The Saga of Hydro-Québec ✊🏻⚡️⚜️

In the 1970s, the French Canadians bulldozed a few Inuit tribes off huge swathes of sub-Arctic land in order to make way for what was the largest hydroelectric project in the world at the time. This was the James Bay project, located 600 miles north of Montreal.  Construction ensued several phases over 20 years, but when it was all said and done, the series of dams created a power capacity of 15 Gigawatts, which is the equivalent of 13 Seabrook nuclear reactors. All of this for a province with the population of 9 million, only slightly larger than Massachusetts. Rate payers in Quebec pay $0.05 USD/kWh while rate payers in New Hampshire pay a staggering $0.25 USD/kWh. Yes, Quebec’s electric bills are one-fifth of ours. Quebec quickly became the Saudi Arabia of electricity in North America.

⚡️Hydroelectricity and Quebec Nationalism

The plot gets thicker. Hydroelectricity and Quebec nationalism are heavily intertwined. A left-wing provincial government was elected in the early 1960s and a man by the name of Réné Lévesque lead the charge to nationalize the power companies across the province.  The private electric companies were largely under anglophone management and the left-wing French population saw this as their chance to drive a wedge in English rule.  The corporate elite in Quebec up until the 1980s were primarily English speaking. There had always been a French majority in the entire province since colonial times, but the English created many settlements after the French defeat on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 and the French-Québecois (pronounced: “ke-BEK-wa”) correspondingly have had a victim complex ever since. There were whole regions with English majorities in Quebec up until the 1980s, including the Eastern Townships around Magog, near the Vermont and New Hampshire borders with Quebec. The province increasingly instituted policies to encourage the English Canadians to move out. 

Lévesque’s campaign was steeped in nationalist rhetoric. Slogans like “Maintenant ou jamais: maîtres chez nous” (“Now or never: masters of our own house”) adorned posters featuring fists clutching bolts of lightning. This channeled communist revolutionary symbolism also employed by the labor movement and Black Lives Matter. The campaign was a success, the public took the bait to nationalize the electric companies, and the Quebec separatist movement was launched into hyperspace.  The province consolidated the nationalized electric companies in 1963 under a province-owned corporation named Hydro-Québec (French pronunciation: “EE-dro KE-bek”). Lévesque later became Premier of Quebec in the late 70s. Premier is the Canadian equivalent of an American governor.  The name Réne Levesque is now immortalized on many buildings and street signs throughout the Belle Province.

⚡️The James Bay Project and Quebec-anomics  

Robert Bourassa is another character in this plot line and he was also a Quebec nationalist.  Bourassa was Premier in the 70s when policy makers considered nuclear for a hot second, but he gave the James Bay hydroelectric plan the green light. They even named a dam after the guy.

Hydro-Quebec is a crown corporation, which is a common scheme in Canada and European countries.  The entity itself operates quasi-privately, but the government owns the shares to the corporation. Hydro-Quebec is also a cartel and Quebec is no stranger to cartels as—among many other price controls—they have a maple syrup cartel, no joke. The equivalent of the public utility board in Quebec works in cahoots with Hydro-Quebec to have tight price controls to ensure that electric rates domestically within the province are very low but all subsidized by market pricing for everyone else, including New Englanders and fellow Canadians.  It’s surprising the rest of Canada allows Quebec to get away with this.  Americans likely wouldn’t tolerate it. Yes, Alaska gives dividend payments to its citizens, but it’s three times smaller than the collective benefit Quebec residents receive from selling excess electricity, not even taking into account that electric rates in Quebec are extraordinarily low to begin with.

Electricity is so cheap in Quebec that most people heat their homes with electricity. Also keep in mind that, after taxes, gasoline costs $5 USD/gallon here. 

Where things get very sticky: the large profits from Hydro-Quebec get funneled into government coffers so that they can prop up their social programs, which were quite large by Canadian standards, and especially American standards, even before the James Bay project went online. So anyone starting to think that nationalization was a good idea, think again.  Hydro-Québec is the cheap food that feeds their monster of a welfare state. So yes, they have really cheap electricity, but they don’t have vibrant free-enterprise to use it on. It’s a difficult jurisdiction to do serious business in. The Québecois have enriched themselves only to further enslave themselves.  Even minuscule market liberalization would do wonders for Quebec since they are already sitting on top of an electric goldmine. New Hampshire has the inverse situation. Any right-of-center economist would go nuts pointing out the flaws with Quebec’s economic model.

