Interesting Program to allow low income homes become more energy efficient

I found this on Craigslist today and thought it might be of interest to people:

The Government Wants to Help You Renovate!

The Energy Conservation Assistance Program (ECAP) provides BC Hydro residential account holders on limited budgets with a home energy evaluation, the installation of energy saving products, and personalized energy efficiency advice. All of this is free of change to the participant.

Every home is different. Your home evaluator will determine which energy efficiency upgrades your home is eligible for. The installation of some products may require multiple visits.

Eligibility

To qualify for this program you must be a BC Hydro residential customer with moderate to high electricity consumption (more than 8,000 kWh/yr, which is approximately an electricity bill exceeding $500 per year) living in the Lower Mainland, on Vancouver Island, or the Southern Interior.

Applicants must provide proof of income for every member of the household 18 years or older by providing a Notice of Assessment from the Canada Revenue Agency. Your combined household income must be below the Low-Income Cut-Off (LICO) as published by Statistics Canada. Low-income cutoffs vary by where you live (population) and by the number of people in your household.

You can view the LICO table on the Energy Conservation Assistance Program application form. This can be found on www.citygreen.ca/bc-hydro-energy-conservation-assistance-program-ecap

Contact Information

Glenys Verhulst ecoenergy@citygreen.ca (250) 381 9995 x11

Eligibility: If you do not qualify for the ECAP program, you can order an Energy Saving Kit, sign up for a home energy assessment for LiveSmart BC grants, or check out the Affordable Warmth incentive database for other programs to help you make your home more energy efficient.

Oil and Gas coming to the Yukon?

Seems there is a push to start the development of some natural gas resources in Yukon.   A company called Northern Cross is proposing development of the resource for local use by mines in Yukon.

The development of this resource will bring more interest in oil and gas into the region and may lead to the construction of a pipeline from north eastern BC to Yukon.  It also is another further step down the road to the development of the oil and gas resources in the Mackenzie Delta and eventually the tar sands on Melville Island.

Until there is a lot more green electrical power and oil is no longer economically viable, the development of oil and gas resources will move further and further out there.  BC could help by extending the grid to Yukon.

Northern Cross touts solution to Yukon’s energy pinch

Wednesday June 16, 2010  by John Thompson

As far as fossil fuels go, it’s cheap, clean and plentiful.

If Northern Cross has its way, the stuff will help power Yukon’s next generation of mines. It may even one day help propel the trucking fleet that carries goods up the Alaska Highway.

It’s natural gas. There’s an estimated 5 trillion cubic feet of it beneath Eagle Plain, and Northern Cross, a small, privately-held Calgary company, wants to pump it to the surface, chill it to minus 160 degrees Celsius so it condenses to liquid, and truck it to energy-hungry mines within the territory.

“There’s a large need for additional energy, especially with a growing mining industry, and we’d love to service that industry with clean-burning natural gas, if we can,” said president Brian Avery.

On Friday the territory announced that Northern Cross won the right to explore 49,000 acres of property in Eagle Plain, just shy of the Arctic Circle, after pledging to conduct $615,100 in exploration work over the next decade. Oil and gas dispositions are given to whichever company pledges to commit the most work.

The new disposition completes a patchwork of properties already claimed by Northern Cross. All in, the company has rights to explore nearly 1.3 million acres of Eagle Plain Basin. It has pledged to conduct a total of $21 million in work.

Next step: before exploration begins, the company needs to raise between $50 million and $100 million.

“Financial markets have been a little shaky lately, to say the least, so we don’t have the wherewithal to do exploration yet, but we’re hoping that will come together in the next few months,” said Avery.

If financing falls into place, Northern Cross plans to sink a dozen new wells, starting early next year, and to explore four existing wells that were drilled in the 1960s and 1970s.

The operation would employ approximately 100 workers at any given time, said Avery.

The company’s first three drilling licences have already cleared Yukon’s regulatory hurdles. This work would all be done immediately adjacent to the Dempster Highway.

Northern Cross already has its drilling rig in place at the old Camp 204. Next, it plans to move a 46-person camp up from Fort Nelson.

