Hydro goes darker on power line
Decision on second line to West Kelowna turned off until 2025
Completion of a long-sought second major power line to West Kelowna has been pushed back another three years.
The initial target for activation was 2020. Just four months ago, the date was extended to 2022.
Now, the government-owned utility says the second line — intended to prevent recurrence of long power outages that have affected tens of thousands of Westsiders — won’t be completed until 2025 at the earliest.
“This change to in-service date takes into account the time required to acquire regulatory permits, approvals and authorizations, and the short season to complete field studies and construction,” reads a letter to West Kelowna city council from Sabrina Locicero, head of stakeholder engagement for the government-owned utility.
Mayor Doug Findlater said Tuesday he was dismayed, but not all that surprised with the further delay to the second line.
“We’re disappointed it won’t come sooner, but better later than never,” Findlater said.
“I would say it is just turning out to be a way more complex project than they first thought.”
Potentially complicated issues, Findlater speculated, are engineering challenges, First Nations consultation processes, and the interests of private landowners along the proposed route.
West Kelowna and Peachland are served by one power line connecting the communities from B.C. Hydro’s substation in the Nicola Valley south of Kamloops.
A few prolonged power outages on that line, including one that lasted nine hours in November 2014 — and which affected all Westside homes, businesses, and institutions — prompted West Kelowna and Peachland councils to campaign for a second line.
The former Liberal government under Premier Christy Clark, who represented the riding that includes West Kelowna until her government was defeated by the NDP, committed BC Hydro in February 2015 to building the second line. Projections were then it would be complete by 2020.
When the NDP took power last year, there were some concerns on city council the second line may slip down B.C. Hydro’s priority list.
As recently as May 24 of this year, Hydro representatives assured council the project was still on track, but said the completion date would be 2022 instead of 2020.
“I know it’s taking longer than anybody ever wants,” Locicero said at that meeting. “We are trying to move as quickly as possible, but this is a big project.”
For his part, Findlater is confident the project will eventually be complete, and won’t just be successively pushed back.
“It remains in B.C. Hydro’s capital budget, that’s the most important thing,” he said. “And they’ve already done a lot of planning work on this, considering various options. I’d be very surprised if all that was just ‘make-work’ work.”