Tag: CRED-NB Action

Selling NB Power again?

Lepreau3

In 2010, the New Brunswick government tried to sell NB Power. Then, it tried to sell “just” the hydro-electric power facilities and the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station (PLNGS). The ensuing public outcry forced the government to back down. This year, the PLNGS is again for sale as well as all of the wind power in New Brunswick.

NB Power and Ontario Power Generation (OPG) are negotiating a deal, which could result in their joint ownership of the PLNGS. The resulting power purchase agreement could force New Brunswick customers to pay for expensive nuclear power for decades depending on the terms of the arrangement which, of course, are being negotiated in secret. New Brunswick would lose the option to fully shift to less expensive renewable energy.

Read the full article by CRED-NB core member Tom McLean, published in the NB Media Co-op HERE.

Waste: To burn or not to burn?

CRED-NB is one of 40 groups across Canada signatory to a Call to Action issued today against burning waste. We must stop burning things to produce energy!

From the media release:

While Canada is set to host the next round of the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations April 23-29, Canadian groups are raising an alarm about the expansion of waste incineration across the country. Dubbed “waste-to-energy” (WTE) by industry, burning waste through methods like incineration, gasification and pyrolysis is a practice that would undermine federal climate, plastics, and waste management policies.

“Canada has goals to end plastic pollution and stop climate change. That means we must close the door to polluting and wasteful garbage incineration,” said Karen Wirsig, Plastics Senior Program Manager at Environmental Defence. “Incineration poses real risks to the environment and human health. Plus, garbage is not a clean or ‘renewable’ energy source and incinerators have been found to emit more greenhouse gasses per unit of electricity than fossil fuels.”

Read the full media release with the list of signatories HERE.

Climate groups reject nuclear power

Today, CRED-NB was one of 130 groups in Canada and 600 plus groups internationally that signed a statement launched at the Nuclear Energy Summit in Brussels. The groups say that new nuclear power is too slow to tackle the climate emergency, nuclear power is much more expensive than renewables, and nuclear power is dangerous.

Read the statement and more about it HERE.

Nova Scotia announces legislation for 2030 Clean Power Plan

On February 27, Nova Scotia announced legislation to start the implementation of their 2030 Clean Power Plan. The goal of the plan is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity by 90% while providing reliable affordable power to Nova Scotians. How?

Similar to New Brunswick, Nova Scotia plans to phase out coal-fired electricity. However, instead of experimenting with nuclear power, Nova Scotia will simply increase its use of renewable sources to 80% by 2030. That’s a tall order as NS currently only generates 14% of its electricity from renewable sources. The good news is that they will not have to invent any new technology to succeed, just use what’s already readily available in the power industry marketplace.

According to an October 2023 presentation by the NS Department of Natural Resources, the plan has three main elements:
• Adding more wind and solar power.
• Using grid management tools such as batteries and load management to integrate renewables.
• Deploying transmission facilities and dispatchable hydrogen-capable generators to increase resilience and reliability, especially during severe events increasingly exacerbated by climate change.

NS will deploy several additional sources of clean power by 2030:
• 1,370 MW more onshore wind
• 300+ MW of grid scale solar power
• Imported power from Muskrat Falls hydro to handle 10-15% of annual NS electricity needs.
• Rooftop solar power
• Community solar power
• 300 MW of hydrogen capable generators

NS will use various proven techniques to integrate renewable variable sources of power.
• Add up to 400 MW of battery storage
• Upgrade NS-NB regional transmission capacity to 500+ MW
• Use technology such as demand response and load management to avoid power curtailment and reduce power load peaks

Electricity from burning wood pellets is a scam

In its recent Energy Plan, the New Brunswick government proposed that the NB Power Belledune power plant should switch from burning coal to burning wood pellets. The federal government has mandated that all coal-fired electricity plants stop burning coal by 2030.

However generating electricity from forest-based biomass is a false climate solution. Burning wood for heat is one thing but burning it to generate electricity is incredibly inefficient.

Research has shown that burning wood pellets generates more carbon emissions at the smokestack than coal. It also creates many toxic particles harmful for the health of surrounding communities.

Two years ago, more than 500 scientists sent an open letter to world leaders calling on them to not burn forests to make energy.

How can governments get away with claiming that biomass-generated electricity is renewable and carbon neutral? It’s a scam.

International carbon accounting rules state that carbon losses from forest harvesting have to be reported in the land sector section of the carbon audit for the country where the trees were cut.

Every time a hectare of forest is cut, that counts as a reduction of forest carbon uptake. The harvested forest wood, if it’s burned, can’t be reported as a CO2 emission, because that would be counting it twice.

So the country or province that burns trees reports that as zero carbon emissions. That means that producers can treat biomass as being equivalent to zero emissions technologies, like wind and solar. Scam!

Scientists and environmental activists everywhere are lobbying hard for constraints to be put on the use of forest wood as a renewable fuel.

