I tried to step back.

I started building some AI middleware. I disappeared into fiction. I had a bad accident and broke the hell out of my foot. I spent an objectively unreasonable amount of time writing about an Air Force General and a certain blonde Colonel falling in love in the Nevada desert nearly twenty years after their television show went off the air.

It was nice.

Peaceful, even.

Fun.

And then Newfoundland went and dialled the gate again.

I looked away for five minutes.

Five minutes.

And when I looked back, the Fischells Salt Dome Power Generation Project had been withdrawn and resubmitted with a wind farm, underground salt caverns, compressed-air energy storage, a transmission line to Bottom Brook and — because apparently the universe has a sense of humour — “revisions to the project’s intended market focus,” including exploration of potential future energy exports.¹

Oh, for crying out loud.

Preferably delivered in a certain General's best expression :)

Fine.

I’m back.

For a moment anyway.

And I hate to say I told you so.

Actually, no.

That is a lie.

I've been waiting a very long time to write this article.

I did not predict the salt cavern

Let's get this out of the way.

At no point did I predict somebody would solution-mine a salt dome in western Newfoundland, build underground caverns, store compressed air in them, attach a wind farm and start talking about possible electricity exports.¹

If I had predicted that, Bayman’s Paradox would no longer be free.

There would be a subscription tier.

What I did predict — or, more accurately, what I kept arguing we should watch — was everything around it.

Where does the energy go?

Who is the market?

Who controls the infrastructure?

Who finances it?

What remains in Newfoundland when construction ends?

Does employment create lasting local capacity?

Does consultation produce actual authority?

And are we building our own economic strategy, or supplying resources to somebody else's?

Those questions have been sitting in my archives for years.

Newfoundland has now very kindly provided another experiment.

Stop staring at the turbines

One of my recurring arguments has been simple:

Stop staring at the turbines.

They're the big visible things, so naturally everybody argues about them.

Meanwhile, the interesting questions are usually sitting somewhere in the background wearing business casual and holding spreadsheets.

In August 2025, I wrote in Behind the Green Curtain: How Global Contracts and Climate Branding Drove the Wind and Hydrogen Push in Newfoundland:

**“This isn’t about turbines — it’s about the deals behind them.”**²

That line has aged annoyingly well.

Fischells isn't simply a wind project.

The proposal combines wind generation, compressed-air energy storage, solution-mined salt caverns, salt production, marine infrastructure, pipelines and transmission infrastructure connecting to Bottom Brook.¹

And now the environmental-assessment record contains this delightful phrase:

**“Revisions to the project’s intended market focus.”**¹

There it is.

The market.

Hello, old friend.

Actually, this started in 2022

Bayman’s Paradox didn't invent this argument.

I first read The Local Paradox in Grand Policy Schemes: Lessons from Newfoundland and Labrador when it appeared online in April 2022.³ The paper has been sitting in my files since then, and my Facebook archives take my own public discussion of these ideas back into 2022 as well.

The underlying problem was already bothering me.

Newfoundland has an extraordinary habit of possessing exactly the resource somebody else suddenly needs.

Fish.

Forests.

Minerals.

Hydroelectricity.

Oil.

Wind.

Land.

And now, apparently, geological formations capable of becoming enormous underground energy-storage systems.

Our problem has rarely been finding something valuable.

The recurring question is what happens after somebody discovers it's valuable.

Who develops it?

Who controls it?

Who sets the terms?

Where does the value accumulate?

What remains here afterward?

The original Local Paradox research identified a related structural problem: Newfoundland and Labrador's economic-development history has often been organized around projects, jobs and tax revenue rather than building the institutional and strategic capacity communities need to shape development themselves.³

A project happening in Newfoundland is not automatically the same thing as Newfoundland developing economically.

Those things can overlap.

They are not synonyms.

And then the receipts start piling up

In July 2025, I wrote Silence by Design: How Geopolitics Got Censored in Newfoundland's Wind Debate, arguing that you couldn't understand Newfoundland's emerging renewable-energy economy without looking outside Newfoundland.⁴

American policy matters.

European demand matters.

Subsidies matter.

Trade matters.

Capital markets matter.

That wasn't an argument against renewable energy.

It was an argument against pretending projects exist inside little glass boxes labelled NEWFOUNDLAND.

If a project's economics depend on outside customers, capital, subsidies or policy, changes outside Newfoundland can change the project inside Newfoundland.

Then came August.

In The Local Paradox in Grand Policy Schemes: Why Resets Fail in Newfoundland, I returned to the distinction between projects and strategy.⁵

A project asks:

Can we build this?

