Login / RegisterPeace River power play over potential Site C dam
The potential Site C dam has fired up a passionate debate across northeastern B.C. over future energy requirements
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The proposed $5-billion to $6.6-billion hydroelectric project at Site C would include a 1,100-metre-long earthfill dam and concrete structures with a length of 300 metres. The reservoir behind the dam would be 83 kilometres long. According to a 2002 report by Lions Gate Consulting, 4,600 hectares of land would be flooded. Another 4,840 hectares of the watercourse would be flooded by the reservoir, and 840 hectares of low land by the reservoir would be unavailable for residential use. Approximately 63 parcels of residential land would be subject to flooding or affected by poor drainage and the relocation of roads.
By Charlie Smith
“If I were raised differently, I’d be a terrorist and I’d kill all these people,” Peterson said from a chair in his living room. “But I wasn’t raised that way. So I don’t plan to do that.”
The northeast has already spawned the EnCana Bomber. Now Peterson wants to be the Site C slayer. And despite the ramifications of using the “t” word in this day and age, Peterson is calm and unapologetic. Given his 33-year fight against B.C. Hydro, the RCMP should conclude that Peterson’s activism is methodical and not explosive.
Arlene Boon, a neighbour and third-generation farmer at Bear Flat—the valley community just below the town of Fort St. John—decided to drop by the Peterson residence during the interview. The neighbours are a few kilometres apart and live just above “flood reserve level” signs that hang about the farming community. They show where the reservoir will flood if Site C goes ahead. Their houses are just above the line, but the lower levels would be wiped out, including some of the best agricultural land in the entire northeast of B.C.
“A lot of people say, ”˜Look at it now; it’s horse pasture,’” Peterson said, referring to the scaled-back farming on the valley floor. “Well, that’s due to Hydro and their programs. The lease-back agreements are such that no one would be encouraged to invest money to do anything like that now.”
Later that day, standing on the edge of the high ridge that looks from his home across to the Peace River, Arlene’s husband Ken Boon, a log-home restorer and builder, told the Straight that the Boon property will “probably get washed away”. Even though they are above the flood line, the sloughing—gradual land erosion as banks slide into the valley bottom—may be enough to take the house over the edge. Arlene’s grandfather Lloyd Bentley Sr. bought the land from the Dopp family, homesteaders from Kansas who came to the area on a paddleboat in 1917.
Like many dam opponents, the Boons belong to the reenergized Peace Valley Environment Association.
“We [the PVEA] want to see Site C stopped, shelved, and put away for good,” Ken said. “We want the flood reserve [level] removed and we want to see a comprehensive land-use management plan put in place. Because there’s a lot of land here that’s now held by B.C. Hydro, and one of the fears is, ”˜What if we win the battle?’ Is there going to be a land rush on all this land?”
Speaking from his own point of view, Ken expressed a common sentiment in the area: “I firmly believe we’re going to win this battle.”
{sidebar title="Site C in pictures"}Photos by Matthew Burrows.
In September 2007, Premier Gordon Campbell declared at the Union of B.C. Municipalities annual convention that he was taking another look at Site C as a “large-scale power project”. Campbell then passed the baton on to B.C. Hydro, which he had tasked to kick-start a new feasibility study, signalling the emergence of, potentially, the largest public-sector capital project in the province’s history.
According to B.C. Hydro spokesperson Susan Danard, the budgeted amount for Site C is still somewhere between $5 billion and $6.6 billion—a figure the PVEA puts at more like $10 billion, based on updated projections.
Peterson said he first heard about Site C in 1974, when B.C. Hydro began scouting for a new dam site. In 1981 and 1982, he said, he and his wife were interveners at B.C. Utilities Commission hearings in both Fort St. John and Vancouver.
“Basically, what the commission said was that Hydro could not prove that they needed the power,” Peterson said. “Hydro didn’t have its ducks in a row.”
According to B.C. Hydro’s discussion guide for the project definition and consultation stages, Site C is expected to provide 900 megawatts of capacity annually and produce around 4,600 gigawatt-hours. Site C would be the third dam on the Peace River, downstream from the two existing hydroelectric facilities: the W.A.C. Bennett and Peace Canyon dams.
