NB Power has released a 20-year integrated resource plan, charting a long-range path for the utility while the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station continues to face unresolved operational challenges.

Published on Monday, the integrated resource plan sets out the position that nuclear generation warrants a place among the province's leading electricity sources and that maintaining it would help limit the volume of greenhouse gas emissions released. According to the document — one intended to guide politicians, policymakers, and the regulator — extending the Saint John-area facility's operational window past its 2042 end date by five to ten years, or undertaking a second round of refurbishment, carries a range of potential benefits.

According to NB Power's own projections, keeping the facility running for another year would carry a price tag of $600 million, while the electricity generated over that same period would fetch around $900 million on the market.

At a Monday online press conference, NB Power's chief commercial officer Brad Coady described nuclear energy as a cornerstone of the utility's long-range strategy, adding that realising that path in New Brunswick would require funding commitments from both the federal and provincial governments, and that a successful build-out could shift the utility's position from net energy importer to net energy exporter, with a projected financial benefit of $300 million.

Green Party Leader David Coon and other critics have pointed to operational difficulties at Point Lepreau as a factor behind NB Power's rising debt load and the upward pressure on electricity rates. Repeated equipment failures at the facility — now in its 44th year of operation — have driven up costs for the public utility by hundreds of millions of dollars, a burden that its roughly 400,000 ratepayers are expected to absorb over time.

Among the incidents was one from the previous month, when a faulty pipe allowed tritiated water to seep into the reactor building. No injuries were reported and the affected area has since been restored to its prior condition.

The $2.4-billion overhaul of Point Lepreau, completed in 2012, added to NB Power's existing $6-billion debt load, while the station's output over the following decade ranked near the bottom of comparable nuclear facilities. Rate increases of more than 25 percent over recent years have been noted in the proposal, with household bills climbing by hundreds of dollars annually as a result.

When NB Power put forward a comparable proposal three years earlier, survey responses gathered at the time showed that roughly 28 per cent of participating customers placed affordable rates at the top of their priorities, with dependable service following closely behind. Affordability ranked as the foremost concern among respondents in the latest survey, drawing support from 43 per cent — a pool of nearly 10,000 people — while reliability followed at 25 per cent. Renewable energy investment and debt reduction ranked lower, drawing shares of 13 per cent and nine per cent respectively.

Coady acknowledged that Point Lepreau's output record needed to improve, and explained that every period the nuclear station sits offline requires NB Power to draw on more expensive electricity from Quebec and New England, or to run higher-emission generation at facilities such as Belledune and Coleson Cove, in order to meet provincial demand. In Coady's view, debt pressure on the utility traces more directly to those periods of reduced nuclear output than to other factors, and a consistently operating Lepreau delivers financial and environmental advantages to NB Power and its customer base.

The plan's output results across that period were characterised as falling short of adequate levels. Critics, including Coon, have argued that ratepayers in New Brunswick have grounds to push back against those results. NB Power's management has not indicated acceptance of that position.

Toward the goal of improving performance, NB Power entered into a three-year agreement worth $20 million with Laurentis Energy Partners — an Ontario Power Generation subsidiary — starting in April, with the aim of strengthening the CANDU plant's long-term performance.

One challenge confronting the utility involves meeting requirements to reduce carbon output by drawing less energy from coal and other fossil-fuel sources. Among the pathways laid out in the document are options for cutting most greenhouse gas emissions and reaching net-zero output. Growing adoption of electric vehicles, the document forecasts, would push power consumption upward, and atomic energy figures into the calculations for how that demand could be met.

NB Power's expansion into wind and solar generation is under way, though utility leadership has not concluded that grid-scale battery storage offers a reliable enough buffer for those sources, which produce power only when weather conditions allow. Coady noted that Point Lepreau — or a second reactor built alongside it — could supply the baseload power the province requires, adding that nuclear energy forms a substantial part of any workable path toward carbon reduction, whether in New Brunswick or across the country, and that the existing facility has already reshaped how the provincial grid operates.

Without the Point Lepreau nuclear facility, officials have estimated that the region's power grid would likely depend on roughly 2,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation — a fuel type that data show accounts for around one-fifth of global greenhouse gas output each year. With a nameplate capacity of around 500 megawatts and a fuel mix now shifting from coal to wood pellets, Belledune Generating Station operates at a fraction of the 2,000-megawatt coal-fired output that planners had envisioned when the plant opened in 1993.

The proposal for that level of coal-fired capacity was ultimately set aside. Coady noted that Point Lepreau's performance is directly tied to the utility's overall financial health, adding that while nuclear generation carries considerable upkeep and operating costs, a reactor running at full capacity can deliver electricity at a notably low unit cost.