Chair Williams, Vice-Chair Carpenter, Commissioner MacFarlane, Director
Bradley, Ms. McKenna and Ms. Walsh-Doucette thank you. We are pleased
to be invited to participate.

Before I begin our prepared remarks, I must respond to some
misinformation presented earlier this week.

On Tuesday, Mr. Orford stated that there are 200 EV’s on PEI. In reality,
we have about 1,400 registered fully Electric Vehicles. This is an 80MW
storage opportunity. Whole home batteries are a booming market on PEI
and like EV’s these batteries can also be used to reduce peak demand and
build a network of interruptible customers.

On Wednesday, Mr. Coyne of Sargent and Lundy, used Table 5-9 to
advise us of energy equipment costs. The chart reported:
Solar PV at $3,131 per kW, Onshore Wind $2,126 per kW
and a 50 MW (4 hour) BESS at $2,670 per kW. 

Now, I don’t know much about the price of wind turbines but after a decade
in the solar industry, I can tell you that his figure for rooftop solar is inflated
by about 50%. We know the prices for BESS are plummeting so it can be
hard to keep up. The current price for a 50MW 4 hour (200 MWh)BESS is
only $1,360 kW or about half of the price listed in the E3 table.

Mr. Coyne also cautioned us to avoid ‘First mover risk.’ Instead of
concern about early adoption we need to avoid the risk of stranded assets.
Do we really think we’ll be burning diesel to make electricity in 2076?
Because Maritime Electric expects Islanders to spend the next fifty years
paying for this refurbished equipment, even when they stop using it.
I do fully support Mr. Coyle‘s statement that “an investment in wind is
the best bang for your buck when speaking to sustainability.”

Energy Democracy Now! Co-operative Limited is a PEI registered
co-operative of member-owners. We’re here as a Friend of the
Commission representing over 1,600 Islanders from tip to tip.

Here exactly is where we stand on this application: Energy
Democracy Now! completely and unequivocally opposes this
application. We believe that Prince Edward Island should meet its capacity
needs with better technology and not by putting $353 million dollars or
more into refurbished diesel power generation. We are asking the Panel to
reject this application.

Almost everything we put to the Commission today comes from Maritime
Electric’s own filings: from its consultants, from its studies, from its answers
to the Commission’s interrogatories.

Section 24(2) of the Electric Power Act requires
expenditures to be reasonably and prudently incurred.

That is ultimately the question before you: is this $353-
million expenditure prudent? The burden of proof lies on the
applicant. It doesn’t move across to the Commission staff, or the
Commission’s expert, or to volunteers like us. We aim to demonstrate that
Maritime Electric Company Limited has failed to prove that the ProEnergy
Opportunity is the best way to proceed.

Maritime Electric would like this hearing to turn on one technical number,
the Effective Load Carrying Capacity, (which I will refer to as ELCC). ELCC
is an accreditation measure of capacity and answers one question:
dependability. And this matters. But it’s a rating. It doesn’t provide
information on what to buy, or who to buy it from, or at what price, or who
pays if a poor decision is made based on this one technical number.

The Panel doesn’t have to take our word for this, because Maritime
Electric’s own filings already keep those things apart. Their consultant,
Energy and Environmental Economics Inc. (which I will refer to as) E3
produced the accreditation numbers. The economics live in a different
document, the Portfolio Net Present Value Study, which was written by
Maritime Electric.

Engineering studies answer engineering questions. How much dependable
capacity is needed? Can different combinations supply it? What the studies
don’t do is determine which investment should be approved. That takes
judgment about what customers pay over decades, about implementation
risk, about fuel dependence, about which choice still looks sensible if the
future turns out differently. These are not the consultants’ questions. These
are the Commission’s questions.

We have six parts to our presentation: 

• What Maritime Electric’s consultant, E3, found.
• Two opposing analyses on battery storage.
• What economics leaves out.
• Answers to four questions the Commission has yet to receive.
• The emphasis by Maritime Electric on urgency.
• Lastly, what Energy Democracy Now! is seeking from the Panel.

