The Salmon Strategy: Power Swims Upstream to Canada.

Fortnightly Magazine - June 15 1996
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Probably the quickest way to get punched out in Toronto is to call Canada the 51st state. But let's face it,

the border is getting murky, like power markets.

Aren't we supposed to be importing power from Canada? Didn't the NIMBY syndrome kill off baseload generation construction, making our provincial neighbors the source of our power and raw materials? Then why are companies like Northeast Utilities suddenly seeking permission to export power to the provinces?

After its nukes restart, Northeast says it will have more generating resources than it needs. It wants to sell that surplus power to Hydro-Québec. Specifically, 665 megawatts (em about one nuclear power plant's worth, or 33 percent of the capacity of the licensed Vermont interconnection. It must be the season; the salmon are swimming upstream again.

Odd, the "experts" said we would import Canadian hydropower through the millennium. In 1991, for example, the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) predicted 10,000 million kilowatt-hours (Kwh) of NEPOOL imports each year. NERC said New York would import another 11,500 million Kwh annually, more than 13,000 million Kwh by decade's end. (That's three to four nukes.) The only Québec imports NERC detected came from Labrador (admittedly, another country to the Québecois). Things changed in 1994 when the New York Power Authority harpooned the Great "White" Whale hydro project by canceling its $5-billion purchased-power contract.

Five years isn't long for capital with a 30-year life. Yet NERC blew that simple forecast. Pitch a brick like that in the semiconductor industry, and you're toast for Motorola.

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