The Fort Nelson First Nation is moving forward with one of Canada’s first geothermal electricity facilities after the federal government announced on Friday that it will invest $40.5 million into the Clarke Lake Geothermal Project. 

The project will transform a natural gas field nearing depletion in northeastern B.C. into a source of renewable energy for remote communities.

“Today is a pinnacle of years of hope and dreams and especially all the hard work that we’ve put into this project,” Fort Nelson First Nation Chief Sharleen Gale said during an online media event.

“We’ve experienced a downturn in forestry and [natural] gas and the pandemic has served to compound those struggles,” said Gale, who is also the chair of the nation’s development corporation, Deh Tai LP. “I believe this project will act as a catalyst for our nation’s economy and for the entire Northern Rockies region.”

Read More: Fort Nelson First Nation lands permit to transform aging gas field into geothermal energy project

The Clarke Lake project is expected to produce 15 megawatts of clean electricity, enough to power up to 14,000 homes. 

Electricity in Fort Nelson is currently generated from natural gas or imported from Alberta, where fossil fuels remain a dominant source of power. By switching to geothermal, the project will reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by more than 25,000 tonnes, the equivalent of taking 5,000 cars off the road, according to a federal government release.

“Our Elders constantly remind us that our future is directly tied to our land and the ability to sustain future generations depends on how we manage the land and our resources today,” Gale said. “The Clarke Lake geothermal project puts us on a path that we can feel confident in.”

The project is expected to be completed by 2024. Next steps involve deepening an existing gas well to roughly between 610 metres and 760 metres and developing a new geothermal production well. Test results from the wells will be available by the end of August.

An aerial view of the Clark Lake site which is being transformed from a natural gas well pad to a geothermal drill site. Photo: Ryan Dickie

Geothermal potential across Western Canada

While Fort Nelson First Nation’s project could be among the first in Canada to start generating electricity from geothermal energy, research shows there’s considerable geothermal potential elsewhere in the country. As the country strives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, interest in generating electricity from the energy stored in hot rocks and water underground is growing.

Under the right conditions, that water, or brine, can be drawn to the surface through a well where heat energy can be extracted and either transformed into electricity at a power plant or used as direct heat to warm buildings.

“As part of a diverse grid with other resources like wind and solar, [geothermal] can play an important role in decarbonizing the electricity sector,” Sara Hastings-Simon, a research fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy and senior research associate at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines said.

While geothermal can offer a constant stream of reliable power, making it attractive as a source of baseload power, it can also be controlled, meaning power plant operators can choose when to send geothermal electricity to the grid depending on demand and the other sources of power available.  

But the industry is still “very much under development” in Canada, Hastings-Simon said, and proponents have faced considerable challenges trying to get projects off the ground in the past.

Read more: Why Canada’s geothermal industry is finally gaining ground

Oil and gas industry a tough competitor for geothermal

Canada’s experience with oil and gas drilling can be both a benefit and a barrier to geothermal development.

Geothermal offers an attractive zero-emissions source of energy and can be a supply of constant electricity which, unlike solar or wind energy, doesn’t rely on external factors like the weather. But the upfront costs of drilling for geothermal can be high and the returns can be much lower than for oil and gas. 

“When, for example, oil and gas prices are high, that in a way actually slows down development of geothermal resources because the business case for going after the oil and gas is just stronger,” Hastings-Simon said. 

Workers plug and cap a natural gas well at the Clark Lake site in preparation for a new geothermal well. Photo: Ryan Dickie

A bulldozer is used to expand the Clark Lake site in preparation for geothermal development on February 11, 2021. Photo: Ryan Dickie

“The oil and gas industry really becomes a competitor for people and equipment and investors during those boom periods,” she said.

That competition has been stiff in Alberta, according to Catherine Hickson, vice-president of Geothermal Canada, an organization that promotes geothermal research and development.

Geothermal wells, which tend to be deeper and wider than oil and gas wells, are expensive to drill and there’s no revenue to be generated until the whole power plant comes online, she explained. 

Missing pieces ‘starting to align’ for geothermal development

With lower oil prices, the competition between oil and gas and geothermal may not be as much of an issue going forward, Hastings-Simon said, noting that the oil and gas industry isn’t likely to  see a long-term return to boom prices.

With more players in the oil and gas sector “looking for what comes next,” Hastings-Simon said she thinks “we might see more sustained attention on geothermal opportunities.” 

Governments in Canada have also signalled their interest in developing a geothermal industry, she said, as evidenced by new legislative frameworks, such as Alberta’s Geothermal Resource Development Act, which help create certainty for businesses looking to develop or invest in geothermal projects, as well as direct funding for geothermal projects, such as the Clarke Lake project.

“All new industries … require governments to take a role early on in de-risking and supporting projects … before investors are really willing to put money into these projects,” Hastings-Simon said.

While there’s still uncertainty about how quickly geothermal energy will roll out across the country, Hastings-Simon said “a lot of the pieces that were missing are starting to align.”

New signage was recently installed to note the Clark Lake site’s transformation into a geothermal project. Photo: Ryan Dickie

Alberta geothermal proponents sees opportunities for carbon storage

In Alberta though, Hickson — who is also chief executive officer of Alberta No. 1, a geothermal power and direct heating project south of Grande Prairie, Alta. — said a lack of financial support from the provincial government has left geothermal proponents hustling to bolster the economic case for their projects to attract investment.

“What we’ve been looking at is what can we add on to a geothermal project in Alberta specifically to make it commercially viable,” she said. 

Alongside using the heat and creating electricity, there may also be opportunity to extract minerals from the brine that is pumped from deep below the surface of the earth, including potentially lithium, which is used in rechargeable batteries, Hickson explained.

The brine that has been pumped to the surface to produce electricity is eventually returned to the reservoir underground through a reinjection well and Hickson said there may also be opportunities to use those injection wells to store carbon deep underground.

“Carbon sequestration is going to be incredibly important for Alberta if it wants to get to net zero,” Hickson said.

The Alberta government has signalled growing interest in geothermal. Alongside introducing a new legislative framework for geothermal last year, the government committed $28 million toward geothermal resource development and a mineral strategy in its 2021 budget.

While direct government funding for projects is effective particularly when an industry is in the early stages of development, Hastings-Simon said it’s not the only way governments can provide support.

As the industry starts to scale up, governments could also offer loan guarantees, she said.

In that way, “governments can use their position to provide more certainty to investors to make them more comfortable putting funding into projects without having to necessarily pay the majority of the cost directly,” she explained.

During Friday’s media event, Natural Resources Canada Minister Seamus O’Regan indicated the federal government is open to funding more geothermal projects.

“How we produce energy for tomorrow will go a long way in determining how we tackle an urgent climate crisis today and how we get to net-zero emissions by 2050,” he said,

In the meantime, communities or companies interested in developing geothermal energy can look to the Fort Nelson First Nation as it moves forward on its Clarke Lake project.

“It will serve as a model for other geothermal facilities across the country, particularly in the north and rural communities,” O’Regan said.

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One of the world’s most restless geological regions, the Pacific Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped belt running up the west coast of South and North America and east coast of Asia and the South Pacific, triggering many of our planet’s earthquakes and volcanoes. Canada has long been the only country in this Ring of Fire to not take advantage of its energy potential by commercially generating electricity from the vast underground store of heat. 

And Canada’s geothermal resources are not limited to this dramatic hot zone. Radioactive decay of elements in the Earth’s crust generates heat, accessible anywhere that geological anomalies like faults and fractures create conduits for hot fluids to be accessed by drilling. Those hot fluids, pumped to the surface, can be used to drive turbines to create electricity. One such heat-transferring geological anomaly is the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin — a rock sandwich below much of Alberta, dipping into southwestern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan, northeastern B.C. and southwestern Northwest Territories.

Canada’s abundant and relatively low-cost natural resources of water, coal, oil and natural gas, combined with its highly dispersed population rarely clustered near geothermal sites, has long made geothermal electricity production too cost-prohibitive. For decades, geothermal interest and investment has waxed and waned, but largely failed to leave the starting gate as an electricity source. 

Now though, are we on the cusp of change?

Canada’s first commercial-scale geothermal electricity plant

Before leading Canada’s deepest geothermal project to date, geologist Kirsten Marcia worked in the mining and oil and gas sectors. A particularly challenging coal project led her to question “the treadmill of exploitation” — digging out resources and going back for more. Now she is redeploying her expertise in renewable energy as founder, president and CEO of DEEP, a project near Estevan, Sask., at the forefront of Canada’s new commercial-scale geothermal development.

With its first discovery well drilled in 2018, DEEP aims to complete feasibility studies in 2020 and send electrons to the grid by 2022. Poised to become Canada’s first commercial-scale geothermal electricity plant, there have been challenges, Marcia admits. 

“It hasn’t been cheap drilling,” she says, “and we’ve been very fortunate to have investors and federal funding support the project.”

DEEP’s long-term goal, beginning with this first drilling site, is to develop hundreds of megawatts of baseload power facilities from small, scalable, repeatable five to 20 MW power plants, each capable of powering up to 5,000 households.

DEEP geothermal drill rig. In December 2018, DEEP drilled the province’s deepest well, over 3,000 metres below the ground surface. Photo: DEEP

High up-front costs relative to wind and solar is a longstanding geothermal stumbling block. Compared with oil and gas wells, geothermal wells — in this sedimentary basin, at least — must be deeper and the well bore diameter needs to be wider to allow for a high flow rate of hot water pumped to the surface, explains geothermal geologist Catherine Hickson. 

