What's wrong with the BC Energy Plan?
Posted April 1st, 2010
The BC Energy Plan is at the centre of the social, economic, and environmental impacts associated with the provincial government’s energy policy. My first Blog posting for BC Citizens for Public Power summarizes a dozen key problems with the BC Energy Plan—and proposes some simple solutions. In the coming weeks, I’ll address each of these items separately and in greater detail.
Visit this Blog regularly for updates.
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What’s wrong with the Liberal government’s BC Energy Plan? First of all, it is not a British Columbian energy plan at all, but rather a plan to privatize BC’s watersheds and power production, erode our public utility, BC Hydro, and export electricity to the US market. It is a globalization plan, with BC cast in the role of a resource colony.
Here are a dozen things wrong with the privatization plan, and a dozen simple solutions that would keep BC independent, adequately powered, and self-reliant:
1. False assumptions: The government has justified its privatization plan with bogus claims that we need more energy. Globally, energy demand is growing, but BC is already self-sufficient. We have been a net exporter of electricity for seven out of the last 11 years, and we have ample resources in place.
Furthermore, the private river projects produce power at the wrong time of the year for local benefit, during spring run-off when BC Hydro’s dams are full and we have lots of energy. Bulk electricity cannot be easily or cheaply stored, so it must be used as it is created. The privately produced energy surplus is destined for export to US markets, as Donald McInnis, CEO of the Plutonic/General Electric partnership openly admits.
The solution: Commission an unbiased, transparent analysis of BC’s future energy needs, then devise a plan that meets those needs with the least ecological and social disruption. If we determine that BC needs more electricity, we could revise the Columbia River Treaty to retain more electricity and sell less. We could retrofit existing dams to produce more power at less cost and less environmental impact than private power projects. Finally, if some communities determine that they need more electricity, then those communities might wish to commission small-scale micro-hydro projects on their rivers, ensuring low impact and maximum local, public benefit.
2. Watershed values: Perhaps the greatest error of the government’s energy plan is that it threatens to sacrifice some 700 BC rivers and watersheds, riparian zones, fish and wildlife habitats, and forests (visit http://www.ippwatch.info/ for an updated list of licences and applications for existing and proposed river diversion projects in BC). These watersheds are corridors of life and assets for community resilience in BC. The government’s energy plan tosses away all these values for large-scale industrial developments that benefit a few corporate owners.
The solution: Protect the ecological and cultural values of our BC watersheds. Preserve natural values, ecological diversity and symbiosis, natural and public health, tourism, local enjoyment of wilderness, and the treasure of our BC wilderness. If we choose to take power off our rivers, we must do so through our public power entity, BC Hydro, with the utmost ecological and community sensitivity, not with wholesale gold rush commercialism.
3. A bad deal: British Columbia’s rivers represent our natural and public assets. The BC Energy Plan transfers these assets to private control, including foreign ownership. Normally, when one sells an asset, one expects another asset—cash or some other social benefit—in return. In this case, the Crown utility is accumulating significant debt while ratepayers subsidize private power projects with inflated energy costs (a projected 33 percent increase over the next four years… with the first of these—9.11 percent—implemented today!) In the meantime, private corporations have seized control of our rivers. That’s a bad deal.
The solution: Retain our public assets, protect our natural assets, and allow our public utility, BC Hydro, to produce the power we need. If BC Hydro determines that the citizens of BC would benefit by a public-private partnership for a particular power project, they could seek bids for those partnerships and our public Utility Commission could determine if the proposed deal is in the interest of BC ratepayers. In Sweden, public-private partnerships have worked very well in the energy sector because those partnerships are scrutinized to ensure they benefit the public as well as profit-seeking investors.
Recent residential energy rate increases expose this plan to subsidize private power developments: last year, a three percent rate hike, followed by a two-tiered rate structure, and now a provincial budget that proposes an additional 33 percent increase over the next four years. These rate hikes pay for private power and represent a transfer of wealth from public to private hands. The BC Energy Plan privatizes the profits and socializes the costs of developing our resources.
The solution: Allow our public utility, BC Hydro—with more than a 40-year track record of providing for BC’s energy needs at reasonable rates—to determine our requirements, develop our resources, and charge fair rates. Modest rate increases make sense: to pay for repairs or upgrades to aging infrastructure, and to create conservation incentives for ratepayers. However, what we want to avoid is an arbitrarily inflated electricity market and a social problem of “energy poverty,” whereby ratepayers are forced to choose between eating and heating.
