BC Hydro has an urge to burn, but green power beckons. The right stuff is just around the corner. Can opposition turn into change?
by Delores Broten
After three weeks of research on the questions of hydro power, natural gas, BC Hydro and pipelines to Vancouver Island, I was trying to tell a friend about the story. "Something's wonky," I kept repeating, listing all the questions I could not answer. "Does Not Add Up," I typed crankily as I tried to get answers from BC Hydro and from Vancouver Island energy activists.
It is obvious that BC Hydro's plans for meeting future energy needs, first on Vancouver Island but also on the BC mainland within ten years, have very little to do with hydro or other forms of renewal energy. BC has always enjoyed relatively clean and extremely cheap hydro-generated power but now the need to protect fish and wildlife habitat, not to mention First Nations' territory, makes the expansion of BC's extensive system of dams and reservoirs infeasible.
BC Hydro has decided to join the age of fossil fuels; it plans to meet almost all growth in electricity demand by buying power from privately-owned, natural gas fired, turbine generating plants. Sometimes, as in the case of the Island Cogeneration Project (ICP) at Campbell River, the waste steam from the process will be efficiently reharnessed to supply energy for an adjacent pulp mill.
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Measuring Power What's a Giga Watt? A watt is a measure of electricity: If you use 1 watt for 1 hour, you use 1 watt-hour of electricity. If the light on your desk has a 60 watt bulb, in an hour, you use 60 watt-hours of electricity. Leave it on all day, and you use 1,440 watt-hours of electricity. 1000 watts is 1 kilowatt (KW) The plants in Campbell River and Port Alberni are 240-260 MW plants (run them 24 hours a day, all year, and each will generate 240 x 24 x 365 = approx 2,100,000 MW hours, or 2,100 GW in the year.) |
Aging Cables to Vancouver Island
The first part of the province to be scheduled for this make over is Vancouver Island. Both the underwater and transmountain transmission cables which supply the island from interior dams are aging, as are the terminal poles and controls where several massive cables enter the water.
Hydro predicts that this equipment will fail sometime between 2002 and 2007. They do not plan to repair or replace the transmission cables, partly due to the $200 million cost, and partly because the equipment is so old that repair parts are not made any more, and anyway, Hydro no longer employs the workers who knew how to fix them.
Instead, proclaim the Hydro brochures blithely, "It's time for Vancouver Island to become self-reliant in energy supply." The gay tone masks the fact that being dependent on several thick cables snaking across the sea floor, carrying electricity generated by hydro, is probably safer than relying on two gas pipelines, in an earthquake zone, with gas open for sale to the highest bidder in the North American market under free trade, and with future global actions on greenhouse gases not yet determined.
The plans have been in the making for five to eight years, and have been progressing steadily. The first Georgia Strait pipeline crosses from north of Sechelt along Texada and across to Comox. In the late 1990s, the Island Co-Generation Project (ICP), owned by Fletcher Challenge Energy Power Generation and Westcoast Power, sailed through its Environmental Assessment with scarcely any public complaint (but more on that matter later.)
Natural gas is touted as the best fossil fuel for the entire continent, if not the world. Over 150 generating turbines are planned worldwide [see "Power Fit for a Digital Economy," in this issue] and for the last few years consumers on North Island and everywhere else on the continent have been beguiled into living with gas by the low price, converting to gas furnaces, hot water heaters and stoves.
Georgia Strait Crossing
Demand leads inevitably to the next critical step in the transformation, a second natural gas pipeline crossing Georgia Strait to Vancouver Island, nicknamed GSX by Hydro and its partner Williams, the American pipeline giant. But the GSX has run into a predictable opposition [See "It's Time to Decide about Power," Watershed Sentinel, August/September 2000]. Members of the conservation-minded Georgia Strait Alliance don't approve of the pipeline running beside the Strait's only marine sanctuary. Farmers and other landowners around green and fertile Cobble Hill are taking great exception to the threat of expropriation of right of ways.