⚡️ The Quebec–New England Connection

Where this ties back to New Hampshire is the the Quebec–New England Transmission system.  After partially waving the white flag on Seabrook, leadership in NH and MA looked to their French-speaking cousins to the north for more energy.  At Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1983 with Premier Réné Levesque present, a deal was signed to build a 900-mile high-voltage direct-current transmission line from the NH/MA border near Nashua, in Ayer, to the Quebec sub-Arctic, next to the James Bay project.  The system went online in 1990 and provides about two Seabrooks worth of power to the New England grid. 

About 15 years ago, leaders wanted to add a second set of cables to Hydro-Quebec dubbed “Northern Pass”.  This project would have added 1.1 MW of power or about 1 Seabrook to the grid.  This was at the height of the Obama/Gore green-energy craze and environmentalists built a case against this project, even though many would consider hydro-power to be clean energy. The bigger issue ended up being eminent domain.  Many affected property owners weren’t thrilled and honestly I don’t blame them.  Northern Pass was officially dead. 

Other than a few minor natural gas pipeline proposals, there hasn’t been a large-scale attempt to expand New Hampshire’s energy supply since. The quest to solve New Hampshire’s energy question continues. 

⚡️ Further listening

This article was loosely inspired by NHPR’s 4-part miniseries called Powerline on the show Outside/In.  It provides a detailed history of Hydro-Quebec and the Quebec nationalist movement, not without typical NPR bias, but it’s still well worth a listen.

RIP Evernote, onto Apple Notes

I was an Evernote evangelist for 15 years and I was a paying user for 10 years. Evernote was ahead of it’s time. It was a notes app, freeform database, and web archive tool. It even had optical character recognition 15 years before any other mainstream app, meaning you could search the text within an attached image.

I used Evernote to archive web pages, recipes, birthday gifts, receipts, random songs on the radio—before cell coverage and Shazam were reliable. Even some goofy article my high school gym teacher wrote for the Manchester Hippo made it into my Evernote file.

The app was also system agnostic. It worked on Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and the web. The Evernote clipper plugin even worked on Linux. I was an Android user for my first 6 years of being a smartphone user. I used Ubuntu Linux for over 5 years as my daily driver operating system at work. Being system agnostic was something appealing to me—and still is.

When I got my first job after college, I decided to upgrade to the paid version of Evernote, which was roughly $30/year at the time. The yearly rate slowly increased, but somehow I managed to remain grandfathered-in to a modest pricing plan. Evernote got reorganized multiple times, and more recently got bought out by Bending Spoons, a European conglomerate. The kicker is that they were going to force me onto a $130/year plan. Forget it.

I’ve been slowly drinking more and more of the Apple koolaid. Truth be told, I’ve been using Macintoshes since I was 2 years old. When I was 6, in 1999, my parents got me one of the original G3 iMacs. Mine was green ☺️ That computer also will go down in history as one of the best pieces of industrial design ever.

Enter Apple Notes. It was one of the first iOS apps in 2008, but it was quite crude, despite the kitschy skeuomorphism façade. The font was MarkerFelt if I remember correctly and the background looked like a yellow legal pad. I never really considered it a serious note taking app until more recently.

Fortunately over the years Apple has added nearly all of my beloved features of Evernote. Optical character recognition, tags for notes, folders, device syncing (only among Apple devices), a web app, etc. I’ll add that the tagging feature in Apple Notes is better than Evernote: anywhere within the note, you can just use # symbols just like a tweet. Apple Notes also works much faster than Evernote, which was starting to get pretty slow in the new versions. Only notable omission is that Apple Notes does not have a web page clipping feature. This was nice in Evernote, because often webpages change or eventually get removed. Oh well. That feature wasn’t worth $130 for me.

I used this fantastic utility on GitHub called evernote-backup to archive all my notes in Evernote, which really are just rows in a SQLite database. The Evernote archive files can be imported directly into Apple Notes. After that I was off to the races. Vivat Apple Notes.

Portugal and Spain trip

Dom Luís I Bridge in Porto

The Iberian Peninsula is a major region of Europe that I had not been to prior to last month. It has a much slower pace than that of France, Germany, and England, but there is much to be appreciated. I spent 10 days total in Europe on this trip: 5 days in Porto and 5 days in Madrid.

Portugal

After a 30-minute layover in the Azores, a Portuguese
archipelago in the middle of the North Atlantic, I hit the ground running as soon as I arrived Saturday morning in Porto. This is the second largest city in Portugal, which is about a 3-hour drive or train ride from the capital, Lisbon. The most direct route from Boston to Porto is via the Azores.