Geothermal’s main advantage is that the Earth’s core heat will be available consistently for the next billion years, allowing it to be used as a source of baseload power to the electrical grid, unlike relying on when the wind blows and sun shines for intermittent power.

Hickson is leading another major geothermal project in northwest Alberta. The Alberta No. 1 project, located near Grande Prairie, aims to generate approximately 5 MW of power for the grid as well as provide heat to a nearby industrial park. 

“Work is underway right now on the final well design and discussions with our partners,” Hickson says. Drilling will begin as early as the fall. 

The $58 million project has received $25.45 million through Natural Resources Canada and is expected to employ nearly 200 workers through construction. 

Hickson’s own interest in geothermal got off to an explosive start when, as a UBC geology undergraduate student on a long weekend camping trip in May 1980, she witnessed, and survived, Mount Saint Helens blowing its top. That serendipitous event inspired Hickson to spend much of her career studying volcanoes before her segue to the geothermal industry — first within volcanic systems close to the Earth’s surface, like those in Iceland, and now harnessing the less volatile deep sedimentary heat sources underneath the Canadian Prairies.

The history of geothermal energy in Canada

The viability of geothermal electricity production, Hickson explains, has historically been tied to the price of crude oil. 

Optimism bubbled up for Canada’s geothermal advancement in the mid-1970s to 1980 during the energy crisis when oil prices rose dramatically. At that time, concern centred around an adequate national supply of energy. 

“It wasn’t so much renewables and green energy, it was just energy in general,” says Stephen Grasby, research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada. 

Both Grasby and Hickson worked at the Geological Survey of Canada during what Grasby calls its geothermal “heyday.” From the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, the government agency hosted a large geothermal research program exploring Canada’s geothermal potential. That abruptly ended around 1985 as the low cost of oil tipped the balance toward geothermal being too expensive to pursue. 

Hickson eventually left for industry, while Grasby tried to revive what was left of their work, setting out to capture essential geothermal knowledge “before it got lost in people’s garages,” he says. Grasby is now president, with Hickson vice-president, of Geothermal Canada, a non-profit organization working to advance geothermal energy in Canada and beyond. 

Geothermal energy is taking off globally, so why not in Canada?

Since those heydays, they’ve watched the continued turbulence in the oil market and its subsequent effect on the ups and downs in geothermal interest. 

There was the late 1990s oil price crash that dashed Canada’s geothermal hopes for that era. Then in the 2000s, as crude prices increased, interest and investment in geothermal development surged. That ended with the economic crisis of 2008.

Over the last two years, interest in geothermal has separated from the price of hydrocarbons for the first time, Hickson says. Crude oil has gone down yet there is increased interest in geothermal as an opportunity to offset greenhouse gas emissions. In Alberta, where Hickson grew up, she says, “geothermal provides a great offset for coal-fired power.”

Across B.C. and Alberta, a handful of projects using geothermal energy to produce electricity are at varying stages of development.

Grasby, lead author on a 2012 Natural Resources report on Canada’s geothermal potential, highlights that, beyond its utility to produce electricity, geothermal could also supply some of Canada’s heating demand, which comprises 60 per cent of the country’s energy needs. Direct use of geothermal heat is already in place at some of Western Canada’s famous spas at hot springs, and also in places like Springhill, N.S., where heat from a shuttered coal mine is now used via a heat pump system by local homes and businesses. But this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential opportunity.   

With signs of broad change on Canada’s geothermal landscape, another question burns on the minds of many: could geothermal put unemployed oil and gas workers back to work?

Can a geothermal industry help unemployed oil and gas workers?

The geothermal industry “has laser sharp focus on what can Alberta do, and what can Canada do, to get drillers back working in our current economy?” Hickson says. Geothermal, with its need for well-drilling, “is a perfect fit.” She cautions that it will take time to scale up geothermal production, and it’s not a panacea for solving all of the oil industry’s problems.

Marcia is also cautiously optimistic. “The synergies are fantastic,” she says. 

There are differences in well-drilling, but the ability, expertise, geologists and geophysicists — all of those employment opportunities are the same in geothermal. But “I don’t want to oversell it,” she cautions. With thousands of oil rigs on the Canadian prairies, even if multiple geothermal companies advance, “it’s still going to be a drop in the bucket” she says, “and a great transition for [only] a percentage of those workers.”

But the oil and gas industry has more to offer geothermal than skilled workers. Geological datasets from thousands of Western Canadian oil and gas wells also provide clues to geothermal prospectors about where to drill. Clues, but not certainty. 

Workers at the DEEP geothermal energy project site outside Estevan, Sask. Photo: DEEP

“Oil and gas resources are above us,” explains Marcia. Geothermal wells typically go 500 to 1,000 metres deeper. Since it’s not a core focus of oil and gas exploration, temperature at depth is not necessarily measured, and sometimes geothermal experts have to infer it from a series of data sources using oil and gas cores and cuttings, seismic survey, lidar and electromagnetic methods. 

“It’s a bit like putting a 3D puzzle together,” says geophysicist Jeff Witter, principal geoscientist of Innovate Geothermal in Vancouver. Geothermal drilling in Western Canada’s sedimentary basin is, at least initially, exploratory. The four new wells drilled for the DEEP project are the deepest ever drilled in Saskatchewan, reaching more than 3.5 kilometres below the earth’s surface.

As for Alberta, even though over 700,000 oil and gas wells have been drilled, few have drilled into deeper sections, explains Hickson. Deeper drilling comes with more sedimentation, harder rock and high quartz content that makes drilling slow. Drill bits quickly wear out.

To access the high volume of hot brine needed to generate electricity in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin — a relatively low temperature system compared with volcanic systems like Iceland — the wellbore size needs to be bigger, usually at least twice the diameter of an oil or gas well. Aiming for water temperatures above 120 C, prospectors like Hickson seek a Goldilocks zone with a trifecta of conditions: just the right temperature, drilling depth and flow rate.

One project in the works through Razor Energy Corp. is looking at co-production of geothermal and oil and gas. The company is testing hot fluids pumped to the surface during oil and gas drilling to see whether they could be used for energy production.

As a rule of thumb, explains Katie Huang, geoscientist in training with the Alberta No. 1 project, temperature jumps approximately 30 C for each kilometre below the surface. After graduating from the University of British Columbia with a geology degree in 2015 during an economic downturn, Huang had to think outside the box about career options. She headed off to the University of Iceland for a Master’s in Geothermal Science. Back in Canada, she’s excited to be a part of this new wave of geothermal interest at home. 

“I know that there are a lot of people in the oil and gas industry hoping to transition over,” Huang says. “And I hope this project can help.”

The future of geothermal in Canada

DEEP and Alberta No. 1 have both recently received significant investment from Natural Resources Canada’s Emerging Renewable Power Program. Advancing multiple forms of renewable energy, including wind, solar and tidal, the program is part of the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change announced in 2017, explains André Bernier, senior director at Natural Resources Canada’s Renewable and Electrical Energy Division. 

About a quarter of the funding announced by the program thus far — $51 million — has been allocated to geothermal, says his colleague Zoë Beaulac, senior program officer in the same division at Natural Resources Canada. Additional geothermal project funding, Bernier hints, may soon be announced.  

Smaller projects and pilot studies in Alberta, Saskatchewan and B.C. are heating up too. The Clarke Lake Geothermal Project in Fort Nelson, B.C., for example, has raised 93 per cent of the funding needed to launch. With hundreds of gas wells in the area already providing relevant data on where to drill for heat, John Ebell, project manager for the Fort Nelson First Nation’s project, says they are ready to drill a full-scale production well that could serve the region’s complete electrical needs. 

Map of the Clarke Lake geothermal study area. BC Hydro transmission lines are shown in yellow. Map: Geoscience BC

This would replace existing gas-fired reliance with clean energy, power an industrial greenhouse development, and create jobs and energy sovereignty for a region that is economically depressed in part due to downturns in the gas and forestry industries.  

“This project would produce 10,000 worker days worth of work, and the majority of those would go to oil and gas sector expertise,” says Ebell, adding the project would “seriously invigorate the economy in the region.”

Fort Nelson First Nation lands permit to transform aging gas field into geothermal energy project

To decarbonize the power sector, it’s helpful to have a combination of different renewables, including geothermal, explains Sara Hastings-Simon, senior researcher at the Colorado School of Mines, formerly with the University of Calgary and Pembina Institute, who now works remotely from her home base in Calgary. She was part of a team that studied the complementary relationship between geothermal and the oil and gas sector in Alberta, and whether the oil and gas industry can enable geothermal advancement. She and colleagues highlighted that benefits can flow both ways, with geothermal deployed to reduce emissions in the oilsands. The birth of the oilsands industry, Hastings-Simon points out, involved government leading the way, taking on some of the early stage risk by proving the technology out. Now, when it comes to geothermal, the need for government investment is no different, she says. 

“We need government investment to unlock that market.”

Until recently, “there was no way you could get a geothermal [project] off the ground in Canada, unless you were talking about a spa around an existing geothermal hot spring,” Hickson says. 

Now, significant federal investment is critically important, she explains. “Suddenly, we have a game changer.” 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

A natural gas field nearing depletion in northeastern B.C. could see new life as a reliable source of renewable energy for remote communities that today depend on fossil fuels for heat and electricity.

Fort Nelson First Nation recently secured a key provincial permit for the geothermal rights to 6,800 hectares of land in the Clarke Lake gas field, setting the stage for a drilling program later this year to prove that a commercial-scale geothermal power plant is within reach for the area.

