Site C: Unfortunately 4 Billion Dollars already committed by Liberals was too much to ignore

From a Globe & Mail article posted by jas:

Further, continuing with this project would bring international embarrassment by decimating Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park, named to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1983 because of its natural majesty and significance for endangered species.

​I've read this elsewhere, and it is really laughable. How in heaven's name would Site C affecct Wood Buffalo National Park? Site C is not going to affect the flow of the river, and for that matter, Wood Buffalo is several hundred kms distant from Site C, and in fact there are already two hydro dams on the Peace River, and they haven't 'decimated' Wood Buffalo, so it's a bit hard to see how one more dam is going to change that.

As far as the methane produced by reservoirs, the article posted didn't say it was a known. In fact it was said it was an unknown.

However, if you think even for a couple of seconds about the issue, you'd realize that any lake adjacent to farmland will do precisely the same thing. And I'd be willing to bet that the number of lakes in that situtation outnumber hydro reservoirs by about 10,000 to 1. So if indeed agricultural runoff is causing methane production in standing water, better get started drainging lakes...

I can't help feeling like the "profit" motive was missing from the Leap Manifesto.  Evidently, we all need to make sacrifices to save Gaia, Mother Earth, except now we shouldn't do that unless there's a margin.

Rev Pesky wrote:

From pogo:

The reason to subsidize new sources and technologies is to create a level playing field during their incubation stages.  That is not necessary for Hydro Electric.

​Pardon me, but I thought the overall push was to decrease the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere. If that isn't the overall goal, then those technologies are more of less useless. Look at an output graph for a windfarm or a solar farm, and you'll see why.

Hydro generation is not only green, but it's steady output, which means no fossil fuel generation is needed to back it up. Wind and solar both require back-up, and because that back-up may be needed on short notice, the cheapest and easiest way to do that is with natural gas generators. 

It's also true that the percentage of overall generation by wind or solar is limited because of it's capricious nature. 

 

 The key words are "overall goal".  So yes alternative energy needs to come on line.  Subsidize it while it is in the incubations stages, but not when it has its foothold in the community.  If it needs preference over carbon, tax carbon.  We don't need to create monuments to waste and ineffiency covered up by subsidies.  If Site C is feasible and meets community tests then build it.  Otherwise stop it now.

The issue with subsidies is that it ignores the biggest hurdle we will need to cross.  Changing energy sources is critical, but to get to the other side of this the biggest obstacle is reducing energy consumption from all sources.  Subsidies are counterproductive to this goal.

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Strange Magoo despite your insistance on fiscal prudence in countless other threads you want people in BC to pay for power we don't need. But you claim to be something other than a contrarian who likes to troll?

Yes, I do typically object to the public paying for things with no clear public benefit -- "speech lessons" for a politician whose parents should have taught her to speak, or $800/night hotel rooms, or a $16 glass of juice.

But are you saying that Canada has ENOUGH green energy now?  If so, don't tell me; tell Naomi Klein.

From Marc Jaccard, former head of the BCUC, appointed to that position by the NDP. Interested parties should read the whole article:

BCUC must consider 'dispatchability' in Site C review 

In its rush review of B.C. Hydro’s Site C project, the B.C. Utilities Commission must address the widespread assumption that the dam’s economic value has declined relative to its renewable competitors, especially wind and solar. As I frequently hear and read, “the falling cost of wind and solar is eroding the economic justification for Site C.”

This sounds logical. But it isn’t. To see why, I must explain a key term from the worlds of emergency services and electricity system operations – “dispatchability.”

Renewable electricity generated by wind or solar or run-of-river hydro (no reservoir) is non-dispatchable. It is produced only when there is wind or sunshine or high runoff in the spring. On a winter afternoon, when Hydro’s electricity demand peaks, these non-dispatchable sources may produce nothing.

…In contrast, renewable electricity generated by hydropower with a reservoir, like Site C…is dispatchable.

…I have frequently seen wind and solar compared to Site C in terms of cents-per-kilowatt-hour – the ratio of annual costs to annual generation. But this ratio completely ignores the value of dispatchability. It treats a low-value, non-dispatchable kilowatthour as equivalent to a high value dispatchable kilowatt hour.

…Of course, we also want to know the costs…of the dispatchable and non-dispatchable options. And when independent analysts do that, they find that dispatchable electricity sources can be 10 times or more the value per kilowatthour…In other words, comments that wind and solar are getting cheaper than Site C because their costs are falling are nonsensical. These costs must be compared to the value of the electricity.