5. Corruption: To the public, the BC Energy Plan appears corrupt. The government, through BC Hydro, has handed out over $27 billion in contracts to private power companies, who have in turn contributed over $800,000 in donations to the BC Liberal Party since 2001. We witness former government employees taking lucrative equity positions and high-paying jobs with new energy companies that they licensed. Plutonic Power Corp., for example, hired key Liberal Party aides including former ministerial and executive assistants. These schemes all represent conflicts of interest.
The solution: Play fair. Eliminate conflicts of interest and prosecute those who violate the public trust.
6. Violation of Commission authority: The BC Utilities Commission has reviewed the private power schemes and concluded that BC Hydro’s 2008 Long-term Acquisition Plan—specifically, the requirement of BC Hydro to purchase massive quantities of private power at grossly inflated rates—is “not in the public interest.” The government ignored this decision by directing BC Hydro to move forward in its so-called “Clean Calls for energy,” and then proposed to review and revise the role and function of the BC Utilities Commission in the coming months. The government has violated the public trust by ignoring the ruling of its own Commission.
The solution: Follow the advice of the province’s own arms-length regulatory body, the BC Utilities Commission, that was put in place precisely to safeguard our public assets.
7. Undemocratic processes: The process of transferring these public assets into private control has been undemocratic. The people of BC and the communities that live in affected regionshave not been legitimately consulted. “Public consultations” proved to be largely disingenuous and staged media events—a website and a series of email addresses where public input could be submitted—and where conclusions seemed already decided. The government’s refusal to release details or post copies of the submissions received is another indication of their lack of transparency. Furthermore, the so-called “Green Energy Advisory Task Force,” established by the provincial government, has been stacked with promoters and supporters of private power. This government got elected by promising to preserve our public hydro utility, and then broke that promise without public consultation. Insiders devised this plan in corporate board rooms and political back rooms, not in a valid public forum for the public good.
The solution: Play fair again. Offer a genuine, serious public analysis and consultation process with unbiased energy demand and supply data available to the public. Place the public good and the environment ahead of private profit. And stop packaging private power as green energy where there are obvious serious and negative environmental impacts.
8. Privatization destroying public power: The energy plan systematically breaks up, privatizes, encumbers, disempowers, and damages BC Hydro, our public energy utility. The plan privatizes our public power utility with a hundred small cuts. In the first stroke, they privatized BC Hydro operations, power transmission, and access to BC’s rivers. The plan actually forbids our public utility from increasing its power capacity and allows only private companies can generate new sources of electricity in the province. Finally, the plan creates a financial burden on BC Hydro to buy unfairly priced power, which (according to research from the Joint Industry Electricity Steering Committee) will cause BC Hydro to lose $450-million per year, a recipe for the bankruptcy of our Crown utility.
The government lied to us about this. In 2001, while running for office, Gordon Campbell said, in the Vancouver Sun, “A BC Liberal government will not sell or privatize BC Hydro’s dams, transmission lines, water resources or other core assets.” Once elected, they launched this privatization scheme, which has brought speculators, stock promoters, and global corporations to BC with a get-rich-quick, goldrush mentality.
The solution: Preserve public power. BC Hydro is one of our province’s greatest competitive advantages, a secure, public, long-term energy utility that can manage complex social, ecological, and energy values for our public benefit. Private power promotes consumption, while public power can conserve and operate at an optimum scale. Private power has a single goal: profit. Public power, operated by BC Hydro, can serve our complex public objectives, including conservation, job creation, and fair energy rates.
9. The “Green” energy fallacy: The government has attempted to soften their privatization plan by claiming that private river power projects are sources of “green” energy that will help slow global warming. Even a cursory investigation exposes this deceit: private river projects are neither “carbon-free” nor “green.” They are large scale, industrial transformations of our rivers and watersheds. Delicate riparian zones are bulldozed and destroyed. Crews arrive in helicopters, and boats bring in trucks, construction equipment, cement, and massive power stations, all carbon-intensive construction. Developers cut roads through wilderness, divert rivers into colossal steel pipes, and cut transmission corridors (permanent clear cuts) through pristine forests. The transmission lines themselves waste up to a third of the energy. These power projects disrupt salmon streams, destroy bear habitat, degrade forests, and leave an unsightly industrial mess that undermines public enjoyment of our wilderness and our own tourism industry. The private power projects are not remotely “green.”