Geothermal energy could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the Fort Nelson region, where electricity is currently generated from natural gas or imported from Alberta, which is heavily reliant on fossil fuels for power. It could also provide access to great stores of heat that could be used by industry, for tourism, or to keep local homes toasty in the winter.

“Greenhouse production is an obvious opportunity to explore. Everyone is pretty excited about producing fresh food in our region in the middle of winter,” Fort Nelson First Nation Chief Sharleen Gale told The Narwhal in an email.

Geothermal energy is contained in hot rocks and water deep underground. Unlike renewables such as solar and wind, geothermal can provide a constant power stream, making it an attractive source of baseload energy.

The challenge is finding the right conditions for production.

Geothermal energy is taking off globally, so why not in Canada?

Study finds potential for electricity and heat production

“It’s easy to figure out where it’s windy and sunny on the surface, but it’s kind of hard to figure out where there’s hot permeable rocks two kilometres underground,” explained Steve Grasby, a research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada.

Typically, geothermal power not only requires heat, but also water, which absorbs heat by flowing through permeable rock. As long as the water, or in some cases steam, flows at a high enough rate, it can be drawn to the surface through a well where heat energy can be extracted and either transformed into electricity at a power plant or used as direct heat to warm greenhouses for food production or buildings during cold winter months, a common use in Iceland.

The geothermal greenhouses at Garðyrkjustöð Ingibjargar have been in operation since the 1930s. Photo: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Researchers working on a project for Geoscience BC, an independent, non-profit research organization, have already been able to model the Clarke Lake reservoir and simulate the flow of hot water from the underground aquifer. 

A subsequent “pre-feasibility” study determined there is potential to produce both heat and electricity from the geothermal resource in the Clarke Lake gas field. The study offered rough estimates, within 50 per cent accuracy, that a 15 megawatt project could cost between $139 million and $285 million and take 12 to 24 years to payback.

“We do see it as one of the higher potential parts of the country and I think well worth the exploration effort,” said Grasby.

Map of the Clarke Lake geothermal study area. BC Hydro transmission lines are shown in yellow. Map: Geoscience BC

Geothermal exploration can carry significant economic risks: in a worst case, millions could be spent drilling a test well only to find high heat but no fluid to carry that energy to the surface.

In the Clarke Lake area, data collected from gas revealed high temperatures well below the surface, helping to bolster the odds of success. But the presence of high enough water flows can only be confirmed through drilling. 

In a statement, Bruce Ralston, the minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, said the recently issued provincial permit “gives the Fort Nelson First Nation the certainty it needs to attract investment and move forward with developing a geothermal energy project that will reduce climate pollution while creating new jobs and opportunities.”

Geothermal plant could be up and running by 2024

Alongside likely benefits for the climate and food security, the project’s economic opportunities are a welcome prospect for the Fort Nelson First Nation, which is partnering with the Saulteau First Nation to bring geothermal energy to the province’s northeast. 

“Our region is economically depressed and our people are under employed. We need opportunities through project ownership,” said Gale. “We have seen what happens as a people with industrial development when we are not fully involved.” 

Though a number of permits are still needed, Fort Nelson First Nation and its partner are planning to drill a test production well and injection well later this year.

“We know the geothermal resource exists through all the data that’s been collected but it has to be proven … so the development can be commercially financed,” said John Ebell, project manager of the Clarke Lake geothermal undertaking and a founder and owner of the Barkley Project Group.

The test production well, which will be some 2,500 metres deep and about 13 inches wide at the bottom, will run for two weeks to a month, enough time to prove the project is viable, said Ebell.

If all goes according to plan, a geothermal plant could be running by 2024.

“I have a lot of confidence in the Clarke Lake project so I have no doubt we’re going to make it across the finish line,” Ebell said.

Gale hopes it can serve as an example for other communities, as well.

“Geothermal energy is available in other northern Indigenous communities. Fort Nelson First Nation and our partner Saulteau First Nation hope that what we accomplish will be an inspiration to other communities,” she said.

Why a Small Alberta Oil and Gas Town is Pursuing Geothermal Power

‘You have to risk money to drill holes’

There are a number of areas with geothermal potential in B.C. — from the hot sedimentary basin in the northeast to the volcanic belt in the southwest — and some other communities are already actively exploring the possibility of capturing that energy from deep within the earth. 

Projects are underway south of Terrace, where the Kitselas First Nation has partnered with the Borealis GeoPower on the Lakelse project, and south of Valemount, where the same company is working with the Valemount Geothermal Society on the Canoe Reach project.

Meanwhile in Saskatchewan, the DEEP Earth Energy Production project has already drilled test wells to depths over 3,000 metres. 

Drilling that deep comes with its challenges but Canada is well positioned given the drilling expertise that already exists as part of the oil and gas industry and could be applied to geothermal.

The Fort Nelson First Nation is considering transforming a depleted gas field into a geothermal energy project. This idled Cabin gas plant is located northeast of Fort Nelson. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

The Achilles’ heel of geothermal is the financial risk of exploration. Just one test well for the Clarke Lake project is expected to cost around $12 million. While Natural Resources Canada gave Fort Nelson First Nation $1 million to assess the Clarke Lake resource last year, Ebell expects to face some funding challenges since the geothermal resource is not yet proven. 

“You have to risk money to drill holes and if you don’t find a good resource you’ve lost all that,” said Grasby, who’s hoping his team’s research in the Garibaldi Volcanic Belt will help reduce the risks of exploration.

The goal is to find new ways to better predict the location of those sought-after hot, permeable aquifers and in doing so encourage more industry investment in exploration.

“Geothermal won’t work everywhere, there are parts of Canada that we know are very low temperature and the thermal resources aren’t there, but in places that we do have the right temperatures, it could be a very good source of energy,” said Grasby — even if it’s just for the heat.

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New research released in April estimates the value of the global geothermal energy industry will grow to $9 billion by 2025, up from $4 billion in 2018.

While this growth is translating to geothermal heated greenhouses in the Netherlands, a zero-emissions power plant in Italy and geothermal chocolate bars in the Philippines, it hasn’t meant much for Canada — despite the country’s substantial documented potential.

Geothermal energy comes from natural heat in the earth’s crust. Steam from hot spots near volcanic ranges, such as those in B.C., can be used to spin turbines to generate electricity, while warm water from cooler areas can be used as direct energy to heat homes, melt snow or grow food in greenhouses, like the Icelanders do.

The form of renewable energy, which provides uninterrupted baseload energy as opposed to intermittent alternatives such as wind and solar that rely on the weather, seems an obvious choice for many provinces and territories looking to increase sources of electricity while also decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Thus far, Canada is the only country on the Ring of Fire, a tectonic zone where the earth’s heat is abundant, that doesn’t have a single commercial geothermal power plant in operation.

But there have been positive developments — from a small geothermal power plant in Saskatchewan to an aquaponics startup in the Yukon — that may be signalling a long-awaited change in tide.

Saskatchewan’s DEEP geothermal project poised to be Canada’s first

Advocates and supporters of geothermal energy across the country are watching construction of the DEEP project — Canada’s first geothermal power facility in the southern Prairies — with hopeful anticipation.

Located in southern Saskatchewan near the U.S. border, the DEEP project requires a well drilled down 3,500 metres and will generate approximately five megawatts of power from heat in the Williston Basin hot sedimentary aquifer.

The company estimates hundreds of megawatts of power could be developed in this basin with the drilling of additional wells.

“The DEEP project has stirred up a lot of excitement, people are asking questions that weren’t necessarily being asked before,” says Zach Harmer, policy director at the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CanGEA).

And the questions are important, because it’s a push-pull narrative between government policy and the public’s appetite for demanding change. “If you have the public on your side, chances are that politicians will want to be there,” he says.

DEEP geothermal drill rig. In December 2018, DEEP drilled the province’s deepest well, more than 3,000 metres deep, to harvest hot water. Photo: DEEP Corp.

And the DEEP project needed that political support. Initial exploratory work and feasibility studies cost the company $8 million — a substantial investment that was made worthwhile when the province’s utility provider SaskPower announced a power purchase agreement with the company that guaranteed a set price for the plant’s energy.

Jumping on the opportunity, the federal government announced $25.6 million in funding for the DEEP project earlier this year.

The project will power 5,000 homes a year while offsetting about 40,000 tonnes of carbon emissions, the equivalent of taking about 8,000 cars off the road, according to SaskPower. Wastewater from the project may also provide its own offshoot opportunity.

“There’s a huge business case for our wastewater,” DEEP CEO Marcia previously told The Narwhal.  

“The water that comes out of the plant is still 65 degrees Celsius, so it’s extremely hot still. We’ve done some modelling on what we can do with that: as it turns out, from just one of our plants, we could heat a 45-acre [18-hectare] greenhouse.”

Marcia has also previously suggested that heat could help grow a variety of products, including legal marijuana.

The company announced it successfully drilled its first well — the deepest in the province’s history — in December.

Beyond its position as Canada’s first geothermal plant, the story of the DEEP project in Saskatchewan holds promise for another reason: its heat resource was originally mapped by oil and gas developers.

Leveraging Canada’s oil and gas data for geothermal

Canada first expressed interest in geothermal during the energy crisis of the 1970s.

Steve Grasby, a geoscientist with the Geological Survey of Canada, who worked on mapping Canada’s geothermal potential between 1975 and 1985, said most of the data we have about the resource stems from that original research.

