The alternative is in the ground

The cheapest 750 megawatts isn’t a methane plant. It’s our own furnaces.

Manitoba Hydro wants to build up to $3 billion worth of additional methane turbines near Brandon — 750 megawatts of fossil-fuelled power, to get us through the coldest winter evenings and the driest years.

As the Public Utilities Board weighs the plan this summer, Manitobans should ask a simple question — is burning methane really the cheapest way to keep the lights on and the furnaces running?

The evidence says no.

Two problems have been put forth. The first, a dry year, is an energy problem, and imports can already handle it, as 2021 proved. In 2021, Manitoba Hydro imported roughly 1,955 gigawatt-hours over nine months.

Start with what the Brandon Generating Station is actually for. It is not a workhorse; it is insurance.

So, separate the plant’s two jobs. A dry year is an energy problem, and imports already handle it, as 2021 proved. The coldest evenings are a different problem: a few brutal hours when the electric furnaces in 130,000 homes run flat out at once, each pulling roughly 10 kilowatts at the exact moment the grid strains.

That peak is the only real case for the plant. So the question narrows — what is the cheapest way to shrink it?

Now swap one of those homes to a geothermal heat pump. Even at -30 C, its peak draw falls from about 10 kilowatts to three, a saving of roughly seven. Multiply that across 100,000 of those homes, not even all of them, and you erase about 700 megawatts of winter peak, the entire methane plant, permanently, and without building a single turbine.

This isn’t theoretical. Efficiency Manitoba already offers ground-source heat pumps with no upfront cost, an interest-free payment of about $75 a month, while cutting a family’s energy bill by $900 to $1,000 a year. The savings roughly cover the payment from day one. The province can retire the methane plant’s job for a few hundred million in incentives, because homeowners fund most of it themselves.

Two smaller tools round out the plan. Conservation (insulation, air-sealing, smart thermostats) is the cheapest megawatt of all, trimming the same peak the heat pumps target. Wind, unlike solar, is strongest in Manitoba’s winter, so new wind farms keep our vast hydro reservoirs full for the next dry year.

Notice what wind is not asked to do: stand in for firm power on a still, -30 C night. It doesn’t have to — the heat pumps have shrunk that peak away. Two problems, two sets of tools, and methane answers neither.

There is one catch, and it’s about time, not about money. Converting 100,000 homes takes a decade to ramp up; trained installers and drilling crews don’t appear overnight. Hydro warns it could run short within a few years. So, the demand-side plan can’t cover the very first winters.

But that’s an argument for starting now, not for pouring concrete in Brandon and then buying decades of methane to feed it. Even run sparingly, the plant would burn roughly half a billion dollars of methane over its life, leaving our kids and grandkids a warming climate and the debt, while heat pumps and wind burn nothing.

Bridge the early years with imports, batteries for short evening spikes and paying people to shift when they use power, while new wind farms get built.

Meanwhile, ramp the home conversions hard. By the time a methane plant would have been paid off, Manitoba could have lower bills, no new emissions and a peak that shrinks every year instead of a fossil asset we’re locked into for 30.

The Public Utilities Board’s job is to make sure ratepayers get the cheapest reliable option, not the most familiar one. And $3 billion may be optimistic: Hydro’s last two megaprojects, the Keeyask dam and the Bipole III line, came in a combined $3.7 billion over budget.

Before it signs off, the board should force a straight comparison: what would the same money buy in efficiency, geothermal conversions, wind and firmer import lines?

If that test is run honestly, the methane plant may turn out to be the most expensive way to solve a problem our own furnaces are creating.

The cheapest 750 megawatts in Manitoba isn’t a power plant.

It’s 100,000 homes that stop heating with raw electricity.

Stuart Williams is a Wolseley resident with a master’s degree in computer science. He is a passionate advocate for renewable energy who writes out of an urgent concern for the future of our children.