All British Columbians today benefit from the large generation assets that BC Hydro built a generation or two ago in our province’s north and Interior. For decades, these dams have reliably delivered the clean and renewable electricity that powers our province’s homes, businesses and industries.
These generation plants made a lot of sense at the time, and we are fortunate to have them today as public assets. While neighbouring jurisdictions like Alberta and Washington work to phase out coal power, our electricity is already exceptionally clean right out of the wall – a leading regional advantage in the battle against climate change.
But the mega-dam age is over. The world has changed, cities are changing, and the way we use energy is changing, too. Vancouver and Victoria have both committed to a renewable energy future; to reach their goals, we can expect strengthened building codes, new and expanded district energy systems and a wave of super-efficient buildings.
In the coming years, as part of the global push to prevent runaway climate change, municipal and federal policies will reduce power demand across Canada. We are already seeing this in cities like Guelph, Ontario. That municipality enacted a plan to reduce per-capita energy consumption and greenhouse gases up to 80% by 2030 by changing land use, increasing density and sourcing power locally.
Guelph’s smart energy community plan integrates all of the pieces that make up the urban fabric – water and waste water, municipal waste, transportation, green buildings, heat and more. The result is that over the coming years, that city’s demand for energy will plunge.
Here in B.C., we will see electricity demand eventually climb as our population grows and we convert all the things that now run on petroleum, including cars and home furnaces, to run on electricity. There will be huge new business opportunities in this transition.
Unfortunately, both BC Hydro and the B.C. government are stuck in a 1960s time warp. Two years ago, when the joint review panel gave the green light to the Site C dam, it set in motion a project that, if completed, will prove an economic and environmental disaster.
Site C is a throwback to an earlier era in which large, centralized electricity megaprojects – far from the load sources, served with massive transmission lines – met demand.
With 21st-century solutions like rooftop solar and district energy, there is simply no need to build this kind of beast anymore; there is no need to risk billions in public capital for a megaproject that will inundate productive farmland and stampede over aboriginal treaty rights.
We will need new sources of clean power in the coming decades as we electrify our economy, and the way to get it is on a smaller scale, as we need it, using private capital. Think of it as local power, generated as we need it, in smaller chunks, closer to where it will be used. We have small hydro power to develop, and we have only just begun to tap our wind resource. While no energy project is benign, environmentally speaking, these operations are far, far less destructive than Site C.
Plus, they can be produced without risking taxpayer dollars, at a fraction of the cost.
We have a private power industry in B.C. today. Its plants light up some 1.5 million of the province’s homes under long-term energy supply agreements with BC Hydro. But despite having attracted more than $8.6 billion in investment to the province, this sector is on the ropes. Our government has turned its back on this clean-power sector.
It’s not too late to change course. The province has so far sunk about $1.5 billion into Site C; a vast work camp is in place up in the Peace River Valley. It would be painful to cut our losses, but not as painful as ponying up for what could easily bloom into a $15 billion to $17 billion project.
B.C.’s big heritage dams are valuable public assets, but they are relics of another era. We now have better options on the table, including efficiency and smaller-scale, locally developed renewable power – and we should be using them. •
Mike Harcourt is a former British Columbia premier who now chairs QUEST, Quality Urban Energy Systems of Tomorrow. He will address the Clean Energy BC Generate 2016 conference in Vancouver November 6-9.