I. WHAT E3, MARITIME ELECTRIC’S OWN CONSULTANT FOUND

First, putting our objections to one side, we’ll take the E3 Study at its best.
E3 reported that PEI needs about a hundred and fifteen megawatts of
accredited capacity by 2030, measured against a standard of one day of
lost load in ten years. We’re not asking the Commission to treat that as
settled because Sargent & Landry came in at 85MW. It comes out of the
same modelling I’ll get to shortly, and the answers to your expert’s
questions about it, filed on the seventeenth of August, concede more than
they settle. One of them is worth pausing on now: twenty of those hundred
and fifteen megawatts are not a shortfall of machines at all. E3 calls them
an interactive effect — mostly wind saturation. A property of the model, not
of the peak. But take it at its best, and look at what E3 did next: in Exhibit
30, IR-53, Maritime Electric writes that the E3 Study presented ten
portfolios, and each of them achieves the same reliability contribution.
This matters. It means the Panel won’t be choosing between a reliable
system and an unreliable one. On the applicant’s own evidence, you’re
choosing among multiple reliable options. And once the options are equally
reliable, reliability can’t tell the Panel which one to build. Everything after
that comes down to cost, to risk, and to the assumptions sitting underneath
the model.

So what did E3 find about the resources themselves? Regarding demand
response, Table 5-3 (Exhibit M-30) sets out six programs. One of them is
six hours long, called twelve times a year. It is accredited at ninety-five per
cent. The turbines are accredited at seventy-five per cent. Demand
response, on this system, measured by E3, is the best-performing capacity
resource in the study.

So how was that finding used? It wasn’t. Of the ten portfolios, not one
includes any extra demand response. None includes extra wind, or solar, or
interruptible load, or additional imports. The Commission’s independent
consultant, Synapse Energy Economics, pinned that down at Question 1(c)
in their August 7 questions (Exhibit C-33), and the answer isn’t in front of
the Panel yet. The resource that scored highest was left out of every costed
option. We want to be fair here: E3 answered the questions it was hired to
answer. But the Panel is being asked to pick from a menu, and the best
dish (demand response) isn’t on it.

And put that next to one more thing. The PEI Energy Corporation’s
demand-side management plan expired this year on the twenty-eighth of
February. Nothing has been filed to replace it. As such, the best-performing
resource in Maritime Electric’s own reliability study is also the one this
province currently has no plan for.

Second, we’ll look at storage. In Exhibit M-30, figure E3-S, E3 accredits
the first twenty megawatts of four-hour storage at sixty-seven per cent, and
the first twenty megawatts of eight-hour storage at eighty-one per cent. The
turbines, again, are at seventy-five percent. So storage isn’t the weak
resource it’s been made out to be.

Maritime Electric’s answer to that is saturation — the more storage you
add, the less each megawatt earns. The effect is real and we’re not going
to dispute it. But saturation is a feature of high penetration. It only becomes
a factor if storage has to do the whole job by itself. Hold that thought,
because Maritime Electric’s entire case hinges on that assumption.

Third, size. E3 found that a twenty megawatt engine is accredited at
eighty-six per cent, while a fifty megawatt turbine only gets seventy-five per
cent. The reason is that on a system peaking near four hundred
megawatts, losing use of one big machine is itself a major source of risk.
Smaller units offer a more reliable contribution per megawatt. That’s
Maritime Electric’s own consultant explaining why, here, small beats big.
The application before us is the opposite of small. Two identical fifty
megawatt machines. One vendor. One production line. One site, sharing
fuel handling, sharing whatever design features they have in common.
EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute, puts common-mode failure at
the top of what conventional adequacy modelling misses. And two more
issues come out of Maritime Electric’s own answers. Exhibit 30, IR-75 does
not show a PE6000 running anywhere in a climate directly comparable to
ours.

The Maritime Electric testimony on Tuesday affirmed that the utility has not
yet seen a PE6000 in operation. They also stated that they had never
heard anything bad about ProEnergy but we have heard many things that
are not ‘sunshine and roses’ we found lawsuits in Indonesia, Venezuela,
and Germany plus I just found a case in Missouri from 2018 where the
arbitrator ultimately awarded the Plaintiff Plaintiff $1,807,430.43 in
damages and costs.

And in Exhibit 30, IR-74, the promise that each unit would be
performance-tested before delivery has been withdrawn. They’ll be tested
here, in Charlottetown, after installation, after payment.

Fourth, cost. We want to take some care here, because this is an area
where the record can be misread, including by us.
The two figures are on the screen. Maritime Electric’s preferred portfolio,
and the one that swaps the engines out for eighty-five megawatts of battery
storage. They’re about one per cent apart, and Maritime Electric’s own
sensitivity testing keeps them within 5% in nearly every scenario it ran.

