You asked
Members of the PROENERGY team were on hand to answer questions about the RIGS facility at a recent public information session with NB Power. A range of topics was discussed during the session, including the facility’s water use and greenhouse gas emissions.
Water use
A community member asked how much water the RIGS facility will use. Most of the time, the RIGS facility will use no water. It will spend most of its life stabilizing the grid voltage when wind and solar generation output fluctuates, operating in “synchronous condensing” mode (see additional details below about this mode of operation). When operating in this mode, the RIGS facility uses no water and no fuel. The facility will use water only when it is called upon to generate electricity, which will be about 7% of the year. For those operations over the course of a year, it will draw on average about 310 cubic metres of water per day from onsite wells. This is 99% less water than a coal or oil-fired boiler plant, which is the type of facility that RIGS will replace.
Greenhouse gas emissions
Another topic of interest during the session was greenhouse gas emissions related to the project. The RIGS facility will enable NB Power to reduce its overall greenhouse gas emissions by 250,000 tonnes per year – the equivalent of 106 million litres of gasoline not used or 125 million kilograms of coal not burned. The reductions are based on NB Power calculations supported by increased system flexibility related to how NB Power dispatches generating units within its generation fleet. The RIGS facility will enable NB Power to bring on smaller increments of fast-acting generation, instead of starting up much larger base load units that can take days to bring online.
“Right now, we actually have to start [NB Power’s oil-fired generating station] Coleson Cove 36 to 72 hours before we need it to have it be ready to generate electricity. That's a lot of fuel going into the unit without generating a single kilowatt hour on the output side. That's how we handle it today, and that's what the RIGS facility will help us avoid. The technology we're using for the RIGS facility can start and stop within minutes. The RIGS facility can go from zero to 500 megawatts in about six minutes, it can stay on for as little or as long as needed, and then it can turn off,” said NB Power’s Chief Commercial Officer Brad Coady during the session.
A community member also asked if it is true there will be CO2 emissions of more than 900,000 tonnes per year for the RIGS facility. This amount was included in the Environmental Impact Assessment for the project to reflect an extreme stress case of operation for the facility. It’s expected that the facility will actually operate at one-fifth of the hours estimated in the EIA scenario, producing closer to one-quarter of the stress case tonnes per year of CO2.
Combustion turbines like those being used as part of the RIGS project typically exhaust nitrogen oxides (NOx) of 25 ppm (parts per million). This meets the New Brunswick provincial standard and is normal for a facility like this. However, PROENERGY is including advanced downstream control technology that will reduce NOx emitted by the turbines to 2.5 ppm. The company is voluntarily choosing to incur the cost to include this additional emissions control equipment. This exceeds what is required by federal and provincial regulations.
“To be proactive, we decided to include catalyst systems that reduce NOx and CO emissions from the turbine exhaust by 90%. This was the responsible decision, in our opinion, to pursue an emissions level well below the typical air permit requirements. It will be interesting to see if this ultimately sets a perceived precedent for future thermal projects in Atlantic Canada or even Canada as a whole,” said Landon Tessmer, Vice President, Commercial Operations with PROENERGY. Landon has more than 15 years of power generation experience, is based in Ontario and is a licensed Professional Engineer.
Why not batteries?
Battery Energy Storage Systems were also a topic of interest during the public information session. The community were informed that NB Power has issued a call for a Request for Expressions of Interest (REOI) for a partner to build a Battery Energy Storage System in New Brunswick, and work to plan and develop this facility is ongoing. The cost to build a battery storage facility with enough capacity to power the province for an entire day is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. This is a massive investment that would ultimately be passed on to customers. Battery storage can only put energy on the grid for a short period of time. This limits the ability of batteries to backstop renewables and provide reliable peaking capacity during extreme weather events, which can last for several days. These are needs the RIGS project can fulfil. Source: NB Power fact sheet for Renewable Integration Grid Security (RIGS) Project.
We welcome all questions and comments. You can contact us at info@rigsenergyatlantic.ca. There are also many answers to frequently asked questions on our website: www.rigsenergyatlantic.ca.
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