In November, CRED-NB signed a letter to federal Energy and Natural Resources minister Wilkinson, with 26 other climate groups across Canada, calling on the federal government to take immediate action on biomass. These are some of our demands:

• Work with other levels of government to ensure forests are off-limits to wood pellet production for export.

• End all subsidies to the utility-scale wood pellet industry

• Redirect funding to Indigenous land use, stewardship or restoration projects and real climate solutions such as wind and solar power.

• Support value-added jobs that provide more substantial and stable economic opportunities
locally.

• Encourage utilities to take a public stance against burning forest biomass as an energy replacement for burning coal.

• Advocate on the international stage for an update to carbon accounting mechanisms that closes loopholes which falsely represent industrial logging and utility-scale exported biomass as carbon neutral.

Hydrogen: super fuel or another big distraction?

New Brunswick this week released a “5-year roadmap” for hydrogen development, predicting that the strategy will make the province a clean-energy powerhouse.

Hydrogen will be an element in a future energy system that emits fewer GHGs. However the government’s plan misses the mark.  Here’s CRED-NB’s initial analysis:

  • Electricity and heat pumps are a far cheaper solution to heating buildings than hydrogen.
  • It is far better & cheaper for transportation to be muscle or battery powered. Green hydrogen is too expensive except for flight and long-distance shipping.
  • Hydrogen is hard to contain so exporting it will be difficult. That’s why most hydrogen is produced close to where it is used.
  • Green hydrogen (produced by renewable energy) can be a clean back-stop to wind and solar electricity generation but the priority should be using more efficient storage.
  • Green hydrogen must be made with wind power to keep the cost down. There will be no market, local or export, for hydrogen made with nuclear power as it will be far too expensive.

CRED-NB spokesperson Tom McLean got a few words in about this during a CTV clip about the government’s plan the day it was launched. Watch it HERE.

NB government’s energy plan is ignoring reality

NB government’s energy plan is ignoring reality.

Rothesay, New Brunswick, December 13, 2023 – The Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick (CRED-NB) is astounded that the NB government would produce an energy plan that ignores the reality of where energy systems and the global energy economy are headed.

Tom McLean, of CRED-NB, said “Today, at the conclusion of the UN climate change conference, COP28, the global community committed to triple the use of renewables and transition away from fossil fuels. It makes no sense for New Brunswick to plan to frack fossil gas when the world is deploying wind turbines and solar panels.”

The government’s plan is also based on a nuclear technology that may never exist. In the presentation in February by CRED-NB to the NB Legislative Assembly Standing Committee on Climate Change and Environmental Stewardship, we quoted the authoritative U.S. National Academies’ of Sciences 2023 report. It states that the advanced reactors planned for New Brunswick, ­ molten salt and sodium-cooled, ­ will have difficulty achieving commercial operations even by 2050.

“Premier Higgs’ energy plan is not sensible, sustainable or just,” said Ann McAllister, Chair of CRED-NB. “Fracking for fossil gas has no social license in NB due to its health and pollution risks. Hydrogen production is so expensive and inefficient that it makes more economic sense to use the electricity directly.

The SMRs proposed for New Brunswick will come too late to reduce carbon emissions now, when we need them. To export them would provide client countries who don’t yet have nuclear weapons with the plutonium to produce them. This is not the plan we need in these times of climate change and escalating global conflict.”

Meanwhile, the planet is burning, and the clock is ticking. While we’re waiting for these nuclear SMR experiments to fail, the government is wasting time that we must spend urgently on genuine climate action.

CRED-NB recommends guidelines for the ARC-100 Environmental Impact Assessment

NB Power is proposing to develop an experimental nuclear reactor design, the ARC-100, on the Point Lepreau nuclear site on the Bay of Fundy. The Government of New Brunswick, which is funding and promoting the project, will also conduct the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). The government asked the public to provide feedback on the draft EIA guidelines. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this important effort! The CRED-NB submission to the guidelines consultation is HERE. Our page with information about the ARC-100 is HERE.

New video: Nuclear Energy and the Bomb

Most people around the world learned about power of the atom from newspapers on August 7, 1945 after the U.S. military dropped a nuclear bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima in Japan and killed or injured 140,000 people. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki.

After the war, governments realized that nuclear energy to generate electricity would be unacceptable to the population unless people could be convinced that it was completely separate from nuclear weapons. The U.S. began an “atoms for peace” propaganda campaign to convince Americans to accept nuclear energy despite their knowledge of its terrible destructive power. The campaign to deny the link between the two continues today in every country that has nuclear energy, including Canada.

CRED-NB was co-host of a lecture by University of British Columbia professor M.V. Ramana on Oct. 12 at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. The link between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons “is a truth that has been systematically masked” says Ramana. See the video HERE.

CRED-NB brief to federal committee on natural resources

On October 3, CRED submitted a brief to the House of Commons standing committee on Natural Resources. The committee is studying Canada’s clean energy plans in the context of the North American energy transition. Our brief consisted of a document, Eleven reasons nuclear energy should not be part of Canada’s plans for a clean electricity grid in future. Read the document:
In English HERE
In French HERE