Province tells Nova Scotia Power to burn more wood to generate electricity

Nova Scotia is directing the province's main electricity producer to ramp up biomass use, starting immediately and continuing for the next two years.

The Houston government made a regulatory change this week that requires Nova Scotia Power to use 160 gigawatt hours of biomass each year until 2027. The new regulation builds on earlier directives for Nova Scotia Power's biomass use. In 2022, the province called for 135 gigawatt hours of biomass-powered electricity each year until 2025.

A statement from Energy Minister Trevor Boudreau says the province bumped the number up in order to get more renewable energy on the grid while waiting for additional wind and solar projects to come online.

"This is a great way to use our natural resources — the byproduct of harvesting and milling — to fuel cleaner electricity and our green economy," Boudreau said.

A spokesperson for Boudreau's department said the additional biomass will replace coal and will be "comparatively priced." They said they don't yet know the exact cost, but the impact on power rates should be "minimal."

The regulation used to stipulate that biomass burned for electricity had to be a forestry byproduct. In other words, it couldn't come from trees harvested for the sole purpose of producing biomass.

The province did away with that provision. A spokesperson for Boudreau's department said it wouldn't make economical sense for the forestry sector to harvest trees explicitly for creating biomass — essentially calling the previous stipulation redundant.

"Only sustainably harvested biomass can be used to help Nova Scotia Power meet this standard," they said.

The province also did away with a provision that put a surcharge on biomass power.

'Nothing clean or green'

Ray Plourde of the Ecology Action Centre said the government's framing of the regulatory change is disingenuous. 

"There is nothing clean or green about burning forest biomass to produce electricity," he said in an interview.

Plourde said biomass is often presented as a carbon-neutral fuel because new trees recapture carbon that's emitted from the ones that are cut and burned. He doesn't buy that argument. He said the recapture time is about 100 years, and "that's time we don't have" in the context of climate change.

He called it a simplistic calculation that ignores the harms caused by large-scale tree harvesting to forest ecology and biodiversity.

"And the fact that those trees are already storing carbon, and if left alive and standing, would continue to sequester more atmospheric carbon from all the other global point sources of emissions," he added.

Plourde said the move is "clearly" about helping the forestry industry.

Indeed, the forestry industry welcomes the news.

Helps woodlot owners

"Nova Scotia has an abundance of forestry residuals. We need opportunities to use that resource," Todd Burgess, executive director of Forest Nova Scotia, told CBC News in an email.

Insufficient demand for low-grade wood has been an ongoing issue for the industry since the 2020 closure of the Northern Pulp mill, which was a major buyer of woodchips.

Burgess said Nova Scotia needs new markets in order to manage forests following ecological forestry objectives. He said increasing Nova Scotia Power's biomass use will help woodlot owners do that.

He said the new regulation is "a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done."

"We have opportunities to make our electricity grid more reliable with specifically designed combined heat and power plants attached to district heating networks," Burgess said.

A recent study made the case for these combined heat and power plants connected to district heating networks.