A loose-knit coalition of activists from Victoria to Courtenay, from the lower mainland to Washington State, has shown a surprising technical competence and joyful tenacity as they dig for facts, file Freedom of Information Requests and post the questions on the Internet site, www.sqwalk.com. Indeed, it feels as if the sleeping giant which is the green movement on Vancouver Island rolled over, said, "Make My Day," and decided to have some sport with the power Goliath.
I suppose this kind of local resistance is neither surprising nor troublesome to the people's power company, which has a slick crew of community relations folks to distribute pretty reports, information sheets, and glowing fact sheets. Nonetheless, federal environment Minister David Anderson has sent the GSX pipeline to an independent panel review under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, where the GSX Coalition hopes to put the issues of alternative power and greenhouse gases firmly on the agenda.
But the story keeps growing. In September, the air preservationists in the lower mainland became agitated at the prospect of a giant gas generation plant to be built at Sumas. The folks from the lower mainland, led by one of BC's oldest environmental organizations, SPEC (Society Promoting Environmental Conservation), not to mention the City of Abbotsford and the Fraser Valley Regional District, decided they really didn't need any extra air pollution in the choking Fraser Valley, and especially American air pollution. Next thing you know, they had the provincial Minister of Environment on side, protesting to the Washington State government, which is being attacked by folks around Sumas, who don't really take to extra air pollution either.
The cry went up, Where are the feds? The crowd down in the Lower Mainland were mainly just miffed when federal Environment Minister David Anderson said he found it socially awkward to protest a power plant which was many times cleaner than the one nearing completion in Campbell River, BC with provincial government blessing.
Island Cogen Under Scrutiny
Anderson's stance didn't cut much ice in the exhaust and ammonia-laden atmosphere of the Lower Fraser Valley, but folks over on the Island started to wonder if they had been relegated to some sort of air pollution ghetto. Island Cogen got more local press in three weeks than in the three years since it was first introduced. As we go to press, a petition is circulating asking the provincial government to make ICP clean up to Sumas standards, an issue first raised by Environment Canada during the environmental assessment.
The gas strategy for Vancouver Island, as revealed in Hydro's own documents, calls for three gas-fired generating plants — the one at Campbell River, due to come on stream in December or maybe February (there may be start up problems since it is only the second of its particular design in the world), one at Port Alberni, and a very large one (probably 660 MW) in the vicinity of Duncan. The Alberni plant was originally supposed to be a cogen, providing supplementary steam power to the pulp mill, like the Campbell River site. But somewhere along the line, negotiations with Hydro fell apart, and now the Alberni big burner will have to go through a new environmental assessment for its new design and new site.
Meanwhile, on the world stage, the David Suzuki Foundation was raising hell about Canada's shameful backsliding on the issue of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the Kyoto negotiations. It's not lost on any of the big burners' opponents that these three plants will raise BC Hydro's GHG emissions by over two million tonnes a year.
The Elusive Aluminium Smelter
Just in case things weren't hot enough, provincial Premier Ujjal Dosanjh announced that the province was providing funding for a "Pre Feasibility Study" on the location of a new aluminium smelter at Port Alberni.
Why any company would try to run an energy-gobbler like an aluminium plant on power generated from natural gas is just one of the many things which "Does Not Add Up," about this story. Another thing which does not add up is just how Hydro could possibly supply the power for an aluminium plant while Vancouver Island, according to the company, is facing imminent power brown outs unless and until the gas burners get turned on. A smelter would probably require the output of the Alberni and Campbell River plants together.
When asked by the Watershed Sentinel whether Hydro had included the power for the aluminium plant in their projected demand figures, Wayne Cousins of Hydro's Media Relations replied tersely, "Please direct any questions you have about the government's Port Alberni aluminium smelter announcement to the provincial government, as this was their announcement."
Price and Supply
But the fantasy aluminium plant aside, why would accountants or planners worth their salary not be aware that North America is currently facing a natural gas shortage, and that Canada's gas, under de-regulation, is flowing south faster than the brain drain? Mike Sawyer of the Calgary based Citizens' Oil & Gas Council says that the pipelines in Canada now have 13% extra capacity and "They just can't get the gas to fill them."
