Key takeaways:
- The study discovers that the aging station can be maintained in warm idle mode till 2030.
- An independent review of the Holyrood thermal generating station has selected the oil-fired power plant to continue operating for the next eight years as a backup to Muskrat Falls.
An independent review of the generating station at Holyrood shows that the aging and polluting oil-fired plant in Newfoundland’s Conception Bay can work till the end of the decade as a backup to Muskrat Falls. Still, it won’t be affordable — and it could also impact power rates.
Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro engaged Hatch, a global engineering firm, to evaluate the fuel-burning Holyrood generation station, decommissioned when the expensive Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project was eventually finished.
Under one plan, the report specified that Holyrood could offer “recall power” — the word used to define the time between the call for power and synchronization with the grid — on four hours’ notice in a significant Muskrat outage. However, the statement says that such a scenario would cost almost $600 million between 2022 and 2030, with fuel and capital upgrades accounting for most of that charge.
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According to Hydro’s previous revelations, the approximately $65-million yearly expense to keep Holyrood equals adding one cent per kilowatt-hour to power rates.
It’s a price that wasn’t expected — or had in cost estimates — when the Muskrat Falls project was approved a decade back since part of the reason for making Muskrat Falls was being able to close Holyrood.
But there are worries regarding the dependability of the power line that will send Labrador electricity to the Avalon Peninsula, prompting a reliability and resource adequacy assessment of the region’s power grid to choose what backup generation will be needed when required the Muskrat Falls project is wholly commissioned.
Source – cbc.ca
