Originally published in the Chronicle Herald on March 12, 2022.
In the 20-plus years Nova Scotia Power, now Emera, has traded on the public stock exchange, the utility has continued to serve three unequal masters: government, customers and shareholders.
Ratepayers remain caught in the middle of an unending tug of war between politics and profit, controlled by a virtual monopoly failing to tackle societal and climate change priorities.
Successive provincial governments have played the “power back to the people” card at election times. But when in power, they sputter and fail to implement meaningful regulatory and legislative levers desperately needed to address the increasing gap of equity, affordability and sustainability related to energy production and supply.
With the recent controversy over proposed net-metering charges for those using solar power and the delay in closing the coal-fired Trenton plant, NSP continues to reveal that its true priority is profit, not environmental targets or the well-being of Nova Scotians.
Shining a light on solutions, NSP’s latest general rate increase application is now before the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board (UARB) during a watershed moment for everyone in Mi’kma’ki. Post-pandemic economies are heating up, sadly, along with inflation and greenhouse gas emissions.
The Ecology Action Centre is calling for a legislated sustainability mandate for the UARB to bring meaningful change. We’ll be bringing forward the imperative of a sustainability mandate using key metrics well beyond call centre, outage and storm-response stats.
A sustainability mandate would first and foremost establish ambitious, firm timelines and track NSP’s progress towards renewable targets, with less leeway in altering plans and penalties should targets not be met.
And while they’re at it, the province needs to remove biomass from the definition of renewables. Biomass simply isn’t clean energy.
The sustainability lens would bring focus to the urgency of delivering efficiency programming for industries and households using incentivized efficiency upgrades and deep energy retrofits to lower energy use and keep electricity affordable.
As long as NSP views efficiency gains as dips in sales performance that affect quarterly returns, there’s little motivation to promote and bring efficiency initiatives to customers.
With approximately 20 per cent of families and individuals living in energy poverty in this province and countless more on the edge, it’s infuriating that the UARB and NSP define rate fairness as simply “all those in a particular customer category should pay the same electricity rate.” This clearly misconstrues equality with equity, implying that a one-size-fits-all model is enough to support Nova Scotians.
A sustainability mandate must include programming and rate structures to help those struggling to meet basic needs like housing and food. NSP ignores the big picture Current legislation and regulations governing NSP prioritize lowering costs to the utility, utterly failing to account for the larger social and environmental dimensions at the heart of the matter — or to acknowledge that short and long-term planning, coupled with immediate action, are the only ways to achieve a net-zero future that is more affordable and more reliable.
Left to its own devices, NSP has repeatedly failed to rise to the occasion. Clearly, a sustainability mandate focused on the principles of affordability, reliability and sustainability is needed. One with the power to enact real change, by entrenching it in legislation and tying it to rate approval processes. Government legislation can put NSP on this path and is an opportunity to ensure it fosters and acknowledges the communities in which it operates and serves — prioritizing the needs of Nova Scotians over the pocketbooks of global investors.
It’s an opportunity to ensure the people at the light switch are more than just a revenue stream serving the interests of Nova Scotia Power’s stakeholders, which neither enhances nor protects lives and the environment. Crucially, it’s an opportunity to reframe the kind of corporate citizen this utility gets to be now and for generations to come. Will it be a utility that supports affordable, reliable, and sustainable electricity in Mi’kma’ki? We must ensure the answer to this question is yes.
Gurprasad Gurumurthy is the energy coordinator with the Ecology Action Centre, which is celebrating its 50th year of environmental activism and advocacy.
Link to source: GURPRASAD GURUMURTHY: Give Nova Scotia's UARB a sustainable-energy mandate