War II and led to rationing in the late 1940s. Meanwhile, the commission embarked on the construction of two major dams on the Saint John River, the Tobique and Beechwood generating stations, which were respectively commissioned in 1953 and 1955. See below regarding First Nations relations. The New Brunswick Electric Power Commission bought the Grand Falls Generating Station in 1959 and began work on the province's largest hydroelectric facility, the Mactaquac dam, whose first three units were put on stream in 1968. However, the new hydroelectric developments proved insufficient to bridge the imbalance between supply and demand, which grew by 12% per annum between 1960 and 1975. To cope with this demand growth, the commission began construction of the oil-fired Courtenay Bay Generating Station, near the Saint John shipyard in 1959; it was also adjacent to the Irving Oil Refinery, which entered service in the late 1950s and which the Courtney Bay Generating Station made use of a pipeline running from the Canaport offshore loading facility at Red Head to the refinery. The first 50 MW turbine was put in service at Courtney Bay Generating Station the next year, in December 1960, while two more units were added in 1965 and 1966, 50 MW and 100 MW, respectively. To better serve northern New Brunswick, another oil-fired plant, the Dalhousie Generating Station, was constructed in Darlington with an initial capacity of 100 MW. It was commissioned in 1969. In the early 1970s, the NBEPC signed a series of supply contracts with New England distributors, justifying the construction of its largest power plant in 1972. With three 335 MW units, the oil-fired Coleson Cove Generating Station was completed in January 1977. However, the 1973 oil shock made the operation of thermal plants more expensive, since oil prices rose from US$3 to US$37 per barrel between 1973 and 1982. The company, which was renamed NB Power / Énergie NB during that time, needed to explore other generating options. Point Lepreau The construction of a nuclear plant in New Brunswick had been discussed since the late 1950s. For over 15 years, engineers from the NBEPC visited the Chalk River Laboratories to keep abreast of the latest trends in the field. Formal talks between the provincial and federal governments began in 1972 and discussions between representatives of Premier Richard Hatfield and Atomic Energy of Canada accelerated the following year. In the aftermath of the oil