7 November 2018

The Bipole III Coalition announced today that it is discontinuing its active involvement in informing the public about how decisions taken at Manitoba Hydro affect Manitoba residents. In its place, the main proponents of the Bipole III Coalition are establishing a new organization, the Manitoba Energy Council. The focus of the new Council will be, now that Manitoba Hydro’s expansion is almost complete, to co-operate in finding ways as we move forward to make the best of where we are today.

More information is available in a backgrounder elaborating on this release. Interested parties are also invited to call Garland Laliberte at (727) 954-4504 or Dennis Woodford at (204) 953-1832. Laliberte and Woodford will serve respectively as President and Vice-President of the Manitoba Energy Council.

4 December 2018

The Roblin Review carried the Manitoba Energy Council's November 7 media release in their 4th December edition

Backgrounder to a November 7, 2018 media release by the Bipole III Coalition and the Manitoba Energy Council

The Bipole III Coalition was established in 2010 by a group of engineers, most of them retired from successful careers in Manitoba Hydro, the University of Manitoba and the consulting world. The engineers were joined right from the beginning by landowners in the Red River Valley who would be negatively impacted by Bipole III, a transmission line that would run right through the heart of Manitoba’s most productive agro-climatic region.

While the Coalition’s initial concern was the west-side routing of Bipole III, the leaders of the Coalition quickly realized that, as unfortunate as the routing decision was, Manitoba Hydro’s expansion plan was of at least as great a concern, founded as it was on an overstated and disappearing export market for electricity. It was clear to the Coalition that Manitoba ratepayers would likely be left behind to pay for an expansion the need for which was questionable and for which no reasonable plan existed to recover the enormous debt that would be required. The Coalition’s website (www. bipoleiiicoalition.ca) documents how most of the consequences that the Coalition predicted over the ensuing eight years have come to pass.

The cost of northern generation plants at Wuskwatim and Keeyask have exceeded or will exceed by a large margin the cost estimates upon which the projects were licensed. Both have been, or will be, completed behind schedule. The cost of the Bipole III transmission project is more than double the cost estimated on approval. Ratepayers or possibly both ratepayers and taxpayers will be stuck with paying for the projects. Americans will not. Without a bailout by the province, annual rate increases for electricity will be several times greater than the rate of inflation.

Farmers whose land is in the path of the Bipole III transmission line are just beginning to deal with the cost, the inconvenience and the risk of towers in a line that splits their fields into parts. The fallout will continue over the life of the line, possibly for the next 100 years.

Despite the claim that Bipole III was needed for reliability, that need has never been adequately proven. We have way more capacity to generate electricity than Manitobans need. To defray some of the cost of generating that electricity, we sell the surplus mainly to the export market, much of it for very little above the incremental cost of producing it. The debt required for the expansion is being repaid at a rate that does not reflect the uncertainties of both the export market and the domestic demand.

The proponents in the NDP provincial government and Manitoba Hydro who championed the expansion are long gone, living comfortably on pensions and termination benefits.

And Manitoba Hydro’s reputation as the ‘crown jewel’ of the province is in tatters.

Yet another inquiry into what went wrong in the past was commissioned last month. The best that Manitobans can hope for is that the new inquiry will establish a framework that prevents similar mistakes in the future. The proponents of the new Manitoba Energy Council take the view that the past is in the past and the present is what it is. The future can be managed only by accepting that the starting point of the future is the present. The Manitoba Energy Council will call on Manitoba Hydro and other stakeholders to engage with it in a co-operative approach to find ways to promote the economic, efficient and beneficial use of our electricity in the future. In particular, it will focus on ways to find productive and profitable uses for the surplus capacity that we will have for at least the next 25 years.

The Manitoba Energy Council is developing a website (www.manitobaenergycouncil.ca). Now live, the site currently contains only minimal content. Fuller information will be posted in due course. Site content is expected to grow over time.