In White River Provincial Park, songbirds trill and moss-covered branches rustle in the breeze. The river rushes over rocky shallows as the sun sinks behind the hills. The “Cathedral Grove of the North Island” is a lonely, meditative place in winter, tucked into a narrow valley 30 kilometers down rutted forest roads from Sayward Junction, Vancouver Island.
These towering cedars and firs stand today because, decades ago, a logging crew found them too rare and beautiful to cut down. But any day now, work crews hired by a Toronto-based energy company will arrive at the ridge just east of the park to prepare to clear trees, blast rock, and scrape the land flat for concrete platforms. By year’s end, if all goes as planned, Capstone Infrastructure’s Brewster Wind Project will be well on its way to installing thirty 80-meter-tall wind turbines, complete with lights, a power substation, and 35 km of transmission lines – all without the benefit of environmental assessments.
Two extraordinary declarations from the BC government have effectively canceled environmental assessments (EAs) for a wide range of potentially-damaging projects. The first came last December when Adrian Dix, Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions, announced that the Brewster Wind Project and eight other wind projects will skip the EA step. The Province also awarded lucrative thirty-year contracts with BC Hydro to these privately-owned companies.
In February, Premier Eby went further, releasing a list of ten more energy and mining projects the Province will “accelerate” to completion. That list includes adding new connectors to the Enbridge natural gas pipeline near Fort St. John, approving the Cedar LNG floating export terminal in Kitimat, and expanding Imperial Metals’ Red Chris Mine in the Sacred Headwaters region of the Stikine, Skeena, and Nass Rivers.
Also on Eby’s to-do list is the 450-kilometre North Coast transmission line, which would cut through unceded Indigenous land and more than one hundred private properties, potentially disrupting farmland, traplines, woodlots, archeological sites, winter moose habitat, and waterways that are home to the rare white sturgeon, according to reporter Shannon Waters in the environmental journal The Narwhal. The $3 billion high-voltage power line from Prince George to Terrace will bring power to new LNG plants on the coast, and, Waters adds, the electricity “would come in part from the publicly-funded $16 billion Site C dam project nearing completion on BC’s Peace River.”
The cost of cancellation
Canceling EAs is a radical move that will expedite both renewable energy and mineral extraction. But at what cost? asks Waters. She notes the studies conducted by the BC Environmental Assessment Office are “independent, rigorous, and transparent” processes that detail the risks that projects pose to nearby land, water, and wildlife, and outline ways to reduce those risks. West Coast Environmental Law calls environmental assessments “fundamental legal tools to ensure proper planning and decision-making when it comes to environmental, community, and democratic health.”
The public may never know what rare and endangered species are at risk, and what “acceptable” means in this case.
In the case of Brewster Wind Project, the area is known for limestone, karst, and cave formations. This fragile substrate can make the land “inherently unstable,” according to Martin Davis, a Strathcona Regional District director and cave researcher. If sinkholes undermine the wind farm and topple the turbines, the environmental damage will already be done, and the economic cost will be borne by the company and its partner, Wei Wai Kum First Nation.
The regional district recommended that Capstone Infrastructure consult with caving and paleontology experts before proceeding with the Brewster Wind Project – and perhaps it will, but that won’t take the place of thorough studies by independent experts who are not paid by the company.
Capstone acknowledges that large-scale infrastructure projects like Brewster risk killing wildlife, especially birds and bats, but it hopes to mitigate the risk to “acceptable” levels. The Province and the public, however, may never know what rare and endangered species are at risk, and what “acceptable” means in this case.
Tearing up the guidebook
The Province’s own Best Management Practices for Wind Power Guidebook, developed with industry representatives, biologists, cave experts, and environmental regulators, estimates that “hundreds of thousands” of bats are killed by wind development in North America every year. These flying mammals perform essential pest-control services for wetlands, forests, and farms. Even the unassuming little brown bat can eat its own weight in insects every night. The guidebook repeatedly emphasizes the need for close coordination with independent experts and provincial regulators.
