BC Hydro

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.

by Peter Ronald, Georgia Strait Alliance

BC Hydro, in partnership with US energy giant Williams, wants to build a natural gas pipeline from the mainland to Vancouver Island to transport fuel for three planned gas power plants. And the Georgia Strait Crossing Pipeline (GSX) partners want to build it through BC's only fully subtidal ecological reserve, Satellite Channel (ER 67). This is not a permitted use for an ecological reserve in British Columbia. Although no political decision has yet been taken on this precedent-setting change, a paper trail shows the government has an appetite and incentive for just such an outcome.

by Rob Wiltzen

The federal government kicked off 2011 with announcements of $278 million in pulp mill subsidies from the Green Transformation Fund. The grants for mills in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, and New Brunswick push the disbursement of the allocated one billion dollars in pulp mill black liquor subsidies to $591 million. 

The Fund was created in June of 2009 in response to US subsidies of pulp mills based on their usage of the pulp mill by-product, black liquor, as fuel – a standard practice in kraft pulp mills. [See “Greed and Black Liquor Fuel Pulp Trade Wars,” November 2009, and www.millwatch.ca for

Northwest Cascade Power Inc wants to divert all 8 of the Upper Pitt’s main tributary streams into large pipes, totaling over 30 kilometres in length, which would require the park’s boundary to be “adjusted.” Public opposition to the plan is fierce.

by Joe Foy

The thing about power is that you often find it in the

The BC Liberal govern­ment of Gordon Campbell has teamed up with private power companies to sell us unreliable hydro-power we can’t use, can’t afford, and don’t want.

by Joe Foy

A fellow I knew once told me how he spent a sum­mer

by Joe Foy

I am thinking that the so-called run of river private hydro power gold rush is just about over in British Columbia. That’s because the gold rush has turned out to be a fool’s gold rush. 

In a recent report, University of BC professor George Hoberg found that BC is not short of hydro electricity (as BC’s government has been telling us) because, should we need more, we are entitled to a lot of Columbia River hydro electricity. 

I figure all that’s left to do now is to turn off the remaining proposed private hydro power projects still working their way through BC’s approval processes – like the Kokish River on northern Vancouver Island,

by Stephen Lester

The BC Utilities Commission has instructed BC Hydro to search for low cost proposals to provide power for Vancou- ver Island. Entrepreneurs have floated a dozen proposals, from burning garbage in Nanaimo to burning coal near Campbell River. The Norske Canada pulp mills are all applying to expand their current practises of burn- ing coal, treated railway ties, and tires.

BC faces three threats from our use of energy: global warming, and the peaking of oil supplies, and natural gas supplies. BC needs policies that will accelerate investment in sustainable energy technologies, and a road map that will ensure a smooth and just transition to a sustainable energy economy, without a net loss of jobs.

by Guy Dauncey

The BC government should use taxes, subsidies and