Now, it would suit us to say it shows a storage alternative that costs about
the same as the turbines. It doesn’t, and we’re not going to put it that way.
Both portfolios have the ProEnergy turbines in them. What their closeness
settles is a narrower question: how to meet the balance of the requirement
– engines or more storage. It doesn’t answer whether the turbines
themselves are the right fit. Two things do follow, though.

One is that on Maritime Electric’s own numbers, storage and thermal, swap
in and out at the margin for about the same money. That’s hard to square
with what Islanders were told at the technical session last September,
which was that you can’t rely on a battery. Maritime Electric’s own study
now puts the appropriate battery somewhere between nine and eighty-five
megawatts.

The other is a concession. Maritime Electric writes that the small gap
between these portfolios, and the high-level cost estimates used for
the engine plant and the battery, support further study before a final
decision is made for the remaining capacity additions. I read that last
phrase deliberately, because the further study it recommends is about the
balance, not about the turbines. What it does concede is that its own
costings of the alternatives are rough ones.

Fifth, and this is the part we’d ask the Commission to hold onto:

where this evidence actually stands. Both studies were filed on the twenty-
fourth of July. Nineteen months into this proceeding. Just weeks before this hearing.

And after the Commission’s own expert, Synapse, had pointed out
they were missing. Synapse put fourteen questions to Maritime Electric on
the seventh of August, the same day your staff put theirs. The answers
came back on the seventeenth — two weeks before this hearing. And I
want to be precise about what those answers are, because they are no
longer open questions. They are admissions.

Let’s look at where Synapse questions start. They open by quoting E3’s
own report, page 12, where E3 recommends that Maritime Electric run an
economic analysis on the portfolios to find the most cost-effective way of
meeting its reliability needs. That’s E3 saying the analysis is needed. It
hasn’t been done. The questions go on from there: ten portfolios chosen by
hand, five of them costed; the reliability modelling run for a single year; and
the two proposed turbines placed inside the base system to calibrate the
model, which may distort every marginal accreditation number in the study.
The workpapers the commission’s expert asked for arrived just a week
before the hearings were scheduled to begin.

One word on why scrutiny matters, and we’ll say it fairly. Last November,
Maritime Electric filed a table showing that batteries were more than three
times as expensive as a capacity resource (Exhibit M-15, page 3) . This
was the result of a spreadsheet error. The error was acknowledged and
corrected, but only after Synapse found it. Their scrutiny caught the
mistake from the applicant, and it hasn’t been applied to these two studies
yet.

II. WHY THE TWO ANALYSES DIFFER

The Commission has two economic analyses on battery storage that point
in opposite directions. Working out why is, we’d suggest, the most useful
thing the Commission can do in this proceeding, because the reason isn’t
an obvious one.

Start with what Synapse Energy Economics – the Commission’s own
expert – actually found, because these numbers have received far less
attention than they deserve. Synapse compared the one hundred megawatt
ProEnergy Opportunity project against battery alternatives of the same
size. Like for like.

Installed cost first. The figures are on the screen. The six-hour battery
comes in under the turbines. The four-hour battery comes in at thirty per
cent under.

Then net present cost, over a common fifty years, using Maritime Electric’s
own ratemaking framework. Again, it’s on the screen. The turbines are the
tallest column. Synapse’s conclusion was blunt: either choice of battery
size costs less than the turbine proposal over equivalent lives.
That’s the Commission’s own expert, comparing the actual proposal
against an actual alternative, on the Maritime Electric’s own accounting. It
is the only like-for-like comparison anywhere in this record.

So how does Maritime Electric’s July NPV study end up in the opposite
place? Not because it found that batteries got more expensive. But
because it changed how many megawatts of battery the model requires.
Synapse credited one hundred megawatts of storage with at least ninety
megawatts of dependable capacity, and the six-hour version with the full
hundred. On that footing, a hundred megawatts of storage does the work of
a hundred megawatts of turbine, and you set one against the other.

The Portfolio NPV Study begins somewhere else. It takes E3’s finding that
storage earns less and less accreditation as you add more of it. Then it
asks: how much storage would you need to do the whole job on its own? Its
answer is five hundred and forty megawatts. And the screen shows the
costs — a billion and a half dollars, and one point eight billion dollars.
Now look carefully at what has happened there. Nobody has discovered
that batteries got more expensive. But because the model was told a
battery counts for less, so it had to use five times as many. Same battery,
same inflated price per unit. And the price per unit is unchanged — the
study says so itself. They costed a fifty megawatt project and then
multiplied it by 10.8. There’s no bulk discount or economy of scale. So
when you’re told the battery alternative is unaffordable, that isn’t a market
price you’re hearing. It’s one contested assumption, doing all the work.