We…know…that it is growing in value as we integrate more non-dispatchable renewable sources into our electricity systems…As we invest in more wind and solar, the economics of dispatchable sources like Site C improves.

Courtesy Wikipedia:

Mark Kenneth Jaccard is a professor of sustainable energy in the School of Resource and Environmental Management (REM) at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Jaccard develops and applies models that assess sustainability policies for energy and material.

Dr. Jaccard has been a professor at Simon Fraser University since 1986. His PhD is from the Energy Economics and Policy Institute at the University of Grenoble (now called Universite Pierre Mendes-France). He teaches courses in environment and resource economics, sustainable energy and materials, and energy and materials economic and policy modeling. His research focuses on the development and application of energy-economy-emissions models that simulate the likely effects of sustainable energy policies. He has over 100 academic publications. He advises governments, industry and non-government organizations around the world.

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Of course we need more green energy but tell me what does Ayn Rand think about its economic justification. Her and Thatcher would be appalled at your suggestion. You seeem to be ignoring the people you idolize.

So you're saying that while we need more green energy, it shouldn't be from Site C because Rand and Thatcher wouldn't approve?

I've actually never read Rand, and I don't idolize Thatcher.

I'm just curious why we can only have more green (and less dirty) energy if there's a profit to be had.  Why not think of it like an "equalization payment", except not from a province with more munnee to a province with less, but from a province with more green energy to a provice that's currently boiling dinosaur juice?

This whole "But WHY should I pay??" thing is a bit anomalous at babble.  I help pay for schools even though I have no children.

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Why would someone pay more for power from one green source than another.  If this project is as fiscally inappropriate as its detractors say, it will mean that there will be no capital for any other investments that can deliver green power at an affordable price.

That makes some sense, but tell me more.  I don't think that anyone's been floating the idea that "Site D" would actually be more efficient, investment-wise, but if there's such a site then I'm interested.

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I would think that someone who believes that country's governments should be violently overthrown for bad economic choices would really understand it. If a Bolivarian government was proposing building this boondoggle you would be all over it like a dirty brown shirt demanding they be removed from office for incompetence.

The government of Venezuela invests in lots and lots of things that I have no desire to criticize.  Their bad choices happen far, far above the level of bankrolling a dam.

And really, if Site C goes ahead, and Alberta cannot guarantee you a healthy profit on that green electricity, are you really suggesting you'll be picking through the dumpster for food, or eating flamingos, or having to bring your own syringes and gauze to surgery like in Venezuela??  If so, let me know and I'll send you some gauze, free gratis.

But I'd be all over it like a "brown shirt"?  Really?  I don't see any real need for you to cheapen this like that. 

 

 

From kropotkin1951:

Why would someone pay more for power from one green source than another.  If this project is as fiscally inappropriate as its detractors say, it will mean that there will be no capital for any other investments that can deliver green power at an affordable price.

​In fact Marc Jaccard addresses that specific issue in his commentary. If you read it, you would see that the value of electricity is based on it's 'dispatchability'. That makes the 'dispatchable' output of Site C worth much more than any wind farm or solar installation. He also points out that the more wind and/or solar in the system, the greater the value placed on stable sources of electricity, like Site C.

As far as the claim 'we don't need it', that is looking into the future, and unless you're absolutely certain what the future holds, the claim is nothing more than speculation. Imagine a future with a lot more heating by electricity, and lot more electric cars; in fact a lot more electric everything, and a population double the size of what it is now. In the face of that, the claim that 'we don't need it' falls flat.

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Not everyone agrees with Jaccard. In any case, assumptions about population and demand decades from now are just that.

That's all awesome if you don't need any electricity on a windless night.  Now, or in the future.

As far as "decades from now" goes, does the Leap Manifesto profess to concern itself with "decades from now", or is it only concerned about the present?  And do you feel it would be prudent for us all to concern ourselves only with the present, "because who knows what tomorrow might bring"?

..now if you were to build another 10 site c's this would not mean they were green because of the way they create electricity. determining what is green or not has always been about the overall picture of the project. time and again it's been shown that site c power is not needed, represents encroachment on indigenous territory, has been a massive manipulation in order to transfer wealth to private entities and has been used to destroy a public resource, bc hydro, in order to eventually sell it off.  site c is neoliberalism at it's most effective and neoliberalism is not ever ever green no matter how you spin it.

