5 Sep 2026 The Guardian (Charlottetown)

BRENNAN MCDUFFEE Brennan McDuffee is a community organizer with Energy Democracy Now, a co-operative of Prince Edward Island residents that is an intervener in Maritime Electric’s application before the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission.

Maritime Electric wants $353 million for two new diesel turbines to keep up with demand, but members of Energy Democracy Now say the company’s own filings don’t prove this is the best solution.

Islanders have been told they face a simple choice: two new diesel turbines in Charlottetown, or the lights go out. That framing is designed to make the decision feel inevitable. It isn’t.

Maritime Electric’s own filings before the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission show a company that hasn’t proven this is the best deal; it’s just the one they picked.

Maritime Electric wants $353 million for these turbines. At the company’s own earlier estimate, that’s roughly $101 a year on the average household’s bill, and that’s the good-case number.

If diesel costs more, if the turbines run more than planned, or if future rules make them pricier to operate, Islanders pay for that too. And if the world moves on before these generators reach the end of their expected life, Maritime Electric has told the commission it will ask to recover the leftover cost from customers as well. Shareholders are protected either way.

IRAC hired its own expert, Synapse Energy Economics, to check the math. Synapse compared 100 megawatts of battery storage with the 100 megawatts of turbines on the table. Same size, side by side, using Maritime Electric’s own accounting rules.

The battery came out cheaper to build and to operate over a 50-year lifespan.

Maritime Electric came back with a different number: a battery big enough to replace the turbines entirely would need to be 540 megawatts, five times bigger, priced at past a billion and a half dollars. Same battery, same price per megawatt. The company changed how much reliability credit it gave storage, not the price of storage.

When one modelling choice swings the answer by a billion dollars, that deserves to be tested before the cheque is written.

Energy Democracy Now is a small co-operative of Islanders going up against a utility with engineers, consultants and lawyers.

It’s not our job to prove we could run the grid better; it’s Maritime Electric’s job to prove Islanders should spend hundreds of millions on this project.

So far, it hasn’t. Its own consultants found demand response — paying Islanders to use less power during the Island’s toughest hours — among the best-performing options in the study. It never made the shortlist. No alternative was ever put out to a real competition against diesel, on equal terms and actual market prices.

Every drop of diesel for these turbines ships in across the same strait that sometimes cuts this Island off during storms. Maritime Electric’s consultants simply assumed the fuel would always show up. They didn’t conduct a study; they just took an assumption and built a 50-year cost case on one delivery from this past February.

Meanwhile, P.E.I., New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are working with Ottawa on a more integrated Maritime grid, with results due this fall and a fuller road map by spring 2027.

That work could change how much capacity P.E.I. needs to build alone.

Why commit to 50 years of going it alone just as the region works out how connected it can become?

Maritime Electric says there’s no time to wait.

We’ve heard that before: four separate deadlines, each called critical, have come and gone without consequence. If the sky didn’t fall the last four times, the commission doesn’t owe a fifth free pass.

IRAC has more than two choices here. It can approve this application as filed, locking Islanders into 50 years of diesel on an untested comparison. It can reject the application outright and send Maritime Electric back to zero.

Or it can order something more useful than either: build in stages, starting with battery storage now, with anything further added later, only after it’s tested in a fair competition.

That’s how you build a power system when you don’t yet know how much capacity you’ll need five years out: build the cheapest, fastest part first, and leave the bigger, riskier commitment until it’s proven. On the record right now, storage is that first stage. Diesel isn’t.

Before Islanders accept another $101 a year and everything that could follow, Maritime Electric should have to show that it’s the best deal for the people paying for it. So far, it hasn’t.