Price tags likely to be many billions each for two major projects, but early feasibility work just beginning
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VICTORIA — Energy Minister Adrian Dix reached deep into the archives at B.C. Hydro this week and dusted off two projects that had lain dormant for decades.
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The Homathko network of hydro dams, generating stations and transmission lines at the upper end of Bute Inlet was identified for development in the 1920s.
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Site E on the Peace River was identified in the same 1950s survey that picked the upstream sites for the W.A.C. Bennett, Peace Canyon and John Horgan (Site C) dams.
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Thus both predated the 1960s formation of B.C. Hydro itself.
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FP West: Energy Insider
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Yet one suspects that the paperwork for Homathko and Site E were languishing in Hydro’s bottomless files along with the Stikine-Iskut, Hat Creek and Moran Dam and other almost-forgotten projects, just waiting for a government in need.
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Dix certainly fit the bill in that regard, Monday.
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Asked about the NDP’s former opposition to large scale and environmentally disruptive hydro developments, he fell back on B.C.’s growing thirst for clean electricity.
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“We’ve had flat demand for about 18 years. That’s changing, and we are responding,” said Dix. “We have a generational opportunity in mining, in clean energy, in our ports to take action. So yeah, we are acting with urgency.”
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B.C. Hydro has already gone into wind farms in a big way. It was exploring solar and geothermal, batteries and pumped storage. It was even getting back into natural gas generation for limited purposes.
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“In short, we’re looking at all the options,” said Dix.
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Not quite. He made no mention of nuclear power except in an unfavourable comparison to the cost of Ontario’s drive to develop small scale modular reactors.
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Apart from maintaining B.C.’s long-standing no nukes stance, “we have to be open to all potential sources of generation, including hydroelectric,” said Dix.
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“Large hydro is good for the climate, good for the economy, and we have proven it in B.C. in the past decades.”
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Not to say that Homathko or Site E was greenlighted on the spot.
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“We are pursuing early review permits to take a look in detail at these projects,” said the energy minister. “It doesn’t mean we’re proceeding with these projects.”
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Neither does it mean they won’t be proceeding.
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“Make no mistake about it, we have the workers to do this work and we have the need, the support for climate action that requires continuing our legacy, our strength of clean electricity in this province.”
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Both projects were turned down in the past.
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The Homathko entails massive development in a relatively pristine area of the coast.
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Here’s George Heyman, then with the Sierra Club, later an NDP cabinet minister, writing in The Vancouver Sun with fellow activist Sarah Cox back in 2009 about an earlier Homathko development being promoted by a private company, Plutonic Power.