Rev Pesky wrote:

Not everyone agrees with Jaccard. In any case, assumptions about population and demand decades from now are just that.

​The article you posted said nothing at all about 'dispatchability'. In any case we're not comparing ​​'brown' electricity with 'green' electricity. Hydro is just as 'green' as wind or solar. 

​As far as speculating about future use, it's true that we can't know for sure. However, we do know some things. The population of BC is growing, and that's unlikely to stop. It may even speed up. As of the 2011 census, population growth in BC was at 7% over the previous census, so roughly 1.4% per year. That would be close to 30% in the next twenty years. 

The other thing we know is that electricity use will rise. It may not rise as fast as the population, but it will rise. As of 2007, 52% of  household energy use was natural gas, which would mainly be for heating. What's going to happen when that demand changes to electricity? 

And we return to the fact that people want their electricity when they want it, not when nature decides to make it available. Which is why you can't compare hydro, which is available when you want it, to wind or solar, which is available when it's available.

From Policywonk:

Read it again. It most certainly does. You might try finding "dispatch". And who says I was only talking about wind and solar. There are other forms of renewable energy besides wind, solar and hydro. And the cheapest and most environmentally sound source of energy is conservation. 

Site C: A 21st Century Titanic

When the Titanic, the iconic and storied ocean liner, was being built in company shipyards, its owners, White Star Line, claimed that “as far as it is possible to do, (the Titanic is) designed to be unsinkable.”

Even as the news was coming in that the Titanic was going down, the vice-president of White Star Line stated unequivocally to reporters: “We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe that the boat is unsinkable.”

By all accounts, BC Hydro is behaving in the same feckless and irrational manner, as it continues to engage in shameless boosterism of the Site C dam on northeastern British Columbia's Peace River, aided by its unfailing allies, including liquefied natural gas industry partners (more on that later) and of course former B.C. Premier Christy Clark, who famously vowed to get the project “past the point of no return” before the recent provincial election—but failed to do so.

quote:

Dangerous flaws have emerged in Hydro’s argumentation as important and cautionary as the massive sinkhole that appeared in 1996 in the giant WAC Bennett Dam, 119 km upstream from the Site C location—the sinkhole that cost BC Hydro $2 million a day in lost power production, terrified engineers, and threatened to destroy the entire downstream valley.

One giant crack in Hydro’s rampant enthusiasm for Site C—particularly in light of the BC Liberals' oft-repeated claim to be fiscally responsible—is the Oxford University study that appeared three years ago, which reviewed all major dam projects around the world built between 1934 and 2007, and showed that the overwhelming majority of large dams are simply not cost-effective.

 

quote:

That has compelled a slowly expanding revelation of the real purpose of the elephantine Site C dam. Critics of the project often display an inflatable white elephant to symbolize the true nature of the Site C enterprise.

This is, unequivocally, to act as a life-support system for the greenhouse gas-producing, global warming-inducing, political-donation-dependent fossil fuel industry. In so doing, it’s as if Hydro’s senior management, like Donald Trump, believe global warming to be an irrelevant side-issue—or perhaps just a Chinese conspiracy.

The first reason for Site C playing this role is purely geographical. The proposed location of the dam is directly over the northern end of B.C.’s Montney Shale, the largest accessible methane gas deposit within B.C.’s borders.

The second reason was displayed when the Christy Clark government marched, either deliberately or accidentally, into a climate change dead end. After publicly declaring mandatory targets for reductions in the province’s climate-changing greenhouse gas production, it then served up, this past spring, a “Climate Leadership Plan” that egregiously failed to achieve those targets. Along the way it ignored just about every recommendation made by the very team of experts established to guide the plan’s creation.

Couple these two factors with a third—the precipitously declining cost and rapidly expanding deployment of renewable energy technologies such as solar photovoltaic panels, wind turbines and geothermal projects, as well as the overwhelming cost efficiency of reducing energy consumption—and it is quite clear that for the foreseeable future, B.C. families will not require more hydroelectricity for their own domestic uses.

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He accused the former provincial government of engaging "in a series of exercises" in an attempt to justify the Site C Dam, including "inventing" demand from a liquified natural gas (LNG) industry that has yet to materialize, and from Albertan customers.