Old battles lines are being redrawn at Bear Flat. For the community, B.C. Hydro represents an erosion of all they have built up over the decades. Peterson said he and his father-in-law once co-owned 760 hectares of land. Up until 1978, they raised 2,000 tons of potatoes on 40 hectares on the valley bottom. Now 263 hectares belong to B.C. Hydro as part of a lease-back agreement Peterson and his father-in-law reluctantly accepted. If Site C is again rejected, Peterson can buy back the 263 hectares he didn’t buy back previously for the same price as B.C. Hydro paid.
B.C. Hydro will present a report to the provincial government this fall, which marks the end of project definition and consultation. If cabinet approves moving to stage three, the environmental-assessment phase will take two years. Like the Boons and other opponents of Site C, Peterson doesn’t want to entertain a third stage.
Strumming an acoustic guitar in his unofficial mayoral digs, the Whole Wheat ’n Honey restaurant, first-term Fort St. John mayor and former journalist Bruce Lantz knows more than most municipal politicians about Site C. In 1999, he was short-listed (and subsequently overlooked) for a position as northern communications rep with B.C. Hydro. The interview process required intense study of corporate documents pertaining to, among other topics, the wholly-owned subsidiary and trading arm of B.C. Hydro known as Powerex.
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Since arriving in northeastern B.C.’s Peace River Valley from Idaho 41 years ago, Larry Peterson has been a farmer, agricultural consultant, commercial potato grower and wholesaler, realtor, heritage conservation officer, husband, father, and grandfather. By way of introduction, the gentle 64-year-old plain-speaking giant told the Georgia Straight he has “nothing but contempt” for B.C. Hydro. If the Crown corporation gives the go-ahead for the on-again, off-again proposed Site C dam on the Peace River, the low-lying land below Peterson’s modest farmhouse will be permanently underwater.
Unlike his mayoral predecessor, Jim Eglinski, Lantz is opposed to Site C. Like many opponents, Lantz said the dam will not benefit local residents or even British Columbians provincewide. He said B.C. already has enough power, and he claimed that Site C will enable mass exports of “green” power to California, or even Alberta and (indirectly) the oil-sands operations. (“It could happen.”) Lantz also claimed that the B.C. Liberal government, including former Peace River North MLA and energy minister Richard Neufeld, has manufactured an “energy deficit” to suit this export agenda.
“When they started talking about this energy deficit [in 2005], I went to [B.C. Hydro northern communications rep] Dave Conway, Richard Neufeld, and the [B.C. Hydro] CEO, Bob Elton, at different times, and said, ”˜Okay, I remember when we had this huge surplus. We used to buy and sell, and we would sell at peak price points, and we’d buy it back at low price points, and it was all good and we had lots of electricity,’” Lantz recalled. “And I said, ”˜What has changed from ’99 to ’05 so drastically that now we were in this energy deficit?’”
According to Lantz, “Nobody gave the information.”
“I said, ”˜Keep it simple, because I’m just a dumb Nova Scotian, but you should be able to provide that, because you are selling this on this concept,’ ” he said. “And they never, ever did.”
Lantz pointed to electricity trade statistics, compiled by Statistics Canada and the National Energy Board, that show that B.C. was a net exporter of energy (measured in megawatt-hours) in seven of the past 11 years—from 1998 through 2008.
Blair Lekstrom, the current energy minister and Peace River South Liberal MLA, did not return calls from the Straight.
Third-generation Bear Flat farmer Arlene
Boon and her husband, Ken, are happy to
share their thoughts about the Site C dam.
Matthew Burrows photo.
Vancouver-based Site C opponent Joe Foy, national campaign director with the Wilderness Committee, told the Straight by phone that “the [B.C. Liberal] government is bending over backwards to create a phony shortage.” Foy claimed that B.C. Hydro’s own 2007 Marbek Report contradicted government, stressing conservation measures and stating “we need not be using more power in 2027 than we used in 2007”. Foy said the Marbek Report has been shelved for now.
“When reasonable people accept that there is a shortage, then reasonable people begin to believe that we need to”¦do Site C,” Foy said.