When Northern Cross formed in 1994, its focus was on pumping oil from Eagle Plain to sell to Yukon customers. In 1998, after spending $2.5 million, the company produced a few hundred barrels of crude, which was shipped to Whitehorse and fed to Yukon Energy’s diesel generators.

But a shrinking territorial economy, following the Faro mine’s closure, put the company’s plans on ice.

Since that time natural gas has become a more attractive commodity. It is 25 per cent cleaner than burning oil, and about that much cheaper. Once liquified, it takes up a small fraction (1/600) of the volume of natural gas.

Northern Cross still hopes to extract crude—the new plan is to truck it to Fort Nelson for distribution. But the company’s new focus is on selling liquified natural gas to Yukon’s next cohort of mines.

The territory’s hydroelectric grid is currently under strain. The addition of a new turbine near Mayo will help keep pace with consumer demand, but there won’t be enough capacity to feed a new mine.

Western Copper Corporation, for one, envisions a mine at its Casino project that would be powered with liquified natural gas, known in the industry as LNG. The company currently expects to be fed the fuel from a nearby port.

Avery’s operation, if it succeeds, would offer LNG closer to home, at lower costs.

Northern Cross’ pitch coincides with resurgent interest in natural gas in North America, driven by new technologies that allow companies to extract gas from previously unreachable shale deposits.

Natural gas proponents tout the fuel as a replacement for dirtier diesel. That’s led to a drive to refit North America’s trucking fleets to run on LNG. Such fleets are not uncommon in Europe but are a rarity on this continent, for lack of refuelling facilities.

The state of California is leading the push. It has more than 450 natural gas refuelling stations, and it plans to ban diesel trucks from hauling goods from the state’s two largest ports by 2012.

In Canada, EnCana Corporation wants Ottawa to help it build a chain of liquid natural gas fuelling stations between Windsor and Quebec City. The company boasts that converting just one heavy-duty truck to LNG would be equivalent to taking 325 cars off the road.

But the widespread adoption of LNG faces many obstacles - popular fears of a massive explosion being just one.

But Avery notes that liquified natural gas has been safely extracted and transported in Alaska for several decades. Alaska has shipped LNG from the Kenai Peninsula to Japan since 1969. And, since 1998, trucks have hauled LNG to Fairbanks Natural Gas’ storage facilities. From there, LNG is converted back into gas and distributed to homes and businesses.

“It’s very much proven technology,” said Avery. It’s almost like trucking propane around.”

The company faces more challenges than fundraising in tight times. Its drilling grounds overlap with two conservation controversies: the migration route of the dwindling Porcupine caribou herd and the boundaries of the Peel Watershed.

Northern Cross plans to stop drilling when caribou are nearby to avoid spooking the animals. Avery also asserts that the herd usually doesn’t venture as far south as where the company plans to begin work.

An eight-hectare slice of one property encroaches into the Peel. The territory granted the disposition, despite a ban on exploring for minerals, oil and gas in the region until February of next year.

No surface access will be allowed on the Peel lands while the ban is in place.

Karen Baltgailis, executive director of the Yukon Conservation Society, acknowledges the overlap is small, “but we still find this is inconsistent with the spirit and intent of the moratorium. To me, it seems the message that the Yukon government is sending is, ‘We’re not serious about the Peel planning process.’”

The territory is currently mulling over a proposed regional land-use plan for the Peel. The finished plan will determine which activities will be allowed in the overlapping area. Whatever the outcome, “We’ll govern ourselves accordingly,” said Avery.

Contact John Thompson at johnt@yukon-news.com

The Tar Sands

Energy sources are really all about the price it costs to get the energy needed to do something.  The economics of supply and demand are big feature of energy prices.   A low supply means a high price, a high price means more people looking for supply to meet that demand.

There are constant concerns about the idea of peak oil, that we will run out of available oil and that society will suffer for it.    This analysis ignores several important factors.

As the price of oil rises the amount of oil in the ground that is economic to recover rises - an increase in supply
As the price of oil rises, other energy sources become more affordable - a change in energy source
As the price rises more people spend more money on finding cheaper ways to extract more oil.