The Energy Minister’s Call for Power in April 2024 specified that BC Hydro contracts would be granted to companies that include at least 25% First Nations ownership. The BC government has a lot to say about reconciliation with Indigenous people, but energy writer Ken Boon is skeptical about its political motives. “Having specified that partial First Nation ownership is required for all such new private power projects, perhaps the BC government feels that will help eliminate backlash against not having EA reviews take place,” he writes.
Where are these “56,000 average homes” that need electricity so desperately that we must disregard environmental concerns?
“[I]s there a perception that First Nations would never be proponents for a project that could be harmful, while non-Indigenous proponents would?” Boon asks. “History has shown that any proponent who stands to gain financially from a project will often have a biased or blind view of the negative impacts of said project. That is one reason why EA reviews are important.”
Where is the crisis?
Observers are alarmed at how dramatically the winds have shifted in the halls of power. As Boon notes, the proposed wind projects will produce almost as much energy as the mammoth, destructive Site C dam, for about one-third of the cost. But the government refused to consider wind power as an alternative to Site C, even in the face of widespread outrage about the environmental and economic cost. Boon writes, “Those in opposition to Site C clearly made the argument ten years ago about the poor economics of Site C, but were told that ‘firm reliable’ hydro power was needed instead of ‘unreliable, intermittent’ wind.… That single-minded focus on Site C effectively pushed the wind industry out of the province back then.”
According to industry representatives, the nine proposed wind projects will create 8000 jobs during the construction phase. After that, a much smaller number of workers will operate and maintain the turbines. The Brewster Wind Project alone is expected to produce 510,000 MWh of electricity annually, “enough to power over 56,000 average homes,” according to Capstone’s website.
But where are these “56,000 average homes” that need electricity so desperately that we must disregard environmental concerns and established procedures?
The BC government’s decision to scrap EA reviews for wind projects “seems to be happening in an atmosphere of crisis,” Boon says, but no such energy crisis exists. He notes that “previous ‘cry wolf’ predictions by BC Hydro and special interest lobbyists have proven false.”
In fact, this new Call for Power program resembles the much-maligned Standing Offer Program initiated in 2008 under then-Premier Gordon Campbell. That program mandated BC Hydro to buy power from Independent Power Producers (IPPs) at inflated prices. It opened the floodgates to dozens of destructive run-of-river hydro projects.
The Standing Offer Program was canceled in 2019. The official reason given was that BC has a power surplus sufficient to meet demand until the 2030s.
So why the sudden change in direction? Boon points out that, “if we go hog-wild building more energy-intensive LNG plants that are dictated to run on ratepayer-subsidized grid power, that will indeed require a large buildout of infrastructure.” That’s because LNG plants require immense amounts of power to pressurize and supercool liquefied fracked gas to minus 162 degrees Celsuis.
Energy supply and demand
MLA Sonia Furstenau emphasized this point in the BC Legislature when the Call for Power was announced in April 2024. “LNG requires huge amounts of electricity. If all six [currently proposed] LNG plants were built in BC, that would require 43 terawatts of electricity per year,” she said. “For context, that’s 69% of BC total energy demand in 2022, or the equivalent of the electricity from more than eight Site C dams. That’s eight Site C dams for LNG projects alone.”
These proposed LNG plants would be built in deep-sea ports on the Pacific coast in order to export tankers full of liquefied fracked gas to China and the world. If Furstenau, Boon, and other observers are correct, the Province may be sacrificing environmental integrity to gamble on private profits in the global LNG market.
Ultimately, sacrificing land and water quality and pouring untold sums of money into “renewable” projects may not pay off. Solar, wind, and tidal energy technologies are evolving so rapidly, these projects could be obsolete in a few years.
The massive Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, once the largest solar energy project in the world, is being decommissioned after only ten years in operation. The plant, which covers 3,500 acres in the Mojave Desert, cost more than US$2 billion, including a reported $500 million loan from the US government. This colossal solar array is now getting scrapped because its concentrated solar thermal technology can’t compete with newer, more efficient, photovoltaic solar power.
