When Bill Bennett was appointed B.C.’s minister of energy, mines and petroleum resources in June, one of the first questions he asked the executive team of BC Hydro was: If you tally up all the energy projects in development in B.C., including Site C, including the independent power producers that have energy purchase agreements and including all the scheduled dam expansions, will B.C. attain energy self sufficiency?
“The answer for me was a little surprising,” Bennett told BIV Thursday. “The answer was, ‘Maybe, but we certainly won’t have too much.’ So everything that is on the books, if it was built, we might be at self-sufficiency and we might be slightly below it.”
In the Kootenays, the province’s energy capacity growth strategy largely focuses on expanding legacy dams in the region.
BC Hydro is in the second year of a five-year program that will ultimately see the utility invest $5.3 billion to refurbish and expand its existing hydroelectric systems. The cost is reportedly three times more than what BC Hydro spent on upgrades between 1998 and 2008.
Fortis Inc. (TSX:FTS) and the provincial government announced plans Thursday to spend about $450 million apiece to expand the Waneta Dam near Trail, B.C. Fortis and BC Hydro are each buying about half of the energy expected to be produced by the 335-megawatt (MW) expansion.
Further north in the Columbia River system, BC Hydro is installing two more turbines at the four-turbine Mica Dam, at a cost of between $900 million and $1.3 billion. The two new turbines, which are expected to be running by 2015, will add 1,000 MW of energy generation capacity to the dam, which currently generates 1,805 MW or 15% of BC Hydro’s annual energy capacity.
Roughly 125 kilometres from the Mica, a fifth turbine is being installed at the Revelstoke Dam. The addition will add 500 MW to the dam, which currently generates 1,980 MW of power. Said Bennnett: “There’s a lot of investment in those older pieces of infrastructure.”
Of the Waneta Dam expansion, he said: “You have a bunch of water going over the dam that nobody is currently capturing, so you can generate roughly 335 MW of electricity with this Waneta expansion without having essentially any environmental impact.
“You create all these jobs and economic activity in a region of the province that can use it.”
He added: “We are absolutely enthusiastically in support of developing IPPs but the bottom line for us is to generate electricity at the lowest rate possible.”