NB Power says Ontario’s support at Point Lepreau could help lower rates

NB Power fielding questions about the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station at a hearing on Tuesday.

NB Power is defending its management of shutdowns at the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station, but says a new agreement with Ontario should keep it online more often.

“We have to do something different if we expect that we’re going to get high levels of sustained performance,” said NB Power senior vice-president Darren Murphy on Tuesday.

Management from the Crown corporation answered questions about Point Lepreau’s performance during the second day of Energy and Utility Board (EUB) public hearings, considering the utility’s request for a 4.75 per cent rate hike in 2026-27.

Several questions were asked about how unplanned shutdowns at Point Lepreau were affecting NB Power’s finances and ability to offer affordable energy.

When Point Lepreau is offline, it costs the utility $1 million-to-$1.5 million a day in replacement power costs. An unplanned 15-day shutdown in December cost as much as $4 million a day.

With both scheduled and unscheduled outages during the 2024-25 fiscal year, Point Lepreau only operated 27 per cent of the time.

NB Power management was asked about the merits of signing an agreement in October with Laurentis Energy Partners – a subsidiary of Ontario Power Generation – for nuclear engineers to work out of Point Lepreau over the next three years. The agreement is worth $25 million each year, with room for up to $8 million in bonuses should the agreement result in measurable improvements. The agreement begins April 1.

Murphy was asked when the utility determined it wasn’t able to achieve improved performance at Point Lepreau on its own. He responded by saying NB Power had been reaching out to external nuclear experts for the better part of a decade, adding there had been ongoing discussions for official on-site support over the last couple years.

“What we know for sure is that we have not been able to do it on our own up until now,” said Murphy. “That’s what we know for sure.”

“There is evidence this kind of approach can work. We’re not the first ever to sign a support services agreement like this for a single unit station with a larger world class operator. We think this has all of the elements of success. Absolutely time will tell.”

An objective of the agreement is to see Point Lepreau operate at 90 per cent capacity by 2029, with scheduled shutdowns happening every other year.

On Monday, Murphy said attention to expensive unplanned shutdowns at Point Lepreau had drowned out “the value it brings when it is running.”

“It’s a reasonable question to ask in terms of how do you make decisions about when the end-of-life for Lepreau is? I will tell you that we’re a long way from that,” said Murphy. “We believe that we understand what those (performance gaps) are and they’re not insurmountable.”

Point Lepreau’s licence to operate was renewed in 2022 until 2032.

With files from CTV’s Laura Brown

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