Which brings the whole proceeding down to a single point.That ELCC
number of 540 MW isn’t one issue among several. The entire economic
case rests on this assumption. And it comes from a study filed in July that
ran no economic optimization — E3 has now confirmed that in terms —
modelled a single year, produced its workpapers only on the seventeenth of
August, and, as E3 has now also confirmed, was calibrated with the two
proposed turbines already sitting inside the base case.

We’re not asking the Panel to prefer Synapse’s numbers to E3’s. We’re
asking the Panel to notice that a three hundred and fifty-three million dollar
decision now rests on a figure that the Commission’s own expert has
questioned, and that the answers which came back concede the six-hour
configuration it recommended was never modelled, and that no loss-of-load
analysis was run for the very portfolios being costed. If that figure holds,
Maritime Electric’s case is strong. If it’s overstated, the case turns over
completely, because Synapse’s comparison has the alternative cheaper on
both measures. The question here is: at what accreditation value does
storage become the cheaper resource? Synapse can find that crossover,
and the Commission ought to know that before starting its deliberations.
And finding it is no longer a project: the inputs arrived on the seventeenth,
in spreadsheet form, on the record. What was a request for new work three
weeks ago is now an afternoon with a filed workpaper.

III. WHAT THE ECONOMICS LEAVE OUT

Let us turn to the model itself. We’ll start by giving Maritime Electric its due.
The Portfolio NPV Study is a genuine improvement on what came before. It
brings in fuel costs, fixed operating and maintenance costs, battery 13
charging, arbitrage value, all over a common fifty-year horizon. Those were
fair criticisms and they’ve been answered. What we want to talk about is
what’s still outside the model.

We want to know: How often will these machines actually run? This
matters, because it’s what the fuel bill depends on. The study picks 3% and
holds it there for all fifty years. At the half-load Maritime Electric assumes, it
works out to about five hundred operating hours a year.
Now set that against the rest of the record. Maritime Electric’s own
forecasts have the output of these units more than doubling between 2029
and 2033. The study tests 1% and it tests 5%. It never tests a rising line,
which is the line the rest of its evidence draws.

Carbon. There’s no carbon price in the Portfolio NPV Study. No
compliance cost. No line for offset credits. And that sits awkwardly against
Maritime Electric’s own answer at Exhibit M-30, IR-65, which explains that
the Clean Electricity Regulations will be in effect from 2035, and that after
2050, these turbines are expected to comply by using Canadian Offset
Credits. Offset credits get bought. They cost money. So the compliance
route for the second half of this asset’s life is carried at zero.The reason
given is a federal amendment Maritime Electric itself says is uncertain in
scope and detail.

Then there’s this. The Commission’s staff asked Maritime Electric to update
its greenhouse gas forecast to show what these turbines will emit over their
life. The answer, at Exhibit M-30, IR-68, is that it hasn’t done one, because
it would need assumptions over fifty years about load growth, dispatch, fuel
use, system conditions and market conditions, all of which, it says, carry
significant uncertainty.

Fifty years is too uncertain to estimate the emissions. Fifty years is the
basis of the financial analysis the Commission is being asked to rely on.
Both documents were filed on the same day, July 24.
And Maritime Electric’s own limitations section concedes more than that.
The model doesn’t test different useful-life assumptions. Future restrictions
on diesel generation could shorten the life of these units. Converting to
another fuel might soften that, it says, but at a cost. What cost? At Exhibit
M-30, IR-59(c), Maritime Electric says it hasn’t done that analysis. So the
mitigation isn’t costed, the compliance route isn’t priced, the life isn’t tested,
the emissions aren’t forecast. And when the Commission’s staff asked who
carries the risk if these assets strand, the answer at Exhibit M-30, IR-65(d)
was that Maritime Electric would look to recover the remaining book value
from its customers.

We’d like to raise two smaller points before continuing.
First, on method. For an asset that runs a few hundred hours a year,
neither Maritime Electric or Synapse has put the comparison in the form
that would be clearest to the Commission: the annual cost, per kilowatt of
accredited capacity, of simply keeping the resource available. That figure
would show a turbine, a battery, a demand response program and an
interruptible load contract on one page. We’d invite the Commission to ask
their own expert for it.