Secondly, they do not reduce global warming; they increase it. These projects burn massive quantities of fossil fuels; helicopters, boats, bulldozers, trucks, cement, steel construction, and so forth all burn fossil fuels and emit carbon. Furthermore, the private power projects do not offer a single means of eliminating other fossil fuel consumption. The BC Energy Plan includes no mechanism to reduce fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas emissions. None.
The solution: BC already has relatively low carbon energy in our extensive hydroelectric system, which we’ve paid a carbon-cost to construct. We can maintain and improve our low carbon energy sources by retaining our public utility, preserving our rivers, retrofitting dams, and—if needed—building genuine small-scale micro hydro projects for communities that require more power. Small-scale and community-scale micro-hydro projects on rivers do not require enormous industrial disruption of watersheds and do not require long, disruptive transmission lines.
10. Conservation: The lowest carbon, greenest, and cheapest source of energy is conservation. The BC Energy Plan pays lip service to conservation, but provides no focus or effort at ensuring that private power projects are ecologically sound. Our government builds highways, advocates for coastal drilling, and supports tar sands crude oil shipped through BC, while it claims to be reducing greenhouse gases. This hypocrisy is an embarrassment for British Columbia.
The solution: BC could likely meet all of its near-term energy growth needs with conservation. We should cease building highways and build extensive light rail public transportation to reduce our fossil fuel energy needs. We can mitigate urban sprawl and rebuild local, self-reliant communities powered by local energy sources in many BC regions. We can enforce genuinely ecological building codes and equipment standards throughout our industries and in our residential homes. We can demand co-generation and heat pumps to reduce energy demands. We can employ technologies developed in Sweden and elsewhere to convert waste into energy, avoid landfills, and insure that energy profits benefit the public. There exist many means of conserving energy, but the BC Energy Plan focuses almost entirely on increasing supply, exporting energy, and large-scale, industrial, private power projects.
11. Hype instead of action: The BC Energy Plan appears as a giant public relations strategy intended to generate confusion and sway votes, not to stimulate genuine public analysis of our energy needs. Numerous members of the government’s Green Energy Advisory Task Force had partisan political affiliations, as well as both direct and indirect associations with the private power industry. The plan makes promises it cannot remotely keep, such as “zero net greenhouse gas emissions” and it promises to deliver energy self-sufficiency that we already have with BC Hydro. These public relations tricks make the public feel disrespected and abused as we witness the government and industry’s profiteering and ecological destruction.
The solution: Be honest and transparent. The public discussion about energy and public resources is far too important to leave to partisan political cabals, corporate boardrooms, and makeshift “Astroturf” groups pretending to be “green” while promoting corporate objectives.
12. Globalization of BC: The BC Energy Plan is a scheme to privatize and globalize BC resources at a time in history when smart communities everywhere are attempting to achieve local stewardship. The fossil fuel juggernaut of globalization is running out of gas. We have already entered the post peak oil age, and smart communities are learning to conserve energy, protect local resources, and produce local power for local consumption. Energy storage and transmission is inherently inefficient. Globalization is inefficient because it burns fossil fuel to move resources around the world. We already eat food that costs more calories to produce than the food contains. This is the fossil fuel cost of globalization.
Nevertheless, while the entire world is awakening to the importance of localizing their economies, our government is undermining local authority, sabotaging our Crown utility, and turning BC into a resource colony for private foreign interests. Our government gutted our own Ministry of Environment in 2002 by slashing almost one-third of its budget and staff. As a result, there is almost no capacity to monitor the impact of private power projects. Our own government has eroded local autonomy with the notorious Bill 30, removing zoning authority from local governments.
The solution: Localization. The world has clearly entered the age of resource limits, including energy. Our highly respected Dr. Bill Rees at the University of British Columbia has been a world leader in quantifying our overshoot of the global habitat, and shows that humanity now uses 30% more resources annually than the Earth can supply and replenish. There are no new continents to pillage or oceans to plunder. Successful, stable, resilient communities will be those who learn to reduce their demand, preserve their regional resources, localize their economies, and protect their public assets. We should be protecting our wilderness and farmland, not building transmission lines and highways through our natural bounty. Building resilient local communities and preserving regional environments is the key to healthy communities in the 21st century. Globalization is running out of gas. We should look to ourselves and the bounty of our own region for genuine sustainability.
Rex Weyler
Rex Weyler