Clean Energy On The Horizon
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis, and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts, and business news in the region. Mark Leger is the Director of News Content for Acadia Broadcasting and Huddle.
I was recently stuck in a traffic jam while driving my son to a basketball practice on the west side of Saint John. As I inched my way up the hill toward the Reversing Falls bridge, I noticed a newly erected, very tall utility pole on the side of the road overlooking the falls.
My son thought it might be a telephone pole, but it towered over the nearby ones. It appeared to be a pole for the transmission of something, but what?
Turns out it was part of a 17-kilometre network of poles that would ultimately connect transmission lines from the Burchill wind farm being built in the Lorneville industrial park to a substation in the city’s north end.
The 10-turbine wind farm, scheduled to be finished early next year, will supply 42 megawatts of green energy to the city’s grid, 15 percent of the power consumed by Saint John Energy customers. The utility has been making other infrastructure upgrades in preparation for bringing the wind farm online, including the installation of a Tesla battery and other new batteries at the Somerset substation.
It’s part of ongoing efforts to create a green energy company that still supplies low-cost power to its customers.
There are two steel poles, each more than 90 feet tall, in the Reversing Falls area, one on either side of the river. The utility used a drone to help carry the lines off steep cliffs and across the water from one pole to the next.
A popular tourist destination, some questioned whether the towering poles and transmission lines would be a blight on the area. In a city known for its pulp and paper mills and oil refinery, we need more visible symbols of a future with lower emissions and cleaner air.
This is true not just for industrial cities like Saint John, but for the entire Atlantic region.
Just this week, John Risley, the co-founder of Clearwater Seafoods, spoke at a gathering of business leaders in Halifax promoting green hydrogen developments. The Nova Scotia entrepreneur, who has built three billion-dollar companies over the decades, is part of a group hoping to build a green hydrogen plant and export facility in Newfoundland.
Risley says there is great potential for a green hydrogen sector in the region, which would be good for the economy and the environment.
“If government gets it right – and this is a big caveat, remember there’s a qualifier here – if government gets it right, by 2030 we could have, my prediction, 100 billion dollars of projects underway here in Atlantic Canada,” he says.
“I’ve been in business longer than I care to remember and I’ve never seen an opportunity for Atlantic Canada as large as this.”
If you’re not yet a regular listener of the Huddle “Insights” podcast, you should start with a series of episodes focusing on green developments in the region; conversations that Don Mills and David Campbell had with proponents for the development of green hydrogen in the Port Hawkesbury area, tidal energy near Digby, and small modular reactors (SMRs) in New Brunswick. Entrepreneurs are making significant investments of money and time on potentially game-changing projects for the region’s environment and economy.
Podcast: EverWind Bets Big On Green Hydrogen
The public is also showing increasing support for clean-energy developments.
In a recent interview with Huddle reporter Alex Graham, Jessica DeLong, the manager of stakeholder relations with Saint John Energy, said the utility has the support of its customers for its efforts to green its energy grid with projects like the Burchill wind farm. She says they surveyed customers and support for renewable energy has jumped from 86 percent to 95 percent in the past four years.
“Change is hard, but everyone is celebrating and is absolutely supporting this project,” she said. “And we’re really, really happy about that.”
People like me, though, need to start making significant lifestyle changes to show we’re also committed to a clean-energy future.
In my community, people often focus on the oil refinery as a visible symbol of the still-powerful fossil fuel industry. But there has been another highly visible one at the citizen level.
Traffic jams are a feature of big-city life but just periodic annoyances in small cities like Saint John. Over the past several months, there have been long lines of traffic in the suburban areas of Rothesay and Quispamsis to the east of the city, and over the city’s Harbour Bridge to the west side.
Extensive work on the bridge and area roads is the cause in both the suburban areas and the city. No matter where you went in the region, it seemed like you encountered a traffic jam during rush hour.
On the day I first noticed the newly installed transmission pole, I was stuck in traffic caused by the bridge work.
We’re all still too dependent on our cars to get through our daily lives, but the least we could do is be part of the global shift to electric vehicles–and I admit I’m not there yet either.
Related: This man renders his verdict after owning an electric car for a year
In her chat with Alex, Jessica DeLong said Saint John Energy estimates that at full capacity, the Burchill wind farm will save 43,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year, the equivalent of taking 13,000 cars off the road.
We really need to do both – build the wind farms and get the gas-burning cars off the road. If Saint John Energy can buy a giant Telsa battery, I should get an electric car. A Tesla, which I test-drove a couple of years ago and loved, would be nice if I could swing it.