I strolled across the Dom Luís I Bridge, right at the center of the city, and took a historic streetcar down to the mouth of Douro River, where it meets the ocean. The streetcars around Porto are more of a tourist attraction and prone to breakdown, but it was a fun way to initially take in the new city. Porto also has a modern light-rail system, which I did take to and from the airport.

Food

Food tends to be a highlight when I travel and this trip was no exception. The most popular local dish is called Francesinha (“little French girl”), an adaptation of a French croque monsieur, but with linguiça sausage plus a tomato beer sauce. It’s quite good. I indulged in an assortment of pastries. The local delicacy is a Pastel de Nata, which is small flakey pastry cup shell filled with custard.

Pastel de Nata

I was also happily surprised by how affordable the food is relative to New England. A basic meal in Portugal can be found for under €10, which is not the case in Spain.

Francesinha in Braga

Douro Valley

This was the most scenic part of my trip. I took a wine tour on a bus from Porto up the Douro Valley, which is painted with vineyard terraces as far as the eye can see. The Douro River starts in the mountains in northeastern Portugal and ends in the ocean in Porto.

Braga

The Boston friend that I rendezvoused with in Porto was there on a business trip, which was part of my excuse for going. My friend recommended that I take a train one day up to the City of Braga, which is an hour north of Porto. The historic city center was significantly less touristy city than Porto, which I found authentically charming. Lots of tile covered sidewalks and beautiful pavilions.

The highlight of the day was that I took a Bolt taxi (the Iberian version of Uber) up a hill to visit the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte, which is a Catholic shrine. Beautiful views from the top and ornate stonework on the building and especially the staircase leading up the hill in front of the church. The stairs are deceivingly far and the pictures make them look small. I made the trek down the stairs and then took a Bolt back to the main city square.

Spain

A good friend of mine moved to Madrid, so for the second half of the trip, I stayed with him. Madrid is one of the largest cities in Europe and likewise it has all the amenities you’d expect from a major metropolis. Parks, museums, discotheques that open at 4am, you name it. It’s clean, it’s pretty, but It didn’t have the same level of old-world charm that Portugal had. I had fantastic stay none the less.

Food

The Spanish are big into tapas, but the dish that I found most interesting was one called tortilla. Nothing to do with the chips that Americans are familiar with, but rather thin quiche-like egg crust around a meat filling. Quite good.

Art museums

I went to a couple art museums. The most interesting one was the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, which had a large collection of impressionist pieces that I enjoyed. They even had a Bierstadt scene of New England, ha!

Segovia

On my last full day in Madrid, I wanted to do a day trip to a town outside of Madrid to get a taste of the countryside. The first choice would have been to go to the City of Toledo, but the trains that day were booked up and we ended up going to the City of Segovia, about 30 min by high speed train north of Madrid.

The scenery on the train at the city limits of Madrid quickly turned into high mountain desert with mountains in the distance, reminiscent of the American West. The train approached a large mountain range and then suddenly descended into a dark tunnel.  Mind you, we were going 200 mph, so everything happened rapidly. After shuttling 15 minutes through a mountain range, we came out the other side into Colorado.  No seriously, I had to double take looking out the window to assure myself I wasn’t in the front range of the Rockies near Boulder, Colorado.  The geography and vegetation was a near carbon copy. 

The train station for Segovia was at the other end of the tunnel and we got off and boarded a bus bound for the center of town.  The entrance to the historic area of Segovia is guarded by an original Roman aqueduct.  All these years of traveling thru Europe and this was the first time I had ever seen one. It’s striking to see such an old and well-constructed piece of civil engineering.

Romulus and Remus founded Rome and were raised by wolves. Sic, Magistra! I paid attention in high school Latin class.

Segovia also features a beautiful castle that towers at the edge of town next to a very large cliff.  Lot of beautiful tiled mosaics inside.  The Moorish influence on the architecture was evident.

We had some coffee, pastries, and then we plowed over a gaggle of Spanish tourists to get back on the last bus back to the train out of town.

This was a great trip and the only full week I took off from work this year.  Portugal definitely was more compelling from a tourist perspective.  It had more old world charm, and they’ve slowly built up a tourism industry around it.  It also doesn’t hurt that the dollar goes a long way there.  Would I go back to Portugal? Sure.  I think I’d want to go to a beach during the warmer months.