Liberal leader touts Site C as a job generator
Clark visits Fort St. John, boasting about continent’s ‘biggest clean energy project’
Liberal Leader Christy Clark said Tuesday the $9-billion Site C dam is about jobs and green energy, brushing aside a new report that concludes the project is financially wasteful and unnecessary.
Clark, speaking before about 40 supporters in hard hats at a concrete plant, said the project on the Peace River will employ thousands of workers and represents a clear divide between the Liberals and both the NDP and Greens.
“This is the biggest clean energy project underway anywhere in North America,” she said. “The opposition wants to send every single one of those (workers) a pink slip, send them home empty-handed.”
The NDP supports referring Site C to the B.C. Utilities Commission, while the Green party dismisses the project as a subsidy for the LNG export sector. Clark has consistently refused to refer Site C to the commission, the agency with the expertise to investigate whether the electricity from such a facility is needed.
Clark said Site C will help keep electricity rates among the lowest in North America and follows in the forward-looking tradition of former Social Credit premier W.A.C. Bennett.
Kristi Pimm is the daughter of Pat Pimm, the former Liberal MLA for Peace River North, and co-owner of Alpha Controls Ltd., an electrical company. She praised Site C, saying: “It’s already made a huge difference. We had some really rough times with the oilfield and things slowed down. It kept us going during the hard times.”
A University of B.C. report released on Tuesday said Site C cannot be justified and should be stopped immediately and reviewed by the commission.
Rather than a cost-efficient way to meet increasing electricity demand, the report found Site C will result in added costs ranging from several hundred million to more than $1.5 billion, depending on load growths, export prices and potential cost overruns.
The better alternative path, relying primarily on wind power, pumped storage and energy conservation, would also produce lower greenhouse gas emissions, the report says.
“The business case for Site C is far weaker now than when the project was launched,” said Karen Bakker, Canada research chair and director of UBC’s program on water governance, which prepared the report.
Clark said she had not read the report, but suggested it “was not written by either an electricity planner or an engineer.”
Outside the concrete plant, about a dozen Site C opponents carried placards.
Clark has vowed to push the dam “past the point of no return,” and Hydro’s Site C senior construction manager Bob Peever suggested to reporters that point has already been reached.
“Absolutely. It’s well under construction,” Peever said.
Hydro spokesman Dave Conway said $4 billion has been committed to the project in contracts, agreements and construction already completed, including $1.5 billion spent to the end of 2016.
Peever said about four kilometres of the Peace River and three kilometres of the Moberly River have been logged to date. Some eight million of an anticipated 40 million cubic metres of material have been moved.
Close to 2,000 people were working on the site Tuesday, about 80 per cent of them from B.C. That will rise to 3,500 in 2019-20, he said. Peever said much of the current work involves preparing for pouring concrete for the powerhouse infrastructure this summer.
The 60-metre-high dam is expected to produce 1,100 megawatts of electricity by 2023.