“You want sell us power? Fine. You need to help us sell our oil.”
That was the message delivered earlier this week by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and Energy Minister Marg McCuaig-Boyd.
B.C. has been eyeing Alberta lately as a potential new customer for B.C. power. Alberta plans to phase out coal power and increase investments in renewable energy.
But intermittent power, like wind and solar, needs to be backstopped with firm power. Alberta has plenty of natural gas for that.
But wouldn’t it make more sense, from a climate change perspective, for the neighbouring provinces to co-operate?
By beefing up the transmission lines between Alberta and B.C., B.C. could supply clean hydro power to Alberta.
Specifically, it could provide clean power to the Alberta oil sands, which consumes a huge amount of energy.
B.C. hydroelectric power could also provide a backstop for new wind and solar projects in both B.C. and Alberta. That would be good for independent power producers in both B.C. and Alberta.
Depending on whether or not a liquefied natural gas industry ever takes off, the demand for power from industry in B.C. may not be as high as anticipated.
B.C. has already lost some big industrial customers with the closure of the Howe Sound Pulp and Paper mill the closure of several mines.
So, electrifying the oil sands would provide a new industrial customer for B.C., and it would allow Alberta to reduce its carbon footprint. This could help rebrand Alberta oil as having a lower carbon profile.
Sounds pretty good so far, right?
But why on earth would Alberta cooperate with B.C. when all it hears out of this province is how much we don’t want Alberta’s dirty oil passing through our province and onto our water? What’s in it for Alberta?
“We’ll do what’s best for Albertans and Alberta’s economy,” McCuaig-Boyd told the Calgary Herald .
“We won’t be buying more power if we can’t get our resources to market.”
“We’re not necessarily going to have that much demand for that much electricity if we can’t find someone to sell our product to,” Notley later added. “We have to get our product to other markets.”
I don’t know if anyone has done a calculation on the GHG reduction that would result from electrifying the oil sands with clean wind, solar and hydro power, but I’m willing to bet it would be significant.
The oil sands are not going to shut down any time soon, despite low oil prices. Just today, Imperial Oil announced plans for a new $2 billion oil sands project that would use gas liquids like condensate in steam-assisted oil extraction.
The only thing that’s going to happen if pipelines aren’t built west or east is that Alberta will continue to be held hostage to the U.S., where it has to sell its oil at a discount, and oil will continue to move by rail.
Here is an opportunity for Western Canada to become an energy powerhouse that could stimulate growth in renewable energy projects while shrinking the greenhouse gas profile of Alberta’s oil sands.
How would that not be a good thing?
B.C. opens traffic cam data to tech sector
The B.C. government yesterday announced an interesting offer to B.C.’s tech community.
The government is planning to make highway traffic camera data available to tech companies in the hope that software developers can use all that data to come up with innovative ways to make driving safer.
Can a “Bad Drivers of Richmond” app be very far away?
But seriously, this is not a bad idea. There are more than 300 traffic cams in B.C. By using a big data approach to studying accidents or traffic patterns, one can imagine all kinds of potential software approaches for improving traffic congestion or reducing accidents.
But here’s another good idea: If the B.C. government is willing to provide data on traffic to the tech community, why is it so tight-fisted with medical data?
The B.C. government has a treasure-trove of health and medical data that could be valuable to medical researchers and biotech companies. It could be mined to help develop genomics based medicine, for example.
Life sciences companies have been trying to get its hands on it for years. But the B.C. government has been pretty tight-fisted with that information, despite the fact there are ways to provide information while protecting patient confidentiality.
In releasing the traffic data, the B.C. government acknowledges Vancouver’s innovative high-tech sector. Let’s not forget we have a very innovative biotech sector as well. If making medical and heath data available to researchers and biotechs leads to new drug treatments, why not share it?