One such person is Don Loewen, 54, who lives just north of Fort St. John in the Rose Prairie community and owns a company, Loewen D Enterprises Ltd., that contracts out on projects in the oil and gas sector. Loewen is also doing some preliminary work on-site on the nascent Site C project.
“Absolutely, I’m in favour,” Loewen told the Straight via cellphone. “It’s the only clean power that we have. The river’s already been dammed twice just above it, so one more dam isn’t going to make any difference to the river itself.”
Loewen claimed there are a “multitude of advantages” to building Site C.
“As far as the flooding of a couple of thousand acres, to me it’s trading a feather for a goose,” Loewen said. “I don’t know. I just can’t imagine that that can be a big issue.”
Down the road from Loewen at the North Peace Fall Fair in Montney—21 kilometres outside Fort St. John—farmer Dean Anderson gave a more nuanced view of Site C.
“You know, that’s a two-pronged situation,” Anderson, onetime owner of a water-well-drilling operation, said on August 16. “Here in my heart, it’s telling me that I’d hate to see us flooding another river valley. But I also don’t want to see us go to some other form of [power] generation. Because of that, weighing it all, I have to say I am in favour of Site C.”
First-term Peace River North Liberal MLA Pat Pimm is Neufeld’s replacement representing North Peace constituents in Victoria. The 52-year-old told the Straight he was born and raised in Fort St. John and remembers the Site C issue back when he was a kid watching the first Peace dam come on-line in 1968, backing up the imposing Williston Reservoir. So far, Pimm said, he is not committing to one side or the other on Site C.
“Basically, we’ll have to see what’s in the report and see what’s happening with the report, and that’s my position on it,” he said, before adding: “I don’t think that, 30 years from now, the province is going to be the same size as it is today. I think there’s going to be growth there. I think that growth is going to be one- to two-percent growth over time. That’s what it’s been. I definitely think there’s a need for power, and I think we should be pursuing power from every avenue.”
On the fast-flowing Halfway River tributary, which feeds into the more sanguine and regulated Peace River flow, West Moberly First Nations chief Roland Willson pointed out from a runabout midchannel that where he was will be underwater if Site C gets built. And according to the 43-year-old chief, the loss of natural habitat will be incalculable.
“All this stuff here is prime calving area for the ungulates: the deer, the elk, the moose,” Willson said, pointing to several small islands dotting the river. “They come in here and they get away from the predators on these little islands. It’s prime habitat for them. It’s also prime wintering area for the moose.”
Willson said that if the valley gets flooded, the water levels will rise and fall and the Halfway will be a microcosm of what will happen all over.
“It will be just a constant sloughing [away of the riverbanks],” Willson said.
Alongside Willson, former long-time government wildlife biologist and former Fort St. John city councillor Brian Churchill described rivers as “living, breathing critters”. How British Columbians treat their rivers will affect endangered “blue-listed” species like the bull trout, Churchill added.
“All the way up into all these tributaries you see the bull trout,” he said. “The biggest I’ve seen is 35 pounds. So the Halfway and the Halfway drainage is extremely important to this blue-listed wildlife species for the Peace and, in fact, for British Columbia.”
Willson said he has been working with a Canmore, Alberta–based initiative called Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) that he said aims to have the ecosystem in that vast 3,200-kilometre area thriving 1,000 years from now. Y2Y has identified the corridor from Fort St. John to Hudson’s Hope as being a “Peace bottleneck”, Willson said. He said that the west-east migratory routes of many species have to cross the Peace River.
“With the Williston and the Peace Canyon reservoirs, when they flooded that, they created a barrier there,” Willson said. “It separated”¦it fragmented the caribou migration pattern there, and it’s created a southern and a northern herd of the caribou here. And all the caribou in this area are protected under [Canada’s] SARA: the Species at Risk Act.”
These concerns are shared by Gibsons resident George Smith, former national conservation director with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.
According to Smith, flooding the Peace will result in an increase in greenhouse gases through the loss of trees, as well as methane release from rotting plants and organic soils. Then there is the neurotoxin methylmercury, released from the “ambient environment and plants”, which gets into the fish.
With wildlife, if mankind creates barriers and the wildlife can’t interbreed, they eventually die out, Smith said.