Second, affordability. In a footnote to its own study, Maritime Electric sets
the cost of diesel for the existing turbine against the wind it buys. Both rates
are on the screen. That’s Maritime Electric’s comparison, not ours.
Islanders were encouraged to electrify their heating, and they did it — peak
demand is up forty-five percent in ten years. This is a policy success. But
electrification isn’t the same thing as decarbonization, and it isn’t
automatically affordability either. Which of those it turns out to be depends
entirely on what serves those new winter peaks.

And the consequence for ratepayers is already in the record. Maritime
Electric’s own sensitivity shows that, if avoided, capacity costs come in fifty
per cent lower than assumed, the claimed savings drop from about fifty-two
per cent to about nine, and the impact on a household bill increases from

roughly five per cent to seven and a half. This case rests on indicative, non-
binding quotes Maritime Electric itself says aren’t a firm commitment.

Meanwhile the regional assessments Synapse filed have the Maritime
provinces moving into surplus from the winter of 2028-29, which is before
these units would come on-line.

IV. FOUR QUESTIONS YOU’VE NEVER HAD ANSWERED

We want to put four matters to the Commission now that a record
supporting a three hundred and fifty-three million dollar approval ought to
address, and this particular record does not. We framed them as questions
because Maritime Electric holds the information on each of them, and the
Commission hasn’t been given it.

And we’ll offer a heading for these matters that aren’t ours. The Electric
Power Research Institute, EPRI accepts loss-of-load expectation as an
important measure, but says a single metric only captures one dimension
of risk, and recommends stress testing and thinking explicitly about
extreme events. The Electric Power Research Institute, (EPRI) is more
specific about what conventional adequacy modelling tends to miss:
common-mode failures, extreme weather, and fuel constraints. These
are the profession’s categories, not ours. Three of our four questions land
squarely inside them.

First, water. In its brief, the Maritime Electric counts the Charlottetown site
as an advantage because it’s a brownfield. Fuel storage, grid connections,
water treatment infrastructure, all of it already there. That’s offered as a
reason to approve this application. But nowhere in this record, across
nineteen months and several hundred pages, is there a number for how
much water these two units will use.

The Commission will appreciate the context here, for the very sound
reason that PEI depends entirely on its groundwater. Charlottetown’s
supply comes from the Winter River watershed, which for years has been a
source of concern about extraction limits and low summer flows. The City
puts restrictions on its own residents every summer as a result. Against
that, a new industrial draw isn’t a technical footnote.

So: how much water, in one year and at peak, including whatever the
catalytic reduction system and its ammonia reagent need? From what
source, under what permit, and discharged where? We’re told the
infrastructure is there. We’re not told what pressure will be put on it.
Permitting hasn’t started, and Maritime Electric is relying on an
environmental assessment done in 2014 for an entirely different project.

Second, diesel. There are two halves to this: what it costs, and whether it
gets delivered. On cost. The year-one fuel rate comes from Maritime
Electric’s most recent single delivery back in February. This is escalated
across fifty years, and the only sensitivity applied is plus or minus fifteen
per cent, uniformly, across all fifty. Is fifteen per cent a serious description
of diesel price risk? Distillate is one of the most volatile commodities in the
energy system. This is a fuel that has fluctuated a good deal more than
fifteen per cent inside single years, and it’s being modelled as though it
were limited at fifteen percent over half a century.

On whether the diesel gets here, the question is sharper, because we’re an
island. At Exhibit M-30, IR-60(a), Maritime Electric noted that it keeps about a
week’s worth of fuel for its existing turbine at full load. It doesn’t tell us what three
turbines would need. Where will the fuel be stored? What does that storage cost?
How long does resupply take in the winter when these machines would be
running?

And here’s the sentence we’d ask the Panel to remember. Describing how
new thermal generation is modelled, E3 writes that fuel supply constraints
are not modelled in this analysis, because fuel is assumed to always be
available. But the whole case for this application is that Prince Edward
Island can’t rely on things it doesn’t physically control. The study

supporting this case assumes limitless supply of a fuel that comes from off-
Island, over the same crossings that shut in the same weather. The one

dependency Maritime Electric is willing to accept is the one its consultant
didn’t model. This is precisely the gap EPRI points to. And in Exhibit M-30,
IR-61, Maritime Electric confirms it isn’t aware of any published fuel
strategy for this province or this region.

