Comment by jsnell

1 year ago

Do you have a source for that?

By default, I don't believe your claim. Hydro power would be a horrible match for a LNG liquification plant. The strength of hydro is that it's renewable energy with flexibility on the timing of energy production. It means hydro power plans can be run at a low load when energy is cheap, and high load when it's expensive. (And thus, the average Watt of power generated by hydro is more valuable/expensive than the average Watt of power generated by solar.)

LNG liquification would have the opposite pattern. They'd either want to run the plant 24/7 to get maximimum utility from the capital investments into the plant, or if they are demand-constrained, they'd want to time their production runs to when energy is the cheapest. They're most likely to use electricity exactly when the dam isn't producing any. And conversely, there will be a lot of times when the dam is producing way more electricity than the plant is using.

So it seems totally impossible to believe that production from the new dam is getting allocated 1:1 to a specific LNG plant. It's just not how any of this works. If there's some kind of kernel of truth to your claim, I'd imagine it's some kind of greenwashing where they're buying the rights to claim the LNG was created with renewable energy.

Sorry for the confusion. It's not necessarily preallocated but it just so happens that the new dam will generate x mwh per year and the LNG plant will consume close to x mwh per year. They are also within a few hundred km iirc. The public utility says that the dam's generation goes into the provincial pool and the plant's draw comes from the pool and I have no reason to not believe them...

But effectively private industry gets the benefit and we have to start the process over again to build another generation source.