“It’s fairly simple to determine how windy or sunny a place is,” Grasby told The Narwhal, “but much harder to know what the temperature of the rocks are [four kilometres underground] and do they have enough fluid to produce to surface.”

Refining the target zones through more passive methods, or “desktop studies” as he calls them, is helping to reduce the uncertainty of investing in active exploration.

Continued research and observation over the years have added layers of information to help pinpoint locations, but in comparison to research on other renewable energy sources Grasby said “geothermal is certainly behind,” and drilling is still the only way to be 100 per cent sure.

A deep well to get the essential data for geothermal costs millions, Grasby says. That’s a huge barrier, but one that can be eliminated when looking for geothermal where oil and gas activity has already taken place.

Wellhead data from the hundreds of thousands of wells drilled across B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan includes temperature readings and has proven useful for estimating geothermal potential.

The Canadian Geothermal Association, for example, has identified more than 60,000 wells with bottom temperatures of more than 60 degrees Celsius. Of those wells, 7,702 have temperatures above 90 degrees, enough for heat exchange systems that can power refrigeration, and 500 showed temperatures above 120 degrees — hot enough for power generation.

As Alberta figures out what to do with its growing roster of unused wells, these legacy temperature readings provide the provincial regulator and energy companies with much needed information to determine where geothermal potential might underlie pre-existing oil and gas infrastructure.

That helps eliminate expensive risk, making geothermal projects much more attractive. This was the case for the town of Hinton, where some of these hotter wells are located. Last year the town received $1.2 million in federal and provincial funding to conduct a feasibility study of using geothermal for municipal heat and possibly electricity.

“In the renewable energy industry, we don’t have the privilege to have a well turn out to not be in the right area. It can be the make or break for a project,” CanGEA’s Harmer said.

This is also why getting government support and funding for “capacity-building projects” (shouldering some of the burden in drilling exploration so a community has enough funds to actually develop a power facility) is key.

Policy and tax incentives take shape, but hurdles remain

For many years, companies drilling for oil and gas across Canada were unable to drill for hot water. The permitting structure just wasn’t in place.

As far as policy goes, British Columbia and Saskatchewan are “at the forefront in Canada,” Harmer says; they’re the only provinces in Canada to have a formal framework that enables developers to drill explicitly for geothermal.

And it was just in 2017 that the federal government even acknowledged the existence of geothermal energy as a potential recipient of tax breaks and flow-through shares to help attract investment.

But even with a more lucrative tax structure, obstacles remain.

Geothermal energy is expensive, for starters, and requires a lot of capital investment up front. As a reliable, low-emission energy source with a small physical footprint, the gains of geothermal come over time, but perhaps not quickly enough to satisfy short-term political cycles.

More difficult, though, is a lack of appetite for energy from provincial utilities.

This, in part, accounts for an absence of geothermal power generation in B.C., where the resource is among the most promising in the country.

Geothermal “has not been competitive with other renewable resources because of its cost and exploration risk,” a spokesperson from the province’s ministry of energy, mines and petroleum resources told The Narwhal.

The ministry’s website touts the benefits of harnessing geothermal as “a source of clean, renewable energy with a small environmental footprint,” but is not expected to purchase electricity from alternative energy projects until after 2030, because of the construction of the Site C dam, which will add 1,100 megawatts of power to the provincial grid.

“Beyond 2030, additional conservation measures and geothermal, wind, solar and other clean, renewable resources can supply the electricity we need to support low-carbon electrification and achieve our climate targets,” the spokesperson said.

The Site C dam is expected to oversupply electricity to B.C.’s grid, pushing out wind and solar producers, while flooding 107 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries and displacing local residents who currently live in the dam’s flood zone.

This hasn’t stopped all geothermal activity in B.C., however. The town of Valemount is forging ahead with plans for a geothermal ecovillage that won’t rely on feeding power to the provincial grid and will instead generate power and direct heat for local businesses, including a brewery, greenhouses and a European-inspired spa.

Valemount’s geothermal project has survived despite a lack of support from the provincial utility, BC Hydro, which has put additional pressure on the local community partners and Borealis, the company spearheading the project, to stoke investor interest.

Borealis is using creative methods, such as aerial drone surveys, to keep exploratory drilling costs down.

Geothermal takes long-term vision

Those initial investments in drilling and building have long-term gains that will pay off financially, Harmer said, adding geothermal requires “an aged look at energy pricing.”

“If you look at the straight dollar per megawatt for geothermal energy, it’s expensive, but if you look at a levelized cost, then it is very comparable, even competitive with other forms of energy.”

But forging ahead with geothermal power may depend on the public demanding it, Harmer said. That also means getting a better sense of the role geothermal can play in areas other than energy production. Recently an agriculture company in the Yukon integrated direct geothermal heat from a local hot spring into its plans for an aquaponics greenhouse and tourist attraction.

“We need to see it as a viable solution.”

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Like many towns across Alberta, the landscape around Hinton is a pincushion of oil wells. At the bottom of some of the deeper wells, temperatures can reach upwards of 120 degrees Celsius, and that geothermal heat could be about to spur the town on to its next energy windfall.

A plan is underway to pump water up from deep underground, capture the heat it brings to the surface, then re-inject that water into the ground. The captured heat could warm a dozen municipal buildings or even eventually provide electricity.

“That’s attainable, that’s not a huge technical challenge. The question is at what cost,” Jonathan Banks, a research associate in geoscience at the University of Alberta, told DeSmog Canada.

The town recently got $1.2 million in federal and provincial grants to explore the feasibility of the project, known as a Front-End Engineering and Design, or FEED, study. That should be complete by the end of the summer.

“If the FEED study shows that the project is viable…we could start building the system in the fall of 2018,” Banks says, cautioning that there are a number of unknowns, such as an uncertain regulatory process.

Like many Canadian jurisdictions, Alberta currently has no regulatory framework for geothermal power.

The project would be a first for Canada. That has led to apprehension among residents, who tend to be conservative in their approach to energy.

“There’s always insecurity when you’re building something for the first time,” explains newly elected town councillor Dewly Nelson.

Hinton, Alberta Goes Back to the Well — For a New Kind of Energy https://t.co/t3zkq1XlQd

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) March 20, 2018

Nelson himself started as a critic of the project. Working for the Chamber of Commerce — some of whose members were concerned about the town wasting money — he set about trying to research the project.

“I came up with a little different of an answer than I think people were hoping for,” he says. He now chairs a committee on alternative energy in the community.

“I’m a bit of an evangelist,” he laughs.

A 2016 preliminary study suggested that the cost of a geothermal heating system for the town could be recouped in about 16 years against business-as-usual heating costs.

Nelson concedes the number “could be a little optimistic” at $10.2 million due to the number of hurdles associated with it being the first of its kind.

But he maintains that the benefits of the project extend beyond the lifetime cost (despite insisting that, as a municipal project, for it to be recouping any revenue at all is a plus). He says the spinoff benefits could be in new businesses setting up shop in Hinton due to the cheap, long-term heating contracts the town would be able to provide.

“I think we’ll be surprised at some of the different uses that other people think of,” he says, offering as an example a greenhouse for the fledgling cannabis market. He also points to Boise, Idaho, which uses its similar system to heat an alligator farm.

In Klamath Falls, Oregon, a brewery makes use of the heat. The town’s partner in the project, Calgary-based Epoch Energy, has visited some of those sites to survey their systems.

“Seeing it as a tool for diversifying our economy, that’s the biggest winner for it,” Nelson says.

Two hours away on the other side of the B.C. border, Valemount is also looking at building a “geothermal industrial park” that would make use of a relatively accessible pocket of heat they suspect to be just underneath the town. That could produce electricity, heat water for a brewery, warm a greenhouse and even keep the sidewalks ice-free.

Nelson explains that the American projects also have other lessons to offer Hinton: they charge differently for the use of the power. In Klamath Falls, users are charged directly for the heat. In Boise, users are charged by the volume of water they use, encouraging innovation around efficiency.

Winning over skeptical residents, both Nelson and Banks agree, has been a process of continual engagement and education.

“It doesn’t take a lot to connect with people, and just plant that seed,” Nelson says.

A big part of why Nelson thinks the oil-friendly residents should welcome geothermal to town? It all runs on the same infrastructure and knowledge as the oil and gas industry, making it an excellent way to make use of existing oilfields and some of the workers who have been hit by low oil prices.

“If it ever really takes off on a large scale in Canada, it will be because of oil and gas,” he says.

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B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver went from being B.C.’s solitary Green MLA in 2013 to holding the balance of power in the province’s current minority government.

While the transition has had its ups and downs for the climate scientist, public scrutiny of Weaver’s position and what he ought to do with his influence in government hit an all-time high recently with government’s decision to forge ahead with the controversial Site C dam.

We caught up with Weaver at his office in the legislature to ask him to reflect on the last seven months of cooperation with the NDP government and what he anticipates 2018 holds for some of B.C.’s most pressing energy and environment concerns.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

1) It’s been seven months since you signed a confidence and supply agreement with the NDP. Has that arrangement unfolded as you expected?

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. I went into this agreement very skeptical about our ability to work with the NDP…[but] we recognized that what was critical for us was that we wanted to give people change. We put together this agreement that gave British Columbians certainty, articulated some key values both parties shared…When we started our negotiations it was pretty tense. When we ended it we ended up really getting to know each other and it was quite positive.

It wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t a general willingness of both parties to put the interest of British Columbians first. There are areas where we disagree, like Site C dam — an obvious one. But in the end we agree to disagree and we understand that’s healthy. We can disagree and move on. It doesn’t mean we have to throw a hissy fit and make government fall.

