Nova Scotia Eyes Lower Churchill Power

The following contains excerpts from today's Halifax Chronicle Herald. The entire article is available at the following link:

Chronicle Herald Article.

Excerpt:

TAPPING INTO power generated by the proposed Lower Churchill Falls hydroelectric project probably won’t lower the cost of electricity in Nova Scotia, says the president and CEO of Nova Scotia Power. But Ralph Tedesco says it could go a long way toward providing price stability for an extended period and help the provincial utility "decouple from volatile international fuel prices."

...The opportunity to acquire power generated by the Lower Churchill project offers the most promising option because it could bring up to 600 megawatts of power to Nova Scotia by undersea cable, he says. That represents about a quarter of the total generating capacity required by the utility to serve its customers.
"One of the things that got us very excited about it was when Newfoundland indicated they were bringing power down from Labrador onto the island. As soon as I saw that, lights went off in my head because that then opened up what I called, at least from a conceptual perspective, the opportunity of bringing that power economically to Nova Scotia."

As a result, NSP and its parent, Emera Inc., are in negotiations with Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, a provincial Crown corporation, to do just that. The talks are still in the early stages, says Tedesco, but the utility feels good about the negotiations so far and is pushing forward in the hope of reaching a satisfactory arrangement.

...The landing point in Nova Scotia will partly be based on the capacity of the utility’s transmission lines.
NSP plans to spend $50 million to $100 million to improve its transmission system in Nova Scotia by 2016.
That will help it accommodate more wind and tidal power but should also be useful in determining where the landing point for Labrador’s hydro power might be.

The undersea cable costs about $3 million a mile to install, says Rob Bennett, Nova Scotia Power’s executive vice-president of revenue and sustainability. It also costs about $1 million a mile to run the cable overland, so that will be a determining factor, he says.

The power passed through the undersea cable would be converted to direct current, which allows less power loss than if the cable were a traditional alternating current line.
The special stations to convert the power from alternating current to direct current and back again would be about $150 million each, says Bennett.

One station would be in Newfoundland, the other in Nova Scotia.

The total cost of putting the Newfoundland-to-Nova Scotia transmission line in place would be about $500 million.

But Bennett says the cost of the entire project would be several billion dollars if the development costs of the generating facilities at Lower Churchill Falls are included and the entire transmission system to get it across from Labrador to Newfoundland underwater and then again to Nova Scotia are added in.

If a deal cannot be reached to bring Lower Churchill Falls power to Nova Scotia, Tedesco says the company will continue to develop a mixture of power-generation options.