Muskrat Falls brings cautionary lessons for Green Transformation projects. The failures pushing up costs and stretching schedules could happen to other big projects with desired big rewards.
Enormous overruns of schedules, costs, and design failures have seen many or all of the benefits negated or lessened. Lessons for green energy transitions:
Large scale remote generation of electrical power see reliability risks, transmission costs for construction and operations, and transmission losses of 20% of usage
Base load reliability will require redundancy to achieve publicly acceptable capacity covering failures in renewable or base-load generation. Redundancy, either centralized or distributed, will cost more than people expect
Transitions to non-carbon polluting energy for homes and transportation will stress all elements of electrical grids (generation, transmission, distribution, redundancy) thereby increasing costs on a capital and ongoing basis
The public will not tolerate reductions in reliability, access, or availability of electrical power (government, commercial, or residential uses)
A lot of different engineering talents will be required: power systems, software, mechanical, electrical, civil, environmental, and chemical
In EkaLore’s next piece in the series we’ll see how the failures affect up to 50000000 people and then how the Muskrat Falls project came to be.
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