Third, and this is the one we’d most like the Panel to carry into their
deliberations, because of when it happened.

On the twenty-third of July, at 10:00 a.m. here in Charlottetown, the
Premiers of PEI, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia signed a Memorandum
of Understanding on Maritime regional electricity cooperation, with Natural
Resources Canada alongside them. They committed to deliver, by this
autumn, a regional resource and transmission roadmap covering
generation, transmission and demand-side resources, plus a cost-benefit
analysis of regional planning that includes options for a Maritime system
operator. And by the spring of 2027, a full roadmap and a decision on how
to implement it. One of the stated principles is fair and efficient access to
capacity during periods of limitation. And the governance structure names a
utilities committee, with Maritime Electric on it.

The same day, in the same city, the federal government announced funding
for the Prince Edward Island–New Brunswick Interconnection Expansion:
two new two-hundred-megawatt submarine cables, with transmission and
substation work alongside, and pre-development aimed at construction
from 2028.

The following day, on the 24th of July, Maritime Electric filed the E3 Study
and the Portfolio NPV Study. Two weeks later, on August 7, Maritime
Electric filed its pre-hearing brief. Neither of these two submitted
documents makes reference to these regional energy
announcements.

To summarize: In the same week the decisive evidence for this proposition
was filed, three provinces and the federal government committed to a
process designed to change it — a process that concludes in the spring of
2027, two and a half years before these turbines could produce a megawatt
hour.

These were public events, reported everywhere. We’re not suggesting
anything was hidden. What we’re saying is that this application rests on a
proposition about PEI’s geographical isolation. That the intertie is
constrained. That regional capacity can’t be counted on. The province
therefore, has to build its own.

The Commission already has Maritime Electric’s answer on the
transmission side of this, at Exhibit M-30, IR-42(c). When asked what the
planned New Brunswick improvements would do for capacity into this
province, it said the extent of any increase hasn’t been quantified. And
added, in a footnote, that this can’t be calculated by Maritime Electric — it
has to come from the New Brunswick system operator. So the upside is
unquantified, and Maritime Electric says it isn’t the party who can quantify
it. Has it asked? And what would four hundred megawatts of new cable
connecting PEI and NB do to the constraint this whole application rests on?

Fourth, a pattern that cannot be ignored. Look at the screen. Every line
there is a question this Commission has asked. Every answer is a version
of the same sentence:

“The analysis hasn’t been completed.”

The risk of disconnection.

The point at which owning stops being the cheapest option.

The cost of converting to gas.

What the asset will emit over its life.

And the claim that wind can’t be relied on during a disconnection turns out
to rest, on the Maritime Electric’s own account, on internal conversations
among engineering staff, with no review document at all.

Any one of these could be excused. Together, they describe an applicant asking for a
categorical approval on a good deal less than categorical support.

V. URGENCY, AND THE WINTERS UP TO 2029

Now, the urgency.

In August last year the supplemental filing (Exhibit M-12) described a series
of payments running from September to December 2025, governed by
what it called the Slot Reservation Account, and essential — that was the
word — to keep the critical path to commissioning in 2028. Those dates
came and went. The payments weren’t made. Nothing lapsed.

The justification for the whole accelerated request was that it was the only
viable path to new capacity by 2028. The in-service timeline is now October
2029. The alignment with New Brunswick Power’s project, which was the
reason for abandoning the original plan, no longer fully holds. The
Commission asked twice, at Exhibit M-30, IR-80 and again IR-82, for
written confirmation that ProEnergy will proceed. What came back was a
budgetary proposal, subject to finalizing contractual arrangements and
regulatory approval. After nearly two years there’s no executed contract,
and permitting hasn’t begun. And there’s a new deadline: forty-three point
six eight million US dollars, due by the thirtieth of September (that’s 34
days from today August 27).

This is about weight. Each of those deadlines was described as
critical at the time. Each one has passed. The project survived every
time. So when the Panel is told once more that a decision must be
made now or the opportunity is lost, the Panel is entitled to weigh that
against the four warnings that came before it.

And there’s a practical side to this. These turbines, if the Panel approved
them today, do nothing for the winter of 2026-27. Nothing for 2027-28.
Nothing for 2028-29. These are the winters the Maritime Electric has
written a rotating outage plan for. What does help is what the Commission’s
staff asked about on the seventh of August: the already approved smart
meters, the time-of-use and demand response pilots, more interruptible
load, and a demand-side management plan. Which brings us right back to
where we started. The resource E3 rated at ninety-five per cent is the
one that can be in place before 2029, and it’s the one with no plan
behind it.

