13 January 2012

Beleaguered utility blows raspberry at regulator #nlpoli

Nalcor should be able to supply information to any regulatory or review process for the Muskrat Falls project because the company should have already reviewed exactly the sorts of information those regulators or reviewers in order to approve its project for development.

The fact that Nalcor hasn’t been able to meet a single deadline, especially for the public utilities board process speaks volumes about Nalcor’s fundamental  problems.

The public utilities board process, don’t forget, is one in which Nalcor and the provincial government have constrained the PUB scope of inquiry and time scales/

Still Nalcor is frigging it up.

So what does a company do with a project more and more people are questioning across the board?

They send a letter to the public utilities board chairman that, in effect, blows a raspberry at the regulator.

To paraphrase:  we’ve given you pages of stuff and met your people lots of times despite the fact we are really, really busy doing other stuff.  So there.

What doesn’t sound good, though is this line in the last paragraph:

Nalcor wants to ensure that the process and final Board report is both balanced and a fair representation of the information presented.

So Nalcor chief executive Ed martin is now setting up a pre-emptive defense in case the utilities board review dumps on Nalcor.

Nalcor’s management of the Muskrat Falls project just keeps getting worse. 

And that only serves to further undermine confidence in the company.

- srbp -