Doug Ford has been a loud mouth loose cannon ever since he was mayor of Toronto.
Buying electricity from Canada made long term sense because we had this agreement since the 1990s called NAFTA.
Canada has more hydro power being produced than they will ever use. It also cost a lot less to build the transmission lines to bring it south than it would to build new power plants.
This is why Eversource here in New England decided to build a transmission line to bring power from Quebec down through Maine to hook up with existing grid structure to serve southern New England. Northern New England(Maine, NH & VT) do not need the electricity. MA, RI & CT do. Just that transmission line is over $1 Billion.
The fact is some areas of North America and the world are more gifted with natural resources than other. Canada, WA, TN, ID have an abundance of hydro power. MI, MN, NY have built as many dams as possible. New England has built as many dams as possible. There are no other rivers to dam up.
NY built the first hydro electric project in the country at Niagara Falls back in the late 1800s. It was designed by Nikoli Tesla. Financed by George Westinghouse.
NY is full of natural gas and pipelines. Yes, they outlawed fracking, BUT they have an abundance of natural gas even without fracking.
The issue is New England has ZERO natural gas. They can not get any new gas lines permitted because the NIMBY effect.
All the existing pipelines are full coming into New England.
Therefore, Eversource buys NG delivered to Boston on LNG tankers from Texas/LA/MD. They compete in price with anyone else those producers can sell their LNG to in Europe or anywhere on the Atlantic Ocean. So, when Europe NG prices went up because of that issue with Russia in Ukraine it indirectly affected the price of LNG delivered to Boston.
Shutting off power would be akin to an act of war, IMO. Are they really THAT crazy ?
Great post! Thanks!
Escanaba MI. The pulp and paper mill therr produces enough electricity there to power the most of the population of tge UP of MICHIGAN...or all of Green Bay Wisconsin area for comparison.
Two dams and huge bio mass fired power plant.
They are not allowed to sell the excess power back onto the grid because of some government regulation.
I would suppose Maine had the same except, they closed most of their pulp and paper mills down.
Lots of readons for that and the biggest is foriegn paper imports into the USA.
One thing though. Canada has screwed itself. Potlach and Biewer, etc, are turning up the feed speed in their stud mills. About 5 to 6 hundred million board feet a year will be produced.
Called the Potlach wood buyer at Sawyer, they are licking their chops. Gonna get even and they actually are looking foreward to making ghost towns in Canada where there used to be stud mills.
Doug Ford was never mayor of Toronto. It was his brother Rob who was and he died of liposarcoma. A rare form of cancer that arises from fat. Doug should be careful. It seems he’s gonna pop a vein or something.