lot of work on this,” she said.

The utility chose the Tantramar site because it is close to both existing transmission lines and the Maritimes and Northeast natural gas pipeline, from which it will draw gas to power its turbines.

But it’s the government’s role, and the Energy and Utilities Board’s, “to question and test and make sure … that nothing was missed.”

N.B. Power is facing a tight timeline for the project.

The EUB will hold hearings on it in February, and the utility has said that the U.S. company that would build the plant, Missouri-based ProEnergy, needs a clear decision by April or else it may have to walk away from the project.

Looming over that is another deadline: a forecast by N.B. Power that it may not have enough electricity generation to meet demand by 2028.

Holt’s energy minister, René Legacy, said in December that he worried about shortfalls during peak demand as early as this winter.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation said in a winter forecast report released last fall that the Maritime region of Canada does not have enough “reserve margin” of electricity generation to guarantee power during peak demand.