2) It’s been a raucous time environmentally for this province. There have been some notable highs and lows. What are you most proud of?

One of the things I felt was a deal breaker for me in the negotiations [with the NDP] was climate policy and we all know underpinning any climate mitigation policy is increasing carbon pricing. To me it was a big victory that we had an increase in carbon price of $5 a year, starting in the April budget for four years … which will take us ahead of Trudeau’s target. So we have both leadership and certainty. To me that was a high point.

There were some other good things: we had a ban on grizzly hunting. I know it’s a bit populist and I know there were some people who are concerned because it wasn’t science based and we’ve been advocating for a science-based approach to ecosystem management…but dealing with grizzlies was a good thing.

3) What has emerged as a memorable low point?

Site C.

In addition, we still haven’t seen any action on fish farms. That to me is a critical one and we’re hoping to see something in the spring on that as these tenures come to. We’ll be pressuring government to take a hard look at the renewal of those tenures because they’re on the record saying they’re going to get fish [farms] out of the migratory path of sockeye.

The biggest issue that we’re working on right now is restructuring the professional reliance model to get industry out of the business of policing themselves.

We have a model where industry hires professional consultants to provide the underlying evidence that a proponent of a project will send into the environmental assessment process. We have a problem there.

We’re tackling that. We’ve got that public consultation process going on now. We’re hoping to see some movement going forward in that area.

The [example of professional reliance] that is most personal and relevant and local is of course the Shawnigan case.

The Shawnigan residents believed and frankly rightly so that government was abdicating its role to actually look out for the betterment of all people and letting industry in some sense police itself. So in that particular case we know the professional reliance engineering group were actually partners in the project and there was some conflict there and that’s all before the courts now.

Another example is Mount Polley. Again, when government is not there enforcing compliance and ensuring regulations are met and ensuring public oversight of these projects, things happen and the public loses trust.

Two other projects that stand out are Kinder Morgan and the Ajax mine.

4) On the subject of the Ajax mine, government recently announced it would not issue permits for that project but was cautious to say the decision was not the result of Indigenous veto. What do you make of this government’s promise to uphold Indigenous rights in this province?

We campaigned on this. We would introduce a Natural Resources Board and part of that board’s process would be to ensure when you’re doing an environmental assessment the process is actually modified through legislation to include assessments based on Indigenous values.

We know from the Tsilhqot’in case there are substantive issues with ignoring the wishes of First Nations. So our process would have involved changing the environmental assessment process to ensure as part of that process Indigenous input is there. Not in terms of a veto, and Indigenous peoples don’t talk in terms of a veto either, but in terms of ensuring their collective wisdom is looked at. It’s not that difficult to do: you have an environmental assessment process, you just need to expand the mandate of that but you also have to bring the actual collection of information and oversight into government too so you’re not letting industry choose which First Nation to consult. You’d have a Natural Resources Board that would have a broader oversight that would actually ensure any assessment process went through a process that had indigenous involvement as well.

It’s not easy but it’s what we need to do.

5) We recently put together a list of resource projects that got it right in 2017. What would you put on that list?

The Valemount geothermal project.

I spent ages pushing that project from the inside because there was an MOU sitting on the minister’s desk, waiting and waiting and waiting. All it needed was to get signed but BC Hydro didn’t want the power. So now they’ve got the exploration permit to get going … but it’s not only the Borealis project in Valemount, it’s also Glacier Destinations, which is a ski resort that’s going to happen there. It’s the exact opposite of Jumbo: the First Nations and the town went together to the architects of the Jumbo resort and said ‘we want this.’ And you have community support for geothermal.

Everybody wins.

6) Do you think more small-scale, local energy projects are in store for B.C.?

It’s the way of the future. It’s not only the way of the future, it’s the reason I got into politics.

When you build distributed renewable energy resources you’re putting them in small communities all across B.C. in partnership with First Nations, you’re getting these First Nations off diesel, you’re bringing long-term stable jobs into the communities. You’re not just building construction projects with no jobs at the end. There are so many examples whether in Tofino, Port Alberni, Lytton, where there have been very successful small-scale hydro projects done in partnership with First Nations.

We know right now there’s proposals for solar in Cranbrook, hopefully Borealis geothermal, wind projects all over the place and pumped storage. They’re all ready to go but in B.C. there’s only one purchaser of power: BC Hydro.  So none of them can go ahead unless BC Hydro says we will take that power from you but BC Hydro is building Site C and Site C is taking up any increase in demand for the foreseeable future.

7) What impact do you expect the approval of Site C to have on the renewable energy industry in B.C.?

A few days ago I received an e-mail from a CEO of a renewable energy company that is B.C.-based and they’re essentially saying Site C has killed their industry.

It’s not only him — I’ve heard that time and time again, that people have come to B.C. to invest in the renewable energy potential here and now they feel they have been thrown under the bus. There’s a reason the Canadian Wind Energy Association left B.C., went to Alberta and look what we see: 600 MW of power coming in at 3.7 cents per kilowatt hour. That’s the opportunity we lost.

8) You know a lot of people said the Site C decision should have been the moment the Green party used its position to bring down government. Did you consider that decision and why?

Not for a second.

Even before the decision I let people know that we’re not going to make government fall over whatever decision they made.

The question I would ask people is how would that have changed the outcome? If we caused government to fall on a vote … a budget amendment or confidence vote … government would fall, there would be an election probably by May or June and we’d have spent another $1 billion on Site C.

So what’s the possible results we could get? A majority Liberal government — Site C goes forward. Majority NDP government — Site C goes forward. Minority government — we’re back at the negotiating table.

The reason we didn’t put it in the confidence agreement is that’s not how you develop partnerships. You don’t put a gun to someone’s head … we accepted the NDP’s argument that we would send this to the BCUC. We were comfortable with that because we knew what the BCUC would say. We were delighted with that report. They had everything they needed to cancel it.

9) You’ve said before that with the approval of Site C your party will push for a greater electrification of B.C.’s systems. Is that something you’ll be turning your attention toward in 2018?

We’re already pushing for the introduction of an aggressive zero emission vehicle standard. We need BC Hydro to step up and start to bring in the infrastructure for electric. We need to change legislation and regulatory structure in B.C. to allow people to charge for power in charging stations.

Industry wants to invest in charging stations but they can’t sell the power unless they’re a utility. It starts to become bureaucratic. We will push for electrification. What else can we do?

10) Energy and environment issues are quickly evolving from transitions in energy markets to evolving perspectives on Indigenous rights. One industry that has been affected by these changes is the LNG industry. What is your take on LNG for 2018?

If B.C. starts to focus again on trying to land an LNG industry given all that has happened, I can tell you I am voting government down. I am not standing by no matter when it happens. I am not standing by and watching us give away the farm yet again to land an industry we’re not competitive in. That’s my line in the sand.

LNG is gone because we know global markets, China is over supplied in their contracts. For some time there is no supply gap that needs to be filled.

This is the opportunity to capitalize on the new economy. Given our stable democracy in unstable times, given our access to clean energy and businesses around the world that want to label themselves clean, if we go down this LNG path and start to sign sweet deals again then we might as well have the BC Liberals back in power.

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Being an environmental journalist at this point in history can be a bit, well, depressing. It often means bringing negative stories to light: stories about government failing to balance development with environmental protection, or about companies getting away with harmful practices, or about Indigenous peoples’ rights being set aside in the name of progress.

But it’s not all bad news out there.

And DeSmog Canada wants to celebrate those people and organizations that go out of their way to do development right — those that build their plans around meaningful consultation with Indigenous peoples, minimize environmental harms even at a cost to their business and raise the bar for their industries.

We’ve gathered a list of some of the projects we want to fist-bump this year. We’re not suggesting they’re perfect; any large extractive project comes with an environmental cost. But these are projects that rise above the rest in their efforts to minimize that cost.

The Displacer

Rivers Inlet Run-of-River Hydro Project

High on a hillside above the rusting diesel tanks of Rivers Inlet, a new project is coming to life that will render them obsolete. A run-of-river hydro plant is going to displace most of the community’s diesel use starting in the new year, bringing clean and renewable energy to a remote corner of the province.

But it’s not just the technology that puts this project on our list. This indigenous-led project was planned from the beginning with the local wildlife in mind. The entire system is above the highest point salmon reach in that stream, meaning spawning habitat is not affected.

The road was built in consultation with grizzly expert Megan Adams, who recommended a winding road with lots of escape routes to minimize human-bear contact. And throughout the project’s planning and construction, Wuikinuxv elders and community members were involved and employed by the proponent, the Barkley Project Group.

The Redeemer

‘Namgis-Owned Land-Based Salmon Farm

Fish farming has been one of the hot-button issues on the West Coast for more than a decade. First Nations, environmental groups and other concerned residents are resisting the industry, citing fears over the farms’ effects on wild fish stocks. Specifically, open-pen farms are regarded as being dangerous for their ability to pass diseases to wild fish.

One way around that problem is to isolate the fish in land-based tanks, preventing contact between the farmed Atlantic salmon and their wild Pacific cousins — and that’s exactly the approach taken by the ‘Namgis First Nation-owned Kuterra.

The farm even makes use of geothermal energy to heat the tanks. It’s an expensive way to farm fish, more suited to raising smolts than adult fish, and the company has been hard pressed to turn a profit thus far. But as a way to minimize the known and potential harms of fish farming, this is one way to shake up an industry in need of new ideas.

