Site C Foes Power Up

Shot down in the 1980s, BC Hydro tests the public waters with new dam.

Construction of a third large hydroelectric dam on the Peace River in British Columbia’s north is back on BC Hydro’s to-do list, and the province’s electricity provider is making the rounds to sell the idea to residents through a series of public consultation sessions.

Already forces of opposition are mobilizing to ensure the citizens hear all sides of the story on the massive public-works project that Hydro says could take seven years to build, with preliminary cost estimates pegged at $6.6 billion.

“The main reasons for not building this dam are the same as they were in the 1980s,” says West Moberly First Nation Chief Roland Wilson. “We don’t need it.”

Those who live near the proposed dam still smart from construction of two earlier dams in their area—the W.A.C. Bennett Dam in 1967 and the Peace Canyon Dam 24 kilometres downstream in 1980—and say Hydro is downplaying the likely environmental impact of the Site C project.

If it goes ahead according to preliminary plans, the dam will be built six-and-a-half kilometres southwest of Fort St. John. It will be 250 feet high, stretch 3,200 feet across the water and be capable of producing 900 megawatts of electricity.

Critics argue decaying vegetation under the 5,300 hectares Hydro estimates will be flooded by the dam’s reservoir will unleash massive amounts of greenhouse gasses, to the tune of 15 to 30 tonnes of COs equivalent for every gigawatt-hour of power the dam produces, not to mention its impact on wildlife habitat and agricultural and culturally significant land.

British Columbians were last confronted with a Site C dam when the BC Utilities Commission—after an outcry from local communities, and most vocally the West Moberly First Nation—decided to shelve BC Hydro’s preliminary application for its construction in 1983.

Denial of the necessary Energy Project Certificate was withheld until such time that, “1) an acceptable forecast demonstrates that construction must begin immediately in order to avoid supply deficiencies, and 2) a comparison of alternate feasible plans demonstrates . . . that Site C is the best project to meet the anticipated supply deficiency,” according to Hydro’s feasability review.

Well, the days of “supply deficiency” have arrived—in Hydro’s opinion at least—and the company claims that over the next 20 years the province’s electricity demands are slated to grow by between 25 and 45 percent, with a projected deficit of at least 17,000 gigawatt-hours by 2025; for the past six years we have been net importers of electricity, buying between 10 to 15 percent of the province’s electricity from other jurisdictions.

This argument doesn’t wash with Dogwood Initiative executive director Will Horter.

“This pretense of ‘it’s necessary for self-sufficiency’ is based on some pretty creative analysis and accounting,” says Horter. “What the Site C folks, and even the anti-site C folks haven’t really framed is that with the Columbia Basin treaty we’ve got this massive amount of energy that we have contractually agreed should be brought to the border, and instead of actually bringing that energy into British Columbia, the government consistently chooses to sell that into the California market, and book the revenue.”