"Notwithstanding that any independent evaluation of the likelihood that an LNG industry would develop would have exposed the promises as little more than wishful thinking, the former BC government continued to rely on the emergence of the industry," said the report.

"The former BC government claimed that a $1 billion transmission line between BC and Alberta could deliver surplus electricity supply from Site C. Since Alberta can generate electricity cheaply from gas-fired plants there is no merit to such a proposal," it added.

If the province's residential electricity demands increase, Eliesen suggested that BC Hydro's previously decommissioned Burrard thermal generating station near Vancouver could be restarted cheaply and effectively. That station, Eliesen added, is much closer to the Lower Mainland than the Site C Dam, which — with a population of 2.8 million — houses the bulk of B.C.'s power demand.

United Nations panel calls for halt of Site C dam project in B.C.

A United Nations panel on racism is calling on the B.C. government to immediately halt construction on the $8.8-billion Site C dam, arguing the province needs to review the controversial project in consultation with the First Nations communities facing irreversible destruction of their lands.

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which monitors how signatories such as Canada comply with the UN’s anti-discrimination treaty, issued a new report on Monday holding the project in northeastern B.C. up as an example of an outdated approach to resource development that fails to secure the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples.

The panel also called on British Columbia to “end the substitution of costly legal challenges as post facto recourse” instead of getting the consent from First Nations as well as overhaul the way it decides to approve these big resource projects to achieve buy-in from local Indigenous groups....

Reduction of energy use (and forcing it if necessary through price increases) is better than dams. Dams are really bad for mercury. They destroy habitats for the people who lived there already and countless biological organisms.

However the poor should not suffer from increased energy costs. There should be a reduced rate for low-energy consumption, or in areas where high energy consumption is inevitable, there should be some kind of credit payable to the user. We can do it for G.S.T. and rent tax credits, so there is no reason we couldn't do it for energy.

People refuse to accept the logic that if you cut your energy consumption in half, you have twice as much energy.

Site C Dam Costs Could Escalate 40%, Says Auditor's Report

The Site C dam project faces “significant schedule and cost pressures” that could inflate its final price tag to more than $12.5 billion, according to a new report by one of Canada’s leading auditing firms.

The report, by Deloitte LLP, was commissioned by the B.C. Utilities Commission as part of an independent review of the BCHydro project on the Peace River ordered by the new B.C. government.

The report substantiates statements from many prominent critics of the project, including former BC Hydro CEO Marc Eliesen, that the $8.8 billion project faces serious risks of major cost overruns.

Deloitte was instructed to examine the options of suspending, cancelling or continuing with Site C, to assist the B.C. government in making a final decision about the project’s future, a verdict that will be heavily influenced by Site C’s finances.

Cancelling Site C Would Cost $1.2B: Report

The Deloitte report concludes that it would be cheaper to cancel Site C than to suspend the project.

Cancelling Site C would cost approximately $1.2 billion, according to Deloitte’s analysis, while suspending construction until 2025 would cost $1.4 billion.

The report provides a striking alternative to BC Hydro’s own estimate submitted to the Utilities Commission that found cancelling the project would cost approximately $3 billion.....

NorthReport wrote:

https://thetyee.ca/News/2017/09/13/Site-C-NDP-Indigenous-Rights/

..site c is a test for sure..so are fish farms

From the article posted by NorthReport above:

Some storage and reliability technology seems lagging. Would solar and wind produce steady, reliable power. If Site C is cancelled, could B.C. be looking at power shortages?

The Northwest Power Pool has an enormous capacity surplus. Load growth is effectively zero as new technologies like LED lighting have reduced lighting loads by 90 per cent. Our largest energy users — pulp and paper and LNG (potentially) are facing tremendous challenges. BC Hydro’s loads have been flat for a decade. To make their case for Site C, they are assuming a take-off into continuous sustained growth for the next 30 years.

​Note that this 'expert' does not answer the question about 'steady, reliable power'.

That's because the major alternative power sources are neither steady, nor reliable. We live in a society where people want power when they want it, not when the power is available. And that's the problem with wind and solar, they don't provide power on demand. 

Think of all the freezers and refrigerators out there that cycle on and off based on temperature differential. Think of all the elevators that carry people up and down when they want to go up or down. 

As the expert above knows (which explains why he didn't answer the question), much of the infrastructure of our ecnonomy runs on electricity, and it does so automatically based on design criteria. Wind and solar generated electricity is useless for that infrastructure.