Liberty Natural Gas: A Cost-Effective And Reliable Alternative For Business Owners
Business owners looking for a reliable, cost-effective means of providing heat and energy need look no further than Liberty.
In an era in which the costs of living and doing business continue to rise, natural gas is bucking that trend and has saved New Brunswickers over $45-million in the last five years.
“We’ve been able to control costs and create savings that we pass on to customers, and we’ve also come into long-term contracts to obtain natural gas from sources in Central Canada and Alberta,” said Liberty New Brunswick Vice President, Gilles Volpé.
With those low supply costs locked in by a 20-year contract, the price will remain stable. The ups and downs of a market that relied on American natural gas have virtually come to an end.
“This price is very stable throughout the year, with small variance from winter to summer,” Volpé said.
Natural gas is an unparalleled source of hassle-free heat and energy for businesses and homes. Reliability is unparalleled with Liberty’s piping distribution system that is buried in the ground. The flow of natural gas is not impacted by the transport and weather-related disruptions that stem from the flow of oil or electric systems.
“Its reliability is unmatched when compared to other energy sources,” says Volpé. “Severe weather events disrupt the electrical grid with trees falling on lines, and even oil delivered to you by truck can be disrupted by weather. Those are reliability issues you don’t have to worry about with the robustness of natural gas distribution systems.”
“We don’t measure outages in how many you’ll have in a year with natural gas. We measure outages in the number of decades it’s going to take before you have an outage.”
Gaseous energy will be a key factor in New Brunswick meeting its 2050 net-zero goal; the province’s ambition of eliminating coal-fired electricity by 2030; and addressing the fact that current electricity generation levels won’t meet anticipated future demand.
Volpé stressed that natural gas is a game-changer in New Brunswick, a province reliant on electric baseboard heating, with more than 60 per cent of its homes reliant on electric heating – an inefficient means of distributing heat and energy, he says.
“The electrification of everything won’t satisfy all demand,” says Volpé. “Gaseous distribution of energy is going to be a good supporting energy source for the electricity system, and for heating homes and businesses – and driving process consumption for industrial businesses.”
Volpé says natural gas is an evolving asset, with ample opportunity to “green the grid.”
There are investments and innovations that include adding renewable natural gas (captured from landfills, food processing and wood waste) and hydrogen into the natural gas distribution system.
Natural gas has only been an available energy source in New Brunswick for around 20 years, while other forms of fuel – like wood, oil and electric heating – have been around for far longer.
Volpé said he hopes to bring growing awareness to New Brunswickers of the balance between affordability and environmental consciousness that natural gas strikes.
“Between now and 2050, we’ll be able to have a cleaner and clean source of energy to get us to our net-zero target,” Volpé said.
This story was sponsored by Liberty.