John Chilibeck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Daily Gleaner

Sitting at the back of an auditorium, Randy Dickinson blasted a whistle, shocking the audience below him.

The long-time advocate for people with disabilities had just finished reading aloud handwritten notes on all the problems facing NB Power, the public utility that’s under review by an independent panel appointed by the Holt Liberal government.

“I’m blowing the whistle on NB Power. It’s time for a change! Thank you!” said Dickinson, who was wearing a black baseball cap with the phrase “Elbows Up!” and a red maple leaf.

His preamble up to that moment had lasted five minutes.

Like many of the people who spoke over the one-hour, question-and-answer public consultation session, Dickinson had plenty of concerns.

NB Power over the last two years has raised electricity rates close to 20 per cent. Last December, when the full impact of those rates had just come into effect, a cold snap sent bills soaring, leading to a special independent inquiry on the sudden jump.

And while relatively speaking, New Brunswickers have lower rates compared to elsewhere, the population is also poorer and uses far more electricity, making bills unaffordable.

The utility is saddled with close to $6 billion in debt and aging, legacy generating systems that need major upgrades that will require billions more in spending.

On top of this, people are demanding action to remove greenhouse gases from the grid to help combat climate change, all while electrical demand is steadily growing.

For these reasons, and many more, the Holt government appointed an independent panel of three executives to review NB Power and make recommendations on how it should change, with a report due in March.

On late Friday morning and early afternoon, they appeared at the Hugh John Flemming Forestry Centre in Fredericton, following previous public engagement sessions in Moncton, Saint John and Saint Andrews. At each location, between 40 and 50 people showed up, organizers said.

“A lot of seniors and people with disabilities and others are on low and fixed incomes, and when the rates go up for NB Power, it creates hardship and makes them have to make difficult choices with their limited spending opportunities,” Dickinson told the panel.

“Electricity is an essential service. NB Power does not have the confidence of their customers at the moment. It seems to me they have too many highly paid managers and public relations staff and people working for more rate increases, and maybe not enough people on customer service and preventative maintenance.”

There was applause when he finished.

Duncan Hawthorne, the Scottish utility and energy expert on the review panel who has worked in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, including 16 years as president and CEO of Bruce Power in Ontario, told Dickinson he liked his hat.

He said Dickinson had raised good points, namely, to ask why NB Power’s core business has performed badly, and chronically so.

The utility has not shown it can execute large projects without significant overspending, Hawthorne noted, something that would have to be addressed.

“Everything you’ve raised is fair game,” Hawthorne said. “Although you’ve given specific examples, we’ve heard them everywhere we’ve gone.”

People who raised their hands to speak into the microphone were calm, polite and asked informed questions, much to the delight of the panel.

One man who said he worked in affordable housing asked why NB Power used a variance account recovery to boost bills.

The panel, which has talked to both officials at NB Power and the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board, which acts as a regulator for the utility’s monopoly power, said it was an unusual model being used in New Brunswick that should be further reviewed.

Another audience member asked why New Brunswick does not pursue the de-regulated model from Texas to get more affordable electricity rates.

Panel member Michael Bernstein, a seasoned senior executive with extensive experience in the Canadian power, infrastructure and utilities sector, warned him that Texas also had huge blackouts in February 2021 following three icy winter storms, a crisis that left 4.5 million without power for several days and is blamed for the deaths of some 700 people.

Again and again, the panel advised the audience not to draw too many comparisons from other parts of the world, arguing that New Brunswick had a unique electrical system and set of challenges.

The audience seemed split between several people who backed putting more renewable energy on the grid, through wind, solar and backup batteries, and those who warned such energy systems were too expensive and would drive prices through the roof.

Margo Sheppard, a Fredericton city councillor and environmentalist, said the climate crisis risked destroying the planet and couldn’t be ignored. She asked why NB Power was so resistant to the idea of allowing microgrids and letting people create their own energy.

Tom Mueller, a retired teacher and columnist for Brunswick News, warned that following Germany and Spain on renewables could lead to sky-high prices (Germans pay four times as much for electricity as New Brunswickers do) and blackouts (Spain and Portugal suffered a major one in April).

Another focus was the new gas plant NB Power wants to build in Tantramar in southeast New Brunswick, as a backup facility for wind and solar generation. 

When panel member Anne Bertrand, a former director on NB Power’s board and New Brunswick’s first access to information and privacy commissioner, suggested natural gas was a good transition fuel to reduce greenhouse gases, several audience members gasped. 

Another shouted, “no, it’s not!” 

Without passing judgment on whether the gas/diesel plant was a good idea, Bernstein said it was smart for NB Power to farm the job out to a private company with expertise in building such facilities, given how much trouble NB Power has had building its own generators.

Hawthorne was adamant that NB Power had to be more accountable, and while he said it was fine to have “a wringable neck at the top,” he said it was important for the entire organization to be accountable, from top to bottom.

A specialist in nuclear plants, Hawthorne added that building a second or third reactor in New Brunswick, as Mueller had suggested, was not in the cards.

“There’s no way we should build another nuclear plant when we can’t run the one we’ve got,” he said, a reference to the troubled Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station near Saint John, which has had a series of breakdowns in recent years despite a giant refurbishment project over a decade ago that went more than $1 billion overbudget.

The panel also plans on holding a virtual meeting for the public and in-person sessions for northern New Brunswick. The dates have yet to be announced.

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