The Electrifier

Borden Gold

Even with electric vehicles poised to define commuting in the next decade, it still seems ambitious to imagine that the heavy machinery of a mine would be next. But Goldcorp is aiming to electrify an entire mine with its new Borden Gold project southwest of Timmins, Ontario. It wants the underground mine to be all-electric by 2021 — a Canadian first.

The mine will use an electricity and battery-powered underground fleet, which is expected to eliminate all emissions associated with moving ore and waste rock. Bonus: with less diesel fumes kicking around, the Borden Mine will require 50 per cent less ventilation than a regular underground mine.

This means Goldcorp expects to cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than half and eliminate three million litres of diesel fuel, one million litres of propane and 35,000 megawatt hours of electricity every year.

While mining for gold is not essential, mining for other minerals is important for a renewable energy economy and Borden will hopefully set an example for others.

The Transformer

Kimberley’s SunMine

Over the decades, the site of Teck’s (formerly Cominco’s) Sullivan Mine in Kimberley, B.C., hosted a steel mill, fertilizer plant and tailings ponds, rendering the area tree-less for the forseeable future. What to do with an elevated, south-facing slope that could never again see natural shade? Why, build B.C.’s largest solar farm, of course.

With land and capital contributions from Teck, the Province of B.C. Innovative Clean Energy Fund and a $2 million loan to the City of Kimberley approved by 76 per cent of voters, Kimberley’s SunMine project was a no-brainer.

When it started generating electricity in 2015, it became the first solar project in B.C. to sell power directly into BC Hydro’s power grid.

At peak operation, SunMine powers an estimated 200 Kimberley homes, and can generate nearly $250,000 annually in revenue to help repay the initial loan, cover operating costs and, hopefully, expand the project in the future.

Image: SunMine solar array. Photo: City of Kimberley

The Foresters

Cortes Island community forestry project

If managed properly, forests can provide sustainable income for a community while not sacrificing their ecological values. It’s a delicate balance, but one that’s being tried out on Cortes Island, near Campbell River, B.C.

In 2011, the island’s First Nation and non-First Nation communities came together to co-manage their forests for their mutual benefit. Together, they control licences that make up about a third of the island, sharing the proceeds equally between the Klahoose First Nation and the Cortes Community Forest Co-operative.

In contrast to a normal corporate forestry operation, the partnership’s values voluntarily include preservation of the forest ecosystem, the development of recreational trails and protecting biodiversity and aesthetic values — and all the money it makes remains in the community. Even some of the logs stay on the island; the partnership reports that most of the local construction and carpentry companies are making use of its wood.

The Geyser

Valemount, B.C’s Geothermal Project

The town of Valemount, B.C., is sitting on an endless supply of heat and power — and it’s in the final stages of doing something about it. The town has been working on a plan for years that would allow it to first develop a hot spring, then develop a community geothermal plant to meet the town’s existing energy needs and, eventually, use that energy and heat for other uses as well, like heating a greenhouse, brewing beer or melting ice on the streets.

“It has the potential for being a really ticketable showcase to show the world what can be done with geothermal,” owner of the local Three Ranges brewery Michael Lewis told DeSmog Canada in 2016.

So far, the project’s proponent, Borealis Geopower, has secured rights to develop geothermal in Valemount but has yet to receive drilling permits. Exploratory drilling is the next step Borealis will take to identify just how hot the geothermal potential is beneath the town. But if Valemount’s local hot spots are any indication, there’s likely a wealth of clean, sustainable and cheap energy just below the surface.

We’re on the look out for trail-breaking projects to profile. Know of one? Please tell us about it in the comments below!

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As many countries move away from big hydro projects, B.C.’s government must decide whether to continue work on the Site C dam. The controversial megaproject would flood a 100-kilometre stretch of the Peace River Valley and provide enough power for the equivalent of about 500,000 homes.

The B.C. Utilities Commission, an independent body responsible for ensuring British Columbians pay fair energy rates, found the dam is likely behind schedule and over budget, with completion costs estimated at more than $10 billion. In a “high impact” scenario, it may go over budget by as much as 50 per cent.

ICYMI: Site C Dam $600 Million Over Budget, Will Miss River Diversion Timeline, Says BC Hydro CEO

The dam has faced court challenges and political actions by Treaty 8 First Nations and farmers whose land would be flooded. Treaty 8 First Nations stand to lose hunting and fishing grounds, burial sites and other areas vital to their culture and sustenance. West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations demonstrated the devastating environmental impacts Site C will have.

The Peace Valley’s land and waters are an integral part of First Nations’ identity, stories, songs and language. An open letter opposing the project, signed by 27 people and groups, including Amnesty International, says the project betrays Canada’s commitment under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Consent from affected Indigenous Peoples is required for developments such as megadams, yet the West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations did not give consent.

BC Hydro’s economic analysis also ignored ecosystems and the benefits they provide. The David Suzuki Foundation estimates ecosystem services from farmland, wetland and other natural capital in the Peace watershed are conservatively worth $7.9 billion to $8.6 billion a year. Services that sustain the health and well-being of local communities include air and water filtration, erosion control, recreational services and wildlife habitat.

The replacement value of what will be lost by flooding far exceeds the dam’s economic returns. Failure to account for the loss of ecosystem services puts us on a destructive course and undervalues natural capital in regulatory decisions.

Alternative energy sources such as wind, solar and geothermal, leveraging existing projects and prioritizing localized generation could be as good — or better — for B.C. ratepayers as the megadam. Alternative energy has the advantage of being able to be timed for when it’s needed.

ICYMI: Geothermal Would Create 15 Times More Permanent Jobs Than Site C, Panel Told As BCUC Hearings Draw to Close

Additional generation capacity may not even be necessary because BC Hydro currently exports or sells a significant amount of power, often at a loss, outside the province.

Serious concerns are also being raised about production and release of methylmercury from soil. When land is flooded, naturally occurring soil bacteria can convert mercury to methylmercury, a toxic compound that can move up the food chain and potentially harm human health. Modelling projections for Muskrat Falls dam on the lower Churchill River indicate flooding likely will increase methylmercury 10-fold in the dammed river and 2.6-fold in surface waters downstream. Methylmercury concerns loom at 22 major dams now proposed or under construction close to Indigenous communities in Canada, including Site C.

The area to be flooded is some of the North’s most arable farmland. Agrologist Wendy Holm estimates this breadbasket can feed a million people in the region, an important feature as climate change alters growing seasons and demands more local food systems.

ICYMI: B.C. Taxpayers Paid Millions for the Prime Farmland BC Hydro Will Flood with Site C Dam

Dams now supply about three-fifths of Canada’s electricity. A long-held belief that big hydro projects are the most economically sustainable energy options is fast losing support as renewable energy costs plummet and projects multiply worldwide. The Peace Valley has an incredible ability to generate natural wealth if protected from development. The alternative is ecological fragmentation.

Economic scrutiny of Site C was long overdue but only answers some questions about hydro megaprojects. We can’t elevate the economy above what we need to survive. Humans are now the primary factor altering the physical, chemical and biological properties of the planet on a geological scale. Building more megadams epitomizes the folly of our ways.

The Site C dam should never have been approved. Continuing construction is bad public policy, and it’s not too late to halt it. Canada must join other nations and stop the destructive, unnecessary practice of damming major rivers and running roughshod over Indigenous rights and title. Lower impact renewable energy, like wind, solar and geothermal, look better every day.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Communications Specialist Theresa Beer.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

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A highly anticipated review of B.C.’s Site C dam has found the project is likely to be over budget and behind schedule and alternative energy sources could be built for an equal or lower unit energy cost.

The report from the B.C. Utilities Commission released Wednesday confirmed many of the concerns that have been raised about the project for years.

The panel found BC Hydro’s mid-load forecast for electricity demand in B.C. “excessively optimistic” and noted there are risks that could result in demand being less than even BC Hydro’s lowest demand scenario.

The panel was “not persuaded that the Site C project will remain on schedule” and found “the project is not within the proposed budget of $8.335 billion.”

Currently, completion costs may be in excess of $10 billion, the report read.

The panel concluded it would be too costly to suspend the dam and potentially re-start construction later and focused its efforts on laying out in detail the consequences of either abandoning or completing the dam. The decision now rests with the B.C. government.

Site C, the third dam on the Peace River, has been controversial for many reasons — but perhaps most of all because the project was exempted from review by the province’s independent utility regulator, the B.C. Utilities Commission.

After coming to power this July, B.C.’s new NDP government immediately sent Site C — which has been under construction for two years — for an expedited review by the commission.

The commission considered 620 written submissions and 304 oral submissions from experts and members of the public in preparing its report.

Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources Michelle Mungall said the government plans on making a final decision on the project by the end of the year.

“Now it is our turn, as government, to determine whether Site C is in the best interests of British Columbians, after considering the BCUC’s findings and other issues outside the scope of this review,” Mungall said in a statement.

“This will be an extremely difficult decision. We inherited a project that was advanced by the previous government without proper regulatory oversight, is now more than two years into construction, employs more than 2,000 people, and on which about $2 billion has already been spent.”

The government will meet with First Nations before making a decision, Mungall said.

Energy analyst Robert McCullough, working on behalf of the Peace Valley Landowner Association, said he believes the BCUC report spells the beginning of the end for Site C.

He called the report “courageous” because it basically rejects every part of BC Hydro’s submission, McCullough said.