VI. PROCESS, AND WHAT WE’RE ASKING FOR

A word on process, briefly, because it bears on how much weight this
record will carry. This application was filed in December 2024 on the
strength of a system plan from 2020. E3’s own study notes that Maritime
Electric hasn’t historically done its own resource adequacy analysis. And
the answers to Synapse’s questions about the modelling fall due after
today. A proceeding too urgent to delay is one where the decisive evidence
arrived last and still hasn’t been tested.

On confidentiality, we maintain our earlier objections and ask you to apply
the Commission’s Rules category by category, with the reasons made
public. The inputs to the rate impact may well protect New Brunswick’s
pricing. But the outputs, what this does to an ordinary household’s bill, is
the one thing every household is entitled to know before this purchase is
decided. The remedy for an unfounded inference is a founded fact. And
finally, this is still the only province in the region without a funded public
intervener.

Which brings us to what we’re asking for. Energy Democracy Now asks the
Panel to reject this application.

We ask this on the ground the statute gives you. The applicant has to
establish prudence, and it hasn’t. It never tested the market for a single
alternative. It never costed the demand-side resource its own consultant
rates highest. It never priced the carbon compliance it says it’ll need. The
rest of the list is on the screen — the water, the fuel constraint, the
emissions forecast, the conversion cost, the regional agreements. And
underneath all of it, the economic case turns on one accreditation number
the Commission’s own expert has questioned.

We won’t pretend to the Commission that this is only a question of
evidence for us. Energy Democracy Now!’s member-owners are
opposed to committing this Island to new diesel generation. We’d be
doing them a disservice if we dressed that up as something narrower.

We’re being asked, in 2026, to build a fifty-year diesel plant on an Island
with no fossil fuel of its own, that ships in every litre it burns across a strait.
Federal law requires the emissions of this class of asset to reach zero
around the midpoint of the book life being proposed. Maritime Electric’s
answer to that is a regulatory relaxation it admits is uncertain, and an
assurance that if the asset strands, it will come to ratepayers for the
balance. We don’t think that’s a bargain this Panel should put its
name to.

We’re not asking the Panel to leave the Island short of capacity. If the Panel
rejects this application, we’d ask it to direct Maritime Electric to come back with an open, competitive procurement for the capacity it has identified.

Storage, demand response, interruptible load, renewables, and thermal
generation too if it wants, all competing on equal terms and on tested
prices, backed by a current system plan and the resilience analysis E3
itself recommended. This isn’t delay. This is the ordinary way a regulated
utility buys three hundred and fifty-three million dollars of assets, and it’s
what should have happened before this application was even filed.

If the Panel determines that it is inappropriate to reject outright this
application, then, without giving up our position, here’s what we’d ask on
behalf of the public.

Order the market test your expert recommended, open to storage, demand
response and interruptible load.

Require public answers to the four questions we put to the Commission
today.

Rule on confidentiality category by category, and unseal what this does to a
household bill.

Demand an interim plan for the next several winters.

And should the Panel approve the application, even now, please put
conditions on it, including: a cost cap with overruns to shareholders, the
executed contract and warranties filed before any further payment,
stranded-cost sharing settled in advance, and open competition for every
megawatt that comes after these.

Chair, Vice-Chair, Commissioner, this case has largely been made by
assertion. That no alternative exists. That there’s no time. That the risk is
low. That the questions don’t need answering.

Each of these has been tested at some point in this proceeding, and each of them has failed the
test. E3, Maritime Electric’s own consultant, now tells the Commission that
demand response outperforms these turbines, that storage matches them
at the sizes proposed, and that smaller units are worth more than larger
ones. Synapse, the Commission’s own expert, has the less expensive
alternative on both installed cost and net present cost. And the one figure
that turns that around was filed last month, and nobody has examined it
yet.

Energy Democracy Now! Co-operative Limited is a PEI community-based
advocacy organization founded on the principle that the climate crisis
demands a shift from a corporate, centralized, fossil-fuel economy to a
society and economy that are governed by local community priorities. We
are committed to protect and defend the best interests of all Island
residents on matters of energy democracy.

We therefore request that the Panel reject this application.

Thank you very much for your time. I’m happy to take the Panel’s questions.