Keephills#1 went offline at 18:14 yesterday.
The Market Surveillance Administrator, Alberta’s electricity market watchdog, has levied a $655,000 penalty against NorthPoint Energy – a Saskatchewan trading company, the largest fine laid by the MSA since deregulation a decade ago. The hefty charge was the sum of 332 fines against NorthPoint Energy, the trading arm of Saskatchewan Crown utility SaskPower, for breaking a rule around scheduling power sales across provincial boundaries. It comes 11 years after the administrator investigated similar rule bending between the now defunct and notorious Enron Corp. and PowerEx, the trading arm of B.C. Power. No electricity price spikes resulted from the 300-odd trades that happened between 2008 and 2009, or harm happened to the integrated power system – NorthPoint paid the fine immediately and instituted a number of changes as a result of the investigation. NothPoint misinterpreted the rule, rather than intentionally set about trying to undermine the system for financial gain. (Calgary Herald)
The Columbia Basin Trust intends to complete its mandate to develop hydroelectric facilities with a $900-million expansion of generating capacity on the Waneta Dam south of Trail, BC. The expansion involves building an additional 335-megawatt generating station on the Waneta Dam on the Pend d’Oreille River, just south of Trail. It is expected to take a little more than four years to build, would provide employment for 400 construction workers and inject some $200 million in direct wages into the region. The Waneta expansion is one of three potential hydroelectric developments, along with facilities at the Arrow Lakes and Brilliant dams, that the Columbia Basin Trust was endowed with when the provincial government created the trust in 1994 as a vehicle to mitigate damage caused in the region by damming of the Columbia River system in the early 1960s. Now Columbia Power and the Columbia Basin Trust have reached an agreement in principle with Fortis to jointly develop and share ownership of the project, with Fortis retaining 51 per cent of its equity and the trust taking the balance. The Waneta expansion’s power-sale agreement has to be approved by the B.C. Utilities Commission. Under the Waneta agreement, Fortis would buy an average of 234 megawatts worth of the project’s power generation.