“So to the north of the Peace you have the Muskwa-Kechika [Management Area]—this breadbasket, living room, dining room, and everything place—which has everything for these incredibly rich wildlife populations,” Smith said. “Then to the south you have the conventional Rocky Mountains parks. If you divide those off [with a new reservoir], then that is an incredible shame in terms of the capacity for the wildlife to endure.”
With the divided opinions on Site C, what is the answer? The Wilderness Committee’s Foy said he may not have all the answers but he has questions for the B.C. Liberal government.
“Are we going to self-sufficiency?” Foy asked. “If we are going to self-sufficiency, then the Marbek Report is a really important report. Or are we becoming the northern Arabs of electricity, where we are setting ourselves up—in particular with hydroelectricity—so that we become this major exporter of power? If we are doing that, oh, hell, then you might as well dam the Fraser, dam the Peace, and dam everything, because no matter how much we dam, there will never be enough.”
Mayor Lantz said people outside the Peace cannot see the river for themselves and form an opinion based on that.
“If they [Liberals] lost every vote in northeastern B.C. because of Site C, they’d lose 22,000 votes,” Lantz said. “If you put a major project elsewhere in the province, you could lose that many votes in an eight-block radius. So this is kind of an area that is acceptable losses, maybe, in terms of votes. And, of course, the communities are split. And I think that the deep thinkers in Victoria have figured that this is a good way to go.”
Not until B.C. Hydro makes its move will the public find out if the government gives a dam.
GE Capital has a great interest in BC Hydro's future and their construction agenda to allow their investments to prosper. Rumour has it that GE Capital would also like to purchase BC Hydro and there have been discussions on that.
Search for alternatives, geo-thermal, solar ect. Site C is not for us, I have heard of no plans to put power lines to Ft. Nelson.
Site C: the south takes all the power. our precious wilderness pay's the price.
boooo.
Site C would require 9,000 hectares of crown land in total (vs. up to 45,000 for the Bute Pirate Power project) but would deliver significantly more power throughout the year (4,500 GWh vs. 2,980 GWh from the Bute project) and would be much more valuable "firm power" The cost of power generated from Site C would be about half of that generated by the pirate Bute project.
Mandatory Telecommuting and 3 day work weeks for those eligible would cut vehicle traffic in half greatly reducing GHG emissions. These and other conservation measures, are as the BCUC pointed out better than power builds.
According to BC Hydro's 2009 annual report between 2008 and 2009, it increased its IPP purchases buying 609 gwh for $63 million or 10 cents a kwh. In the same report, it has owned up to contracting for 14,400 gwh for fiscal 2012 an increase of 6600 gwh over 2008. Projecting the current 10 cents a kwh to 2012 we see Hydro will require a 50% rate increase by 2012 changing it from one of North Americas lowest cost producers to one of its highest cost.
Altogether BCHydro has committed to spending $31 billion to buy 7200 Gwh of extremely expensive IPP power. Our energy minister with his high school diploma has indicated he will direct the engineers at BCUC to accept BCHydros additional 3000 gwh buy at 12 cents a kwh adding $360 million to BCHydro's annual cost requiring an additional 40% rate increase by 2014.
Compare that to Alberta and Saskatchewan who have wisely decided not to tear up their landscape building windmills, dams and run of river projects and are committed to far more environmentally friendly clean green nuclear power. Ontario Hydro recently received a bid for two 1.65 gigawatt Areva reactors costing $8 billion with a firm quote for all costs over 60 years for $24 billion. These reactors will produce in the area of 30000 gwh'd annually of high value always on baseload power compared to 7000 gwh'd of BCHydro's mostly spring, good year, low value river power and would fit at Burrard Thermal. A quarter the power for three times the cost including more than 100000 hectares of destroyed landscape. Now there's Gordonomics.
These costs are for onesies and twosies reactor builds. Since nuclear is the only solution to global warming and peak oil, Westinghouse is anticipating mass producing reactors at costs of less than 2 cents a kwh. Compare that to Gordo's 40 year buys at 12 cents.