And the price of natural gas just keeps going up, from $2 a mmBTU (million metric British Thermal Units) which is what Hydro based its cost projections for the gas strategy on, to $6.14 in mid-November, with analysts predicting higher prices and less supply for the next few years.
In an article in Monday Magazine November 9, 2000 Stuart Herzog quoted Hydro "resource planning manager" Graeme Simpson as saying that Hydro engineers thought they could upgrade the cables to bring another 1000 MW to Vancouver Island, enough to satisfy growth for ten years. The plan included refitting and repowering Burrard Thermal, which is far less polluting than ICP. The article states that several Hydro decisions, including ICP and the Alberni plant, came directly on orders from ex-premier Glen Clark. That might explain a lot of things which just don't add up.
Perhaps this wonky "gas strategy" too can be reversed, before it turns into another costly mistake like the fast cat ferries, now on the auction block.
But meanwhile, those cables, which bring the juice to an Island with at least 20% population growth per decade, just keep on aging. And Hydro's not fixing them, a project which would cost about $200 million. The consequences of a protracted squall over pipelines, environmental assessments, pollution and permits, could see Vancouver Islanders sitting in the dark within five years unless some positive action emerges.
Green Power Future
What about alternative energy? BC Hydro has made a commitment to supply 10% of BC's 150 MW per year growth in demand from alternative sources, a new field for the corporation. And its first two projects at Miller Creek and Lytton between them will do better than that, promising to feed 50 MW into the grid. Two or three dozen more proposals are being assessed. "It is not," says David Balser, Manager of Corporate Environment, "as if BC Hydro couldn't spell the word wind."
BC Hydro has about 20 people working on alternative power assessments for a report in December, including hydrogen fuel cells, micropower in small streams, and co-generation from burning wood chips. (The latter might not count as really alternative in the green books, but to Hydro, it's a small project, where the producer of waste can sell power into the grid.) On Vancouver Island, they are doing a year of measurements to see if wind power is feasible. There's no evidence that Hydro has advanced to learning the word "tides" yet.
But the real problem is growth. Using all our smarts, we might be able to start piecing alternative power into the grid, but no one knows where the growth in demand will end. "There's two sets of responsibility," says Balser. "We at Hydro have the responsibility to provide power, but individuals have a responsibility too. Why don't people put jackets on their hot water heaters and buy energy efficient appliances? We need to get the Growth Beast under control." Balser concedes that Power Smart has ceased trying to educate the population in the last few years, concentrating with limited success on providing incentives to industry to modernize and become energy efficient.
But Hydro can't use the most effective way to get people's attention — price — unless there is political will to change. "We have a broad range of customers," says Balser wryly, "and some of them just happen to like cheap power." Hydro's publicity says over and over that they recognize the greenhouse gas downside, and plan to use gas as a "bridge" to sustainable energy.
Meanwhile, the price is rising, and available supplies are shrinking. Forecasts say that there is enough gas to fry the world several times over out on the east and west continental shelves, as well as some left in the northern and western extension of the great oil and gas basin centred in Alberta. Some can also be extracted from coal deposits, a project on the board for the Hat Creek area. But even if greenhouse gas considerations did not enter the picture, it would take five to ten years before wells are drilled and more pipelines snake across the continent. In other words, using natural gas as a bridge to alternative power sources is a strategy at the wrong end of the supply curve. By the time the gas is on line, the alternative power could be too.
However a massive program to convert Vancouver Island to real alternative energy sources is going to take a lot of co-operation from those green protesters who are lining up to stop the gas pipeline. And while we build a social consensus to try something truly sustainable on Vancouver Island, the citizens and BC Hydro are going to have to learn to work together. Together, the people of Vancouver Island and their power company need to design a program that gradually and efficiently converts the island to a conserver society with a flair for adventuring into new technologies. That program needs to have a time line and deliverables, on all sides. Like all negotiations, this one is going to be interesting, and it will determine our future.
Right now, I'm going to go turn off those extra lights.
* With thanks to Arthur Caldicott, Tom Hackney, Stuart Herzog, BC Environment, BC Hydro, and Island Cogeneration Project
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[From WS December 2000/January 2001]