Hydro Power's dirty little secret

Someone brought something to my attention today. Thanks BH. Seems hydro power has a dirty little secret. I know that's way off topic of the intention of this blog, but... Studies done in the past few years are revealing that hydro power may, in some cases, cause as much greenhouse gas as fossil fuel generators. I posted a link in the links section. The main cause is the decaying vegation causing the formation of methane. Methane creates 20 times as much greenhouse gas as the CO2 emitted from a fossil fuel power station.

I also seen some infomation on the Lowerratesnb site that I grabbed for some links. Seems within the last few months the government was doing a decent job of promoting the province as an energy hub. The links to Jack Keir are at the bottom. So kinda strange to see the about face. I read the paper written about the reasoning behind the Churchill Falls agreement. The paper can be found in the Free Newfoundland and Labradour website link. Possibly there was some "economic duress" at the time over the whole project. It may have been a case of leaked financial information, and basically sign or the whole thing wouldn't have been completed. Would have left newfoundland with a several hundred million dollar hole in the ground. Maybe there is some of that going on today. Maybe the premier signed this MOU under economic duress?? Who is to know.....??

Again, I’ll reference the lowerates site, as there are a lot of smart people posting on there. Credit for this goes to Crop circle. This person has it right. But here is a different twist. All numbers are from 2008 NB Power annual report.

$519,000,000 in revenue for 306,000 residential customers. = an average bill of $ 1696 per year.

If you look at some other utility websites, they show, if you heat with electricity, that your bill on an annual basis is roughly %50 for the electric heat. So lets double the annual total for people who heat with electricity. That puts the total at $3392. Fairly close to the figure used on the lower rates site as demonstrated by Crop Circle.

That means for the rest of the customers who do not heat with electricity, their bill is now about 2/3 of the $1696 or $1119 per year. A little less than $100 per month. In line with what some people in the commentary have quoted for heating with something besides electricity, and in line with people I have talked to who heat with wood, etc.

These people save 3% or 33.58 per year for 5 years. Yeah!!!

And For the average rate payer – savings are $50.88 for the first year. Or roughly $4 per month.

For someone heating with electricity, his or her savings is by this example, $101. Again fairly close to what is shown on the lowerrates site. This post has been edited here to correct a math error. I did a excel spreadsheet, and the rate freeze has to continue for 15 years to make up the $2 Billion in expected residential customer savings. If that’s the case, why didn’t they freeze rates for 15 years, not 5.

Even using Shawn Graham’s math of everyone saving $1400 over 5 years, with 306,000 customers, the savings is only $428,000,000.

A 60 watt light bulb that is on for 4 hours per day consumes 72 cents of electricity per month. So lets switch 5 bulbs in our house to fluorescent and save the same amount.

A lot of people have phone bills, cable, satellite, Tim’s, etc. higher than their power pills. Maybe NB Power should sell out to Tim’s and we can get a daily dose of electricity when we stop for our morning coffee.

WEll folks, Happy hunting............and that can have a lot of different meanings this time of year.