Site C Dam Over Budget, Behind Schedule and Could be Replaced by Alternatives: BCUC Report https://t.co/u1Mh7hGwVv #SiteC #Hydro #bcpoli pic.twitter.com/9aycFzvRWg

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 1, 2017

Faulty Demand Forecasting Used to Justify Site C

The panel’s report finds BC Hydro has continued a historical pattern of over-forecasting electricity demand and notes the accuracy of BC Hydro’s industrial forecasts has been “considerably below industry benchmarks.”

The failure of an LNG export industry to materialize in B.C. has significantly reduced the likelihood that BC Hydro’s load forecasts will be accurate, the panel found.

The panel also found BC Hydro failed to accurately account for the impact that rising electricity costs have on consumption.

Additionally, given current low market prices and the likelihood of increasing supply, the panel found that BC Hydro’s proposed export price forecast “should not be relied upon.”

An independent analysis provided to the BCUC by the auditing firm Deloitte found between 1964 and 2016, BC Hydro overestimated future electricity demand in B.C. 77 per cent of the time.

The panel’s critique of BC Hydro’s demand forecasting falls in line with the analyses and opinions of numerous experts who have pointed out the crown corporation’s long history of inaccurate forecasting and the potential for costly oversupply.

Alternative Energy “Increasingly Viable,” Panel Finds

The panel critiqued BC Hydro’s modelling of alternatives as unreliable, saying it is “opaque in its assumptions” and uses out-of-date cost estimates for wind and solar.

The panel stated it found a pairing of alternative energy sources and conservation efforts “increasingly viable” at an equal or lower cost than Site C

During two days of technical briefings by experts, the panel heard BC Hydro consistently ignored or over-inflated the costs of wind, solar and geothermal.

In a submission prepared for the BCUC, North American hydroelectric expert Robert McCullough noted the price of renewables has dropped dramatically since 2010, when the Site C project was resuscitated by the B.C. government. During the last seven years the price of solar dropped 74 per cent, while wind dropped 65 per cent.

In August, BC Hydro submitted to the BCUC that it had screened out solar energy on the basis of a cost estimate in 2025 of $97/MWh. In response to a follow-up question from the commission, BC Hydro provided updated cost estimates of $48/MWh.

Marc Lee, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, is calling for a public inquiry into how BC Hydro and the former Liberal government made the case for the project.

“It’s amazing. I would like to see a full inquiry to investigate how BC Hydro executives and the previous government essentially conspired to manufacture the case for Site C,” Lee said.

“As someone who strongly believes in public sector institutions and Crown corporations, to have our electricity utility lying to us, making up numbers and doing all sorts of spurious comparisons between its preferred option and the alternative is shameful,” he said.

ICYMI: Geothermal Would Create 15 Times More Permanent Jobs Than Site C, Panel Told

The panel developed its own model for assessing Site C alternatives and found “it is possible to design an alternative portfolio of commercially feasible generating projects and demand-side management initiatives that could provide similar benefits to ratepayers as Site C.”

Further still, the panel found B.C. could pursue alternative energy and swallow the estimated $1.8 billion cost of terminating Site C and still end up with overall electricity costs comparable to building Site C.

The advantage of alternative energy, the panel states, is its incremental nature.

Combining energy conservation efforts with “smaller scale renewable projects provides flexibility to better match generation with demand.”

Conservation programs and smaller scale projects built by independent power producers “have project completion times in the range of months to a few years, and each project (or energy contract if it is contracted through an IPP) is much lower in price than Site C,” the panel found.

Site C Behind Schedule and Over Budget

Construction of Site C has been plagued with costly setbacks, the most significant of which occurred with the appearance of tension cracks along the left bank of the Peace River.

In October, the new CEO of BC Hydro, Chris O’Riley, wrote a letter to the BCUC, acknowledging the crown corporation would not meet its own timeline for river diversion due to “geotechnical and construction challenges” — a setback that would add an additional $610 million to the project’s budget.

An independent audit conducted by the firm Deliotte on behalf of the BCUC also identified the risk of construction setbacks inflating the Site C budget.

DeSmog Canada first reported on June 30, 2016, that the Site C dam was behind schedule and over budget. Documents obtained via Freedom of Information legislation later revealed a co-ordinated attempt by BC Hydro and Premier Christy Clark’s Office to discredit the story.

Because Site C is in the early stages of construction and due to “the lack of certainty” around persistent geotechnical issues, “the additional $610 million may just be the first in what could be a continuing series of additional risk events occurring, resulting in further cost overruns,” the panel stated.

Infringement of Treaty 8 Rights Still a Question

In addition to cost overruns from construction delays, the panel found unresolved questions regarding the infringement of Treaty 8 First Nations’ rights could further add to Site C costs.

The West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations maintain the Site C dam represents an infringement of their rights guaranteed under Treaty 8. Although the two nations have brought and lost legal challenges in B.C. courts, the question of rights infringement is far from settled, the panel found.

“The courts have addressed administrative law issues including the Crown’s duty to consult but have not addressed whether the Crown, by approving Site C has unjustifiably infringed the Treaty 8 rights. West Moberly and Prophet River First Nations submit that the Crown bears the risk that in the event a lawsuit is commenced, the court will find in favour of Treaty 8 First Nations.”

Under Treaty 8, the government of Canada promised to guarantee the rights of local First Nations to hunt, trap, fish and continue their traditional way of life on their land.

The option remains for Treaty 8 nations to file a civil case for damages caused by Site C, a possibility the panel considered.

The panel also noted the protection of Indigenous rights and reconciliation were present as a “major sub-theme” in its community input sessions.

“The termination of Site C would be interpreted as a positive and meaningful step in the reconciliation process for those First Nations who did not reach an agreement with BC Hydro,” the panel stated in its report.

So what now?

The panel’s alternative portfolio indicated that under the low-load forecast, new power supply wouldn’t be needed until 2039 and could be met by the addition of 444 MW of wind and demand-side management initiatives, such as increased energy efficiency and optional time-of-use rates.

“The cost to ratepayers of Site C and the Illustrative Alternative Portfolio are virtually equivalent,” the panel states.

But, regardless of the comparative costs, there are other issues to consider when comparing the completion and termination cases, the panel notes.

“Both scenarios involve risk that is not easy to quantify. The major risk of Site C in the short term is whether there will be further construction cost overruns. Site C is a major construction project and therefore inherently at risk of larger cost overruns than a smaller project. It has already exceeded its budget, only two years into a nine-year schedule. There are tension cracks and disputes with its contractors both of which remain unresolved,” the report reads.

B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver said he was encouraged by the report’s finding about alternative energy sources.

“I have long argued that the plummeting cost of alternative renewables makes Site C the unequivocal wrong direction for B.C.’s energy future,” Weaver said in a statement. “Supporting the development of smaller renewable projects presents a significant economic opportunity for all corners of British Columbia.”

It will take leadership to cancel Site C, but it is the right decision, according to Weaver.

“It is unconscionable that the BC Liberals demonstrated such reckless disregard for British Columbians and for sound fiscal management by pushing through such a substantial megaproject without proper due diligence and oversight,” he said.

The panel also notes that there are other ways to meet future energy needs that include changes to government policy. These include re-patriating some or all of the Columbia River Treaty entitlement.

“This energy is generated from water stored behind BC Hydro dams in British Columbia and is as firm and flexible as the energy from Site C,” the panel notes.

Ultimately though, the panel doesn’t take a position on which of the termination or completion scenarios has the greatest cost to ratepayers.

Galen Armstrong, Peace Valley campaigner with the Sierra Club BC, said the case for Site C fell apart “at the hands of BC Utilities Commission.”

“The government is faced with two options: continue with an unnecessary boondoggle, leaving taxpayers and ratepayers on the hook for decades to come, or pivot to a lower-cost alternative energy portfolio including wind and geothermal that would provide jobs for British Columbians at a lower cost,” Armstrong said.

Update Notice: This story was updated at 5:30 p.m. to include additional comment.

– With files from Judith Lavoie

Image: Site C dam construction September 2016. Photo: Garth Lenz | DeSmog Canada

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Opportunities provided by 21st century renewables, such as geothermal, wind and solar, have either been ignored or the costs over-inflated in BC Hydro documents justifying construction of the Site C dam, the B.C. Utilities Commission Site C Panel was told by presenters during two days of technical briefings.

Speaker after speaker pinpointed holes and inaccuracies in BC Hydro’s math, claiming the bottom line was skewed in favour of building the $8.8-billion dollar dam on the Peace River.

Geothermal power projects are thriving in Oregon and Idaho and the geology does not instantly change at the B.C. border, said Alison Thompson, chair of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CanGEA), pointing to the number of hot springs and drilled natural gas wells in the province, which indicate the presence of geothermal resources.

“So, how much has BC Hydro spent in the last 15 years in exploratory drilling for geothermal resources?” she asked.

“We believe this number to be zero.”

BC Hydro has said none of the calls for independent power projects produced viable geothermal proposals.

ICYMI: Canada Has Enormous Geothermal Potential. Why Aren’t We Using it?

“This perplexes us when we hear in a submission that the exploration to date has not identified any viable geothermal resources. We refute that and think that there is, in fact, remarkable potential for geothermal development in our province.”

CanGEA mapping indicates there are about 5,000 megawatts of geothermal in B.C., and, if time and money was put into exploration, there could be more, Thompson said. The Site C dam is projected to have about a fifth of that capacity, at 1,100 megawatts.

Thompson questioned Geoscience B.C. figures that formed the basis of BC Hydro’s cost estimates, and said she “absolutely refutes the numbers that they were coming up with for exploration.”

