Ongoing Lepreau maintenance outage is 5th since 2018 to go over budget
N.B. Power is finding itself mired in another slowmoving and pricey mainte‐ nance shutdown at the Point Lepreau nuclear gen‐ erating station after a faulty seal on a pump de‐ layed a restart of the plant last week.
It's the fifth planned out‐ age at the station since 2018 to hit delays and go over its budget.
The recurring problem is one that an outside review blames largely on optimism inside N.B. Power that main‐ tenance work at the station will go according to plan — despite years of experi‐ ence showing it rarely does.
"We expect the station to reconnect to the grid later this week," wrote N.B. Power communications officer Do‐ minique Couture in an email to CBC News about the cur‐ rent outage.
It began in mid-April and was originally budgeted to last 22 days with another five days of "contingency" time if unexpected issues arose during planned work.
As of Tuesday, the plant had been down for 39 days.
"Prior to reconnecting the station to the grid, it was identified that a mechanical seal on a pump was leaking and required replacement," wrote Couture.
"The additional outage time is to ensure that we per‐ form this task safely and with quality including required testing and adjustments to ensure the Station is safely re‐ turned to service."
The shutdown was origi‐ nally budgeted to cost $23 million. Although final costs won't be known for weeks, the price tag on delays is nor‐ mally high.
Previous planned outages that dragged on longer than expected in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022 cost N.B. Power a combined $202 million more than expected, worsening its already fragile finances.
Utility's struggles linked to Lepreau maintenance problems
A recent Price Waterhouse Coopers Canada review of
N.B. Power operations found planned maintenance out‐ ages at Lepreau that went poorly have been a key con‐ tributor to the utility's finan‐ cial struggles.
It blamed much of that on rosy expectations inside N.B. Power that fixing issues at the plant will go better in the fu‐ ture than it has in the past.
"Outage plans are often developed based on the ideal state," said an early draft of the Price Waterhouse report that was entered at evidence at N.B. Power's recent rate hearing.
According to the consul‐ tants, the utility needs to stop using "best case data" to de‐ velop budgets and plans for Lepreau outages and instead "include more realistic inputs and contingencies."
Asked about the recom‐ mendation during the rate hearing, Jason Nouwens, the station's director of regulato‐ ry and external affairs said N.B. Power itself has been coming to a similar conclu‐ sion.
"We realize improvements need to be made," said Nouwens.
"Gaps in the area for im‐ provement that have been identified aligned with ones that we had already previous‐ ly identified."
Managers' projecions of‐ ten overly optimistic
Michael Daniels, an assis‐ tant professor at the Universi‐ ty of British Columbia's Saud‐ er School of Business, said overly optimistic projections by managers involved in large projects is a common issue that has been studied exten‐ sively.
"It stems from this broad‐ er issue of what we call opti‐ mism bias," said Daniels.
He said research shows people generally "are quite overconfident in our own abilities" and tend to think about the "best-case scenar‐ ios" rather than realistic out‐ comes when tackling projects.
"We will underestimate costs, underestimate the amount of time it might take, we'll underestimate the de‐ gree of risk that there is," he said.
Lepreau has suffered more than 800 lost production days in planned and unplanned outage events since an exten‐ sive refurbishment of the fa‐ cility ended in 2012. It's a cu‐ mulative amount of down‐ time N.B. Power originally pro‐ jected would not be reached until at least 2034.
More recent estimates about the plant's future per‐ formance not been much bet‐ ter.
Daniels said from the out‐ side seeing projects come in weeks late and millions over‐ budget on a regular basis might suggest the need for changes but that's not some‐ thing always recognized by those involved.
"Our brains naturally pull from our memory examples where things went really well in the past and we tend to sort of downplay, subcon‐ sciously anyway, all the mis‐ takes," said Daniels.
"It's our brain telling us, hey, this has gone well in the past, and sort of forgetting about all the times it hasn't."