Senior climate activists in the community are adamant that NB Power can meet its energy needs in other ways than building a gas plant, and one of those alternatives was presented to Tantramar town council during its regular meeting earlier this month.
Tim Hicks, a former senior manager with one of the largest electricity companies in the US Southern California Edison, and now a member of Seniors for Climate-Tantramar, says “there are ideas for the environment that are better than building a gas, obviously carbon-based, combustion power plant.”
Hicks suggested one solution, which would be a lower-cost and more eco-friendly option, would be what has come to be known as “time-of-day” or “time-of-use” power rates. This would reduce the peak demand on the grid and would encourage NB Power consumers to reduce their power costs by shifting their consumption to night-time or early-morning hours. Rates would be more expensive during peak demand time but much lower during those night-time hours, after 9 pm, he said.
Time-of-use plans are not new, he said, and have been implemented successfully in places such as California and Ontario for the past two decades.
It’s a low-cost alternative to creating new power generation, said Hicks, and he questioned why it’s acceptable for NB Power to be 20 years behind in this technology, and is now rushing to build a power plant.
Tantramar Mayor Andrew Black said he was surprised to learn that with such proven success in places like Ontario for time-of-use plans, that provinces like New Brunswick have not used the same approach.