A development strategy asks:

What are we trying to build around it?

Construction jobs are good.

But what exists twenty years later?

What businesses remain?

What expertise?

What infrastructure?

Who owns it?

Where does the money go?

By September, that became Green Land, Empty Hands: How Resource Governance Leaves Locals With Symbolic Wins: could Newfoundland experience enormous economic activity while retaining surprisingly little long-term economic control?⁶

We still don't know how Fischells answers that question.

Financing, ownership, revenues, procurement, taxation, employment and long-term local participation are exactly the things worth watching.

Apparently somebody volunteered to provide us with a case study.

Very considerate.

But this one is my favourite

On September 29, 2025, I published Echoes from Elsewhere: The Manufactured Consent Machine Behind Port au Port’s Greenwashing.⁷

The question:

Whose demand is shaping Newfoundland's renewable-energy development?

Local demand?

Provincial industry?

European hydrogen?

Federal policy?

Corporate markets?

Something else?

Fast-forward one year.

Fischells is withdrawn.

Fischells is resubmitted.¹

And there it is:

**“Revisions to the project’s intended market focus.”**¹

I cannot improve that punchline.

Government wrote it for me.

Consultation isn't control

This distinction matters too.

Public consultation matters.

Environmental assessment matters.

Community engagement matters.

But being asked what you think about somebody else's proposal is not the same as possessing the economic or institutional authority to shape development yourself.

That distinction runs through the original Local Paradox research and several later Bayman’s Paradox articles.³ ⁵ ⁷

Interestingly, Jessica Hogan's 2025 research into wind-energy acceptance in Newfoundland found that residents evaluated future development through their experiences with earlier resource industries. Her findings emphasized questions of procedural fairness, distribution of benefits, recognition, community involvement and ownership.⁸

In other words:

Who owns it?

Who controls it?

What's it for?

Where does the power go?

How does the community benefit?

Awkward.

Apparently I'm not the only person staring past the turbines.

This is why I kept the receipts

In December 2025, I explained in The Narrative Controller: How Nick Mercer Ended Up Writing the Story He Helped Stage why Bayman’s Paradox needed an archive.⁹

I wanted a record of what was being asked while events were happening.

Because institutional memory becomes remarkably tidy afterward.

Years later, complicated decisions become obvious.

Risks become unforeseeable.

Warning signs disappear.

Everybody knew everything.

Nobody could have known anything.

Dates are inconvenient things.

And mine go back to April 2022.

So, is Fischells bad?

I don't know.

That's important.

It may work.

The storage system may prove useful.

The salt resource may create opportunities.

Future exports may become economically attractive.

Or the project may change again.

Bayman’s Paradox is not an argument that development must fail.

It is an argument that we should know what success means before declaring that development has succeeded.

Where does the energy go?

Whose market are we serving?

Who controls the infrastructure?

Who finances it?

Where does the durable economic value remain?

Does employment translate into local economic capacity?

Does consultation produce authority?

And when it's over, is the community more capable of determining its own future?

Fine.

I told you so.

Not about the salt cavern.

I concede the salt cavern.

But the markets?

The infrastructure?

Outside demand?

Financing?

Projects versus development?

Consultation versus control?

Where the economic value ultimately lands?

Yeah.

I'm taking this one.

This is the victory lap.

I'm allowed one.

I broke my foot, built an AI system and spent part of my convalescence resolving the romantic problems of an Air Force General and a certain blonde Colonel who really should have sorted themselves out sometime around 2005.

I've earned five minutes of gloating.

But now we have to stop laughing.

Because underneath this extremely satisfying pile of dated receipts is a much more serious question:

If the patterns I've been documenting since 2022 are now becoming visible in real projects, what does that actually mean for Newfoundland?

That's the next article.

And unfortunately for my retirement plans, I think it's the important one.

Related Bayman’s Paradox Reading

Revollàn-Huelin, Holly. When the Bank Calls the Shots: How Paris-Aligned Finance Exploits Newfoundland’s Governance Gap. August 9, 2025. https://baymansparadox.com/post/when-the-bank-calls-the-shots-how-paris-aligned-finance-exploits-newfoundland-s-governance-gap

Revollàn-Huelin, Holly. GFANZ and the Paris Agreement: ESG Pressure, Financial Levers, and the Bypass of Sovereignty. August 9, 2025. https://baymansparadox.com/post/gfanz-and-the-paris-agreement-esg-pressure-financial-levers-and-the-bypass-of-sovereignty

References