By John McClaughry
While our climate-crazed legislature advances toward full decarbonization of Vermont energy and its replacement with electricity, our main source of electricity — HydroQuebec — is warning that it’s facing demand that may be more than it can provide.
Rob Roper reports in his invaluable blog Behind the Lines, “According to a story in Bloomberg, Vermont’s largest and most economical supplier of electricity is sending signals it won’t be able to produce enough to meet demand.”
“This is a problem for Vermont as the Global Warming Solutions Act put us on a path mandating that Vermonters largely, if not entirely, electrify our thermal and transportation sectors, by 2030 and completed by 2050. This is estimated to double the state’s overall demand for electricity.”
“It is highly unlikely that we can renew our contract with Hydro-Quebec on anything like the same terms as our current contract. … If trends continue, competition for that power from other New England states, businesses such as Amazon and General Motors, and … Canadians themselves who are laboring under greenhouse gas reduction mandates of their own will drive up prices.”
“What this portends, given our current policy prescriptions, is that Vermont will spend the next decade and a half converting our oil furnaces to electric heat pumps, our gas stoves to electric induction, and our internal combustion engine vehicle fleet to EVs only to see the cost of electricity explode when our contract with Hydro-Quebec expires.”
Thanks for that, Rob.
John McClaughry is vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute. Reprinted with permission from the Ethan Allen Institute Blog.
HQ, 98% hydro, is building new hydro plants and upgrading older ones to ensure serving CANADA’s growing electricity consumption for future EVs, heat pumps, electric cooking stoves, electric lawn mowers, electric snowblowers, electric snow mobiles, etc.
That means terms and conditions of existing export contracts will be honored, except for “God’s Will” situations, such as a major ice storm.
But the availability of NEW export contracts will be greatly limited in the future, i.e., the low-cost hydro-electricity gravy train for New York State and New England is going to end.
Norway, 90% hydro, 10% wind, is doing exactly the same as HQ
Norway’s excuse for having very-expensive, variable output, grid-disturbing wind?
It has strong winds on the west coast, similar to Ireland
Vermont’s utilities buy from HQ, under a long-term contract, 1.3 billion kWh/y at 6 c/kWh.
BTW, Vermont’s utilities could have bought at least 2 billion kWh/y, or more, from Vermont Yankee at 6 c/kWh, for 20 years, but the Vermont government, very stupidly, turned it down.
Vermont’s government exerted enough pressure on VY, so management finally said, to hell with, and closed the plant.
This happened just after upgrades for $110 million to get a 20-y operating extension
Vermont utilities buy about 4.7 billion kWh/y from other sources, for a total supply of about 6 billion kWh.
Some Vermont utilities produce electricity, but that is a small percentage of the total supply.
Vermont utilities supply to user meters about 5.6 billion kWh/y, after distribution losses of about 0.4 billion kWh/y
Hydro has every right to pull the plug and as far as I’m concerned should. We had a chance to get in on the ground floor of the project but refused due to leftist ijits who deemed the native’s were getting taken advantage of in land deals for flood area’s. They were getting paid a premium and the leftist loon reasoning here isn’t changing so pull the plug and see how electrifying everything here works out… We should be building a new nuke for our own power anyway. It’s the ONLY solution.
I don’t care. the wokes won’t listen and get smarter, until the power is off or rationed. they will need that to figure out this is all stupid and unnecessary. Me, I’ll make heat and hot water with a wood boiler, and have generators for my power need.