Geoscience B.C. used out-dated technology, looking at large diameter wells, instead of more cost effective slim wells used in modern exploration. Doing so bumps up the estimated cost of a 2.5 kilometre well to $12-million, when the cost of a slim well would be $2-million to $4-million, according to Thompson, who also predicted that, based on U.S. figures, 660 megawatts of geothermal would result in 1,122 permanent jobs ­— about 15 times more than Site C would provide.

#Geothermal Would Create 15 Times More Permanent Jobs Than Site #C, Panel Told As BCUC Hearings Complete https://t.co/EOve99S3jC #bcpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 17, 2017

BC Hydro ‘Biased The Analysis’ With Skewed Assumptions: Energy Expert

The story was similar when John Dalton, president of the energy management consulting firm Power Advisory LLC, spoke on behalf of the Canadian Wind Energy Association and Clean Energy Association of B.C., and pointed to BC Hydro’s habit of over-estimating demand for electricity — against a backdrop of a decline in energy consumption across North America — while simultaneously over-estimating the cost of alternative power.

“BC Hydro has employed a series of assumptions which have biased the analysis results against alternatives to Site C,” Dalton told the panel. “Collectively the effect of these biases is to ensure that alternative portfolios offer a cost that is significantly higher than Site C.”

BC Hydro considered only wind and pumped storage as possible alternative power sources and failed to consider geothermal, solar, biomass and battery storage, Dalton said.

ICYMI: Falling Costs of Renewable Power Make Site C Dam Obsolete, Says Energy Economist

And the estimated cost of integrating wind power was wrong, Dalton told the panel, adding that BC Hydro does not appear to have done any analysis of integration possibilities.

“BC Hydro adds a $5-megawatt hour wind integration cost, while also including $48-megawatt hour for pumped storage, which can assist with integration. Considering both costs is double counting,” he said.

BC Hydro’s accounting came under further scrutiny from energy consultant Robert McCullough, speaking for the Peace Valley Landowner Association and Peace Valley Environment Association.

ICYMI: Terminating Site C Dam, Building Alternatives Could Save B.C. Over $1B: Economist

“If we believe that British Columbia cannot build a wind farm for the same price that Governor Inslee in Washington can, there’s something wrong — with the same culture, the same level of expertise, the same workers, the same terrain,” he said.

Marc Eliesen, former CEO of BC Hydro, focused on BC Hydro’s mismanagement of the project, with cost overruns already on the horizon.

In August, BC Hydro president Chris O’Riley told the commission that Site C was on time and on budget, but, earlier this month, the story changed. Geotechnical and construction problems and a year’s delay in the river diversion, will mean an additional $610 million on the bill, he said.

“BC Hydro’s current and continued project mismanagement can only lead to a conclusion that the project will reach $12 billion before it is complete,” Eliesen said.

“BC Hydro’s efforts to reach a point of no return for this project have added costs to the project which have not yet been properly identified or calculated and would not have been incurred if BC Hydro had been working toward the publicly announced plan.”

However, O’Riley, one of a team of BC Hydro spokesmen at the technical briefings, said Site C offers the best deal for British Columbians and, if the project is terminated, ratepayers will pay $3.2 billion, with nothing to show for it.

The BCUC panel will make a recommendation to government on the future of Site C on Nov. 1 and it will then be up to cabinet to make a decision.

Image: geothermal. Photo: National Renewable Energy Lab via Flickr

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B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver was never a big fan of LNG, he says, because he never thought the BC Liberal plan for a multi-billion domestic natural gas export industry was even possible. But that was the past: when it comes to the future of clean energy in British Columbia, what is possible?

In the following interview with journalist Christopher Pollon, the climate scientist turned politician expounds on LNG, Site C, and the imminent arrival of energy alternatives like geothermal, “pumped storage” hydro and more.

Weaver conducted this interview via speakerphone as he drove a broken microwave oven to a Victoria-area depot for recycling. Being Green, it seems, is a full-time gig.

Christopher Pollon: Is the dream of a big Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) export industry dead in B.C.?

Andrew Weaver: Yes, at least for the foreseeable future. It was absolutely irresponsible of the B.C. government to raise the expectations of people in the north. People in B.C. made changes in their lives, and in the process, the BC Liberals created an artificial divide between urban and rural in B.C.  

Meanwhile there’s a global market glut, landed contracts in Asia are five bucks and change, and China was supposed to be a market but is now a seller in the market because they are oversupplied. The idea that there was going to be a big mega project like Petronas [Pacific Northwest LNG], was nothing but a pipe dream. 

The real question is, what are we going to do with our resource? 

Bloomberg has forecasted that by around 2024, Asian prices will improve and the global glut could disappear. For the couple of LNG projects holding on, is this a matter of waiting that out, or by 2024 will these projects be obsolete?

We are in the middle of an energy revolution like we’ve never seen before, [so] to think that somehow we are going to continue to produce energy the way we were, is a bit of a myth. 

There are so many unknowns. With LNG, we don’t know [the impact] of the Iranian [natural gas] supplies, the world’s largest reserves, or what Russian supply is going to do.

We also know that the Paris Accord is a game changer. If the world leaders actually want to live up to what they signed, we are on a transitional path away from fossil fuel use…there can be no new investment in fossil fuels infrastructure, and any new investment in energy infrastructure should be transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewables. 

So I’m not clear there’s even going to be a [LNG] market in the 2020s that will need to be met.

Andrew Weaver Q&A: The Future of BC #Energy Beyond #SiteC and #LNG https://t.co/GrZFKH2t0W @AJWVictoriaBC @C_Pollon #geothermal #climate

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 29, 2017

Companies like FortisBC are saying there is a huge opportunity for B.C. to use natural gas as a substitute for dirty bunker fuel and diesel in marine ships and transport trucks. Do you agree?

I 100 per cent agree. I pushed for the conversion of B.C. ferries ships to being a domestic market for our own natural gas, and they are now doing just that. 

It’s also an opportunity for long-haul transport, using compressed natural gas.

We have world leading technologies here, through companies like Vedder and Westport Innovations. Getting ourselves off diesel and onto compressed natural gas is cleaner in terms of particulate emissions and it’s frankly cheaper, too.

There are five ferries already transitioned to LNG, what do we need to do to ramp up the fuel switching for more ships and transport trucks?

We need infrastructure to charge and refill, and second, [a mechanism] for pricing emissions, which drives innovation to low- and zero-emitting vehicles.

That’s why I’m excited about our [carbon] price going up in B.C., and across Canada, because this pricing will drive us to innovation. Also, through regulation we can start to regulate tail pipe regulations like they do in California.

Back to natural gas, the NDP has called for a scientific review of fracking — what do you think about this?

To me that’s a wishy washy statement. 

I don’t know what you want to review about it. I don’t understand why they called for a review, I honestly don’t. I can’t defend what I don’t understand.

At the Union of BC Municipalities annual meeting this week, there was a vote on a fracking moratorium. Is this an idea you would support?

The problem in B.C. is not so much the existence of fracking, it’s the ‘wild west’ nature of what’s going on in B.C.  It’s a free-for-all. 

There’s no overarching approach to resource development.

The right approach would be to pause and reflect on the cumulative impacts of our ‘wild west’ approach to resource extraction here in B.C.

Nobody is saying ‘stop producing natural gas,’ but under the BC Liberals it was a get-to-yes approach, and it didn’t matter what the question was. That’s irresponsible.  

We would like to take a detailed look at what we are doing in a cumulative sense. In our platform, we had called for [the creation of] a natural resources board, that we were very keen on.

Changing tracks to Site C, what do you think about the preliminary report from the BC Utilities Commission (BCUC) made public last week? 

I’m quite impressed so far, there are not a lot of answers, but there are a lot of good questions. 

BC Hydro numbers are being very effectively challenged, including on the cost of alternatives and for their approach to debt financing. BC Hydro did their typical approach, which was to submit hundreds of pages of documents. 

They’re not very convincing when it comes to their demand load forecast, though. 

It will be very interesting to see what BCUC reports. Ultimately it will be a cabinet decision, but as people who have been following know full well, the economics of Site C do not work right now. 

It was all about producing electricity subsidized for an LNG industry that doesn’t exist. So Site C is all about delivering the impossible. 

In a hypothetical world where Site C is cancelled, what sort of energy mix would B.C. need to look to for the future?

[The future] is a mix of using our existing dams more efficiently, combined with pumped storage, wind, solar, and geothermal. B.C. has it all. 

Learn about pumped storage potential in B.C.

If one jurisdiction could showcase to the world how to move forward, it is B.C.  And we’re missing out on that opportunity.  

That said, the industry is ready to go. I recently talked with a company looking at pumped storage hydro, which will use brownfield quarries, in partnership with First Nations. This is base supply — it’s one of the cheapest ways to meet peak demand. 

Take Vancouver Island for example, where we need to upgrade our transmission capacity to the mainland.  We could build pumped storage on the island, with the avoided cost of building transmission lines. Then look at a place like Valemont — they run out of electrons all the time there, we could build a geothermal plant there.

In the Kootenays there is a grid-scale solar development that wants to go forward, it’s already through the standing offer program, it’s ready to go. 

This is going to be my focus over the next couple of years in the legislature, and it’s ultimately the reason why I got into politics — to actually get us on track. 

It’s a track that was initially laid by Gordon Campbell under his first administration, which fell apart when Christy Clark came in and started talking about the impossible deliverance of LNG.

Image: B.C. Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver

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