If the Neocon nitwits that voted for Gordo and his fascist team think there was a lot of people moving to Alberta during the NDP years, just wait for the exodus of all BC Business that use electricity to Alberta, Saskatchewan, Washington. Alaska and Montana. The only ones left will be Gordo and his group of BCLiberal party hacks with their Pirate Power fortunes and the remaining great unwashed as their servants. BCHydro and the province will be bankrupt.
seth
"...the United States, the world's leader in geothermal energy. More than 80% of the country's 3,000 geothermal megawatts lies in California. The Geysers, a network of 22 geothermal plants about 75 miles north of San Francisco in the Mayacamas Mountains, is the largest geothermal complex on the planet....Costing about 4 to 7 cents a kilowatt-hour, Taylor said, geothermal is competitive with wind power and significantly cheaper than solar. Geothermal facilities occupy a fraction of the space required by wind and solar farms. The energy is also more reliable. Plants crank electricity around the clock, irrespective of whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing”¦."This country is in an energy crisis," she said. "We need energy now, and this is a proven way to get it."" In fact, according to the Toronto Star "We remain the only country in the Pacific Rim to not generate electricity from the intense heat deep underground..." (http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/288357). Even BC Hydro's Green Energy report, 2002, (http://www.bchydro.com/etc/medialib/internet/documents/environment/pdf/g...) said "The production costs range between five and nine cents per kWh." It is being done and at a reasonable cost... the technology is there so lets copy it.
That old BC Hydro report giving 2002 production cost at 5 to 9 cents doesn't include the extremely costly drilling and testing regime necessary before capital can be obtained and the project built. BC Hydro has been testing at Meager Creek for years without result. If all the prospects were commercially viable, big if, that's 6000 gwh about the same as site C. Nice but extremely unlikely compared to Site C and both really just pissing in the wind when applied to our urgent need to displace fossil fuels.
The most effective form of geothermal with millions of gwh potential worldwide is your backyard heat pump mass produced and powered by nuclear generated electricity.
Next up, the one you have been hearing about that would potentially generate enough baseload power to displace nuclear, involves drilling real deep into the earth, injecting water and pumping up the superheated steam. Unfortunately, nobody has developed a pump that works at 450 degrees C and the water injection cracks the hot rocks causing lots of small and very scary earthquakes. Nice idea but not viable as yet and not for a long time. Costs are unknown but would certainly be well over the cost of mass produced nuclear.
We can't afford to wait.
According to an article by Steve Kirsch in (Aug 19, Huffpo), we need to add-a-gigawatt-a-day of capacity, one mass produced nuclear plant every day for the next 30 years, if we are to have any hope of stopping a climate disaster. He may be optimistic. Scientists are telling us that there is some chance we are as little as 10 years away from falling off a climate precipice with permafrost methane emissions and ocean acidification forming the leading edge of a very steep slope.
Westinghouse research claims with a long detailed study that with mass production techniques and political action for a one time nationwide regulatory approval of a standard design plant, they can build nuclear for $1000 a kilowatt or less than 2 cents a kilowatt hour. They've put their money on the table with a $1200 a kilowatt $5.5 billion nuke sale to China.
Projecting the Westinghouse China nuclear sale, it would cost $1 trillion to buy enough nuclear plants to replace the energy equivalent all of the United States crude oil consumption now costing $500 billion per year. That's less than the cost of the War in Iraq, it would get everybody to work and it be payed easily for by replacing oil purchases.
We were able to retool and regear to fight World War Two. We can do this with a lot less resources required than those needed to build millions of homes and automobiles every year.
The nuclear waste problem is solved with the consignment of waste to fuel for liquid metal fast reactors, like the one Sandia Labs has just designed and just needs political support to launch. To put the waste problem in perspective, we could just take all of it to the nearest coal plant and meter it slowly into the smoke stack. The nuclear waste would increase the coal plants already radioactive emissions by only a tiny percentage and wouldn't add any more lead, arsenic or mercury to the air. Or we could store the nuke waste under a half acre or so of the thousands of square miles of desert ,solar types were planning destroying forever by covering them with toxic solar cells.
About 70% of BC's energy needs (100000 gwh) are met with fossil fuels. The only possible way to displace them is planning a near term construction of about 10 gigawatts of nuclear power which at Westinghouse's China sale price would cost 11 billion dollars. That's less than twice the cost of Site C and produces 20 times the power on only a few acres of industrial land.
We need to do this NOW. Anything else is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
seth
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