ASSESSING SITE C WILL BE DIFFICULT
The ruling New Democrats have delivered on an election promise to refer the Site C hydroelectric project to the B.C. Utilities Commission (BCUC) for review. Business groups say the additional review after years of environmental assessments, legal rulings and a Joint Review Panel report is unnecessary. Environmental groups and some First Nations applaud the move, seeing it as a major step toward cancelling the project.
As Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer reported this week, the government has set out terms of reference for the review that allow for three options: to cancel, postpone or proceed.
The former president of B.C. Hydro said earlier this year that a one-year delay in the Site C project would cost $630 million, while researchers at the University of B.C. concluded that cancelling it would save between $500 million and $1.65 billion.
Some argue the dam’s reservoir, about onethird the size of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam’s Williston Reservoir, will flood 55 square kilometres of land along the Peace River, including farmland that could feed one million people in perpetuity. Counter arguments have it that there is little land affected that is under active cultivation and its most prevalent use is for forage, not food crops.
Site C opponents say B.C. doesn’t need the electric power — that wind and solar generation, along with conservation, will provide enough power forever and that electricity demand has been flat since 2005. Site C proponents say a growing population (a million more expected over the decade), the electrification of the transportation system, increased consumption by individuals with digital devices, e-bikes, electric cars and big-screen TVs, and the move by some municipalities to phase out natural gas and go 100 per cent renewable, means demand for electricity can only increase.
Some of these arguments may be extraneous to the BCUC review, which is looking at Site C’s economic viability, but participants at public hearings — assuming they will be held — are likely to raise them anyway. Given the years of discussion, debate, reviews and rulings, the six-week timeline the BCUC has been given to rehash all this material in a preliminary report (a final report is due Nov. 1) poses a challenge.
Perry Bellegarde, the Assembly of First Nations national chief, says the approach to Site C isn’t in keeping with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which the NDP promised in the election campaign to uphold and implement — a commitment confirmed in the mandate letters given to each cabinet minister. It’s not obvious how this will influence the BCUC thinking.
Moreover, as economist Mark Jaccard pointed out, the review must consider dispatchability; that is, the capacity to reliably generate power when it is of greatest need, rather than merely the cost of power in cents per kilowatt hour. The falling cost of wind and solar, he argued, has to be weighed against their non-dispatchability, their inability to produce power when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun does’t shine. In short, dispatchable power is more valuable than power that isn’t.
Marvin Shaffer, an economist who believed there was never a business case to rush to build Site C, said earlier this year there was by then no business case to stop it and a new government should complete it.
Just over half of responders to The Sun’s poll question (What should the NDP do with Site C?) as of Friday afternoon said the project should continue. About 40 per cent want it cancelled.
The BCUC will have to parse competing narratives to find the truth and deliver recommendations government can sell to voters. And while its deliberations continue, the BCUC should keep in mind there are 2,200 people working on Site C who have a little more at stake in the decision than the rest of us.