(A correction has been added to this story.)
QUEBEC PREMIER PHILIPPE COUILLARD came to Boston on Friday to pitch hydro-electricity from his province as a source of baseload power for New England, a low-carbon-emission replacement for any number of existing nuclear and coal power plants scheduled to go offline in the next few years.
Hydro-Quebec, the province-owned utility, already provides about 1,600 megawatts of electricity to New England, all but a small portion of it on a spot basis. The company wants to sign a long-term contract to supply even more power to the region. Exactly how much power would be delivered and at what price will likely be determined in a public bidding process. Couillard sought to assure Massachusetts officials on Friday that plenty of power from Quebec is available at competitive prices.
Couillard said Hydro-Quebec has sufficient capacity on hand now to send 2,000 megawatts of hydro electricity to New England. He said a fair price will have to be negotiated, but he insisted New England customers will benefit financially. “A partnership has to be good for both sides,” he said, adding that negotiating a long-term contract for electricity would effectively make Hydro-Quebec an extension of the New England power market.
“When we have a long-term contract, we treat this as part of our domestic grid in terms of maintenance, investment, and management,” Couillard said in an interview. “We send power to New England homes as if they were Quebec homes.”
The administration of Gov. Charlie Baker in Massachusetts and his fellow governors from Connecticut and Rhode Island are very interested in importing hydro-electricity from Canada. Baker has filed legislation that would allow the state’s utilities to seek bids for hydro power from Canada, but the Legislature hasn’t acted on the measure yet.
A number of companies have proposed transmission lines to bring power down from Canada. Hydro-Quebec is partnering with local utility Eversource, which is proposing to build a transmission line from the Canadian border to southern New Hampshire. The project, called Northern Pass, has encountered strong opposition within New Hampshire, where officials don’t want power lines wending their way through the state.
Couillard said Northern Pass is Hydro-Quebec’s preferred option, but he didn’t rule out supplying power to other transmission projects. “At the end of the day, we’ll see what the process will look like in New Hampshire a few months from now,” he said. “We know that other options exist for New England in Vermont and Maine, but right now Hydro-Quebec, our public utility, has strongly aligned itself with Eversource on the Northern Pass option.”
Northern Pass is an all hydro-electric project. Other transmission proposals call for Canadian hydro to provide backup electricity for power lines linking wind energy developers in New York and Maine to population centers in southern New England. Advocates say these hybrid wind and hydro proposals could also provide baseload power while bringing in wind energy that satisfies the renewable energy mandates of most New England states. Massachusetts, for example, doesn’t recognize large-scale hydro-power as renewable.
(A correction was made to the following paragraph.)
Dan Dolan, the head of the New England Power Generators Association, is opposed to state governments steering negotiations for electricity to any power supplier. He would prefer the governments set standards for the emissions level of power sold in the region, and leave it to the marketplace to decide the best way to accomplish those goals.
Ha, where he said, “We send power to New England homes just as if they were Quebec homes.” is really a stretch. Maybe he conveniently forgot a few years back when they had a forest fire that took out major transmission lines to New England and they didn’t have the courtesy to give the ISO-NE power pool a warning on it about to happen. The ISO had to scramble to make up for the lost power and reports indicated New England narrowly averted a major regional outage. Je me souviens, indeed!
Policymakers on Beacon Hill are forcing the early retirement of baseload coal and nuclear primarily because the market for baseload power is forced into decline due tomandates for wind and solar. Intermittent and variable wind and solar power is incompatible with baseload. The advantage is shifted to load following natural gas.
There is a disconnect between what Quebec is offering, and what the New England grid will need. Senator Haddad and wind advocates keep talking about using Quebec Hydro for firming backup to wind and solar, and Mr. Couillard is offering long term contracts for baseload power.
The same long term contracts could be offered to coal and nuclear to keep them operating indefinitely.
Firming wind and solar with Natural gas, while closing coal and nuclear does not avoid any significant amount of CO2.
Firming wind and solar with baseload Quebec hydro renders wind and solar redundant and unnecessary.
Why back down already purchased Quebec Hydro whenever the wind blows or the sun shines?
The cost is higher and there is no advantage to CO2 avoidance since both are renewable.
A plan to replace coal with Quebec hydro may make sense. But, this is a plan to replace coal and nuclear with hydro, continuing the firming backup of wind and solar with natural gas, which is in short supply in the winter, resulting in an expensive solution to a non-existent problem.
ISO-NE reports that demand for electricity will remain flat for the foreseeable future.