Don't Feed the Americans!

I must state my interest. I'm consultant to and spokesman for the Save Our Rivers Society.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article saying, in essence, that proceeding with Site "C" to meet our power requirements was better than mucking up hundreds of smaller rivers and streams in the hands of rapacious private power groups. I blew it because I'd fallen for the Campbell government gup that it was either one or the other. It isn't. In fact, B.C. has no immediate need for power and as our needs increase we will have plenty of time to meet our requirements.

Before I go on, the Campbell bunch has misled us all. On the need for power issue, they point to the amount of power imports during the year without telling you that sometimes that's because Hydro can make a hell of a good deal by importing power from Alberta and selling it to great profit below the line; other times they import power because it is, at that moment, cheaper than the cost to make our own.

Look at it this way. Suppose you are a power company for a city and you create the power for $50 a unit and sell it at $75. You find out that the company who creates power for a neighbouring city will sell it to you for $40; you'd be a damned fool not to take it and make $10 while conserving your own power system.

We can find the power

There is another thing the Campbell crowd doesn't tell you: we can get up to 10 per cent of our power needs from the Columbia treaty if, instead of taking money for that power as we now do, we took the power.

Moreover, they haven't told you that according to Hydro, routine conservation itself would eliminate any shortfall they might have.

The environmental consequences of independent power producers (IPP) are horrendous. Far from being neat little mom-and-pop organizations, many of them propose putting up to 95 per cent of a river through tunnels more than nine kilometres in length. No fish can pass this sort of barrier. While companies may say they can transport migrating fish around these obstacles, please understand that even if they could do that, the fry going downstream would be ground to mush by the turbines.

See for yourself

Do yourself a favour and go to the Save Our Rivers website www.saveourrivers.ca and look at the two PowerPlay videos and the Google Earth Map. The projects shown on the videos are amongst the smaller ones. There is, in fact, one tiny one on Vancouver Island the IPPers love to trot out as the perfect project, but believe me, that's not the reality. The PowerPlay videos give you the true picture.

They also don't tell you that each of these so-called run-of-the-river (run-of-the-river being the weasel words created by PR flacks to make you feel warm and fizzy all over) projects they propose are wildly profitable. Even the smallest bring profits in the scores if not hundreds of millions. The bigger ones, billions.

Death of public power in BC?

What is of perhaps more concern is the fate of BC Hydro and what's going to happen with this new power.

Now watch BC Hydro tumble in three stages.

Stage 1. Hydro is one third sold now. In essence it is now run by an American outfit called Accenture.

Stage 2. Let's now look at the BC Transmission Corporation (BCTC) formed in 2003 as a crown corporation to take away from BC Hydro its transmission lines, which in any private power scheme would be enormously profitable. After the next election, assuming that Campbell wins, this will be privatized leaving BC Hydro owning its dams and the Burrard Thermal plant.

Stage 3. BC Hydro, left with approximately $7 billion in debt, has only the power it can produce from its dams and Burrard Thermal to service that debt. Remember, it, like the IPPs, will have to pay BCTC to transmit its power and under government orders, must pay private power companies based on market prices, that price being set by the ever increasing needs of California. BC Hydro will be bankrupt and since the B.C. government guarantees Hydro's debt, it will be sold. The Great Autocrat will, when reminded of his pledge never to sell Hydro, will say "gee whiz, guys and gals, I was forced to sell Hydro because, being government-owned, it was so inefficient it couldn't meet its obligations! Dear, or dear, what could I do?"

Add BC Hydro to BC Rail and BC Gas and watch BC Ferries to go into private hands when a buyer can be found.

Feeding US demand

Thus endeth our public power gained by W.A.C. Bennett's "Two River" policy created at a huge environmental cost back in the '60s -- a power system that was the wonder of the rest of the world.

Here comes the final act in this tragedy -- no happy ending here, I fear.

IPPs will increase and increase as the United States needs more power. These IPPs, getting richer and richer will pass their profits off to foreign shareholders meaning that the profits that once accrued to BC Hydro and paid back to the government becoming hospitals and schools will now, literally, go south.

More and more rivers and streams will be destroyed as U.S. demand increases and B.C. will be the power capital of America. What governor of any state would recommend screwing up one of its own rivers when B.C. was gleefully doing it for them?

We, the people of British Columbia are being told they must pay for the scaffold upon which they will be executed!

To think that we can control this independent power "gold rush," for that's what it is, is terminal naiveté. The only control will be the insatiable demands below the line. Virtually every river and stream will be a possible source of new electricity. Nothing will be safe -- nothing sacred.

What a bitter irony -- 150 years after a gold rush forced Queen Victoria to make British Columbia a crown colony, the event we're now celebrating, we have another gold rush, this time its our streams and rivers.

Oh, yes, I nearly forgot. When all the fish are gone, what's to stop us selling our water to our thirsty neighbours to the south?

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