A rising price of oil will make the market conditions for the globe to use less oil.

The Tar Sands in Canada are the one major source that increases constantly.   As the price rises the amount oil they can afford to recover increases.   Also each year through innovations the cost to extract oil goes down.   Canada's oil reserves are going to grow ever faster.   As they grow, investment win the tar sands will rise.

The only answer to the demand for the tar sands oil is for other energy sources to become significantly cheaper and reduce the global demand for oil.   The idea that one can stop it through boycotting or regulation is not realistic and takes time and energy away from the real solution.

The change will come when motor vehicles are driven by electrical power and electricity is produced from green sources.   Society was dependent on biomass (wood, peat, charcoal) as a primary energy sources for thousands of years, the only other one available was human and animal energy.   When coal came about these older energy sources no longer provided the main energy for human society.

Oil will fade when we adopt something cheaper and better, that is when the tar sands will fade away

Some thoughts about Site C

Original version published in 24 hours on April 22nd

Recently the government announced the go ahead for the Site C dam on the Peace River. This is the first new major dam in North America in a generation, large scale dam building is something from the time when cars had fins and TV was black and white..

Site C is put forward as the great answer for power self sufficiency in BC. Certainly 4600 GWh per year is good, enough to provide power to over 400,000 houses. But there are downsides, the biggest of which is the flooding of close to 14000 acres of land along the Peace River. How big is that? Imagine 14 Stanley Parks. Site C also means the citizens of BC will be on the hook for at least $6.6 billion in new BC Hydro debt.

Site C is not the only option we have in BC, there are better private sector answers available. How does Site C compare to a private green energy project?

The Plutonic Power Bute Inlet project will produce 2900 GWh per year, about 2/3s the capacity of the Site C. This project will directly impact less than 50 acres of land, which is good because more flooded land means more CO2 from a reservoir. The roads needed are already there because of logging, though they will need new transmission lines. The Plutonic project will cost $3.5 billion and citizens will not be on the hook for a penny of it.

Site C is not the best option for BC, but will it even manage to go forward?

The first hurdle is the environmental assessment. This process is rigorous and demands a lot from proponents but is is a process misunderstood by the public. Of the roughly 200 projects that have entered the EA process it is true only one was refused a certification, but that does not mean every other project was approved. The reality is that proponents either withdraw from the process or stop if the environmental requirements become too expensive. About 40% of projects that enter the EA process do not get approval. The process is certainly not a rubber stamp.

The EA process assesses environmental impacts and then sets goals to mitigate the impact of the project. The Achilles heel of the Site C dam is the loss of close to 14,000 acres of land in the Peace River area, of which 8000 is some of the best farmland in BC. How do you mitigate that damage? What action can BC Hydro take to remove this one huge impact on the environment? The loss of this land would be the biggest loss of agricultural land since 2000.  Would the Agricultural Land Commission North Panel even allow the land to be removed from the agricultural land reserve?

Even if through some improbable miracle Site C were to manage to get EA certification, I am not sure how any government would be able to weather the political storm that would come from North America wide opposition to building the dam. It will end up costings us hundred of millions to plan and consult about a dam that will never be built.. The time to stop this waste of money is now.

The Green Energy Taskforce Report

I have to say underwhelmed is the best I can muster for the Green Energy Taskforce Report.   They had a mandate to provide recommendations on all aspects of green energy production in BC and they produced a document that is more platitudes and motherhood statements than any sort of detailed recommendations.

Here is one of the recommendations:

2. Increase Clean Electricity Demand in B.C.

Growing a low-carbon economy means attracting new investment to B.C. that can be supplied by B.C.’s clean electricity. Clean technology industries, like data centers, could be incented to locate in B.C. to take advantage of data networks.

Recommendation 4: Bring the load/business/jobs to the electrons–actively recruit and attract new low-carbon industry (such as server farms for the Interior).

Where does one start with this?   First of all the recommendation is "Increase Clean Electricity Demand in BC" and not attract greener industries.   The two parts do not connect.   The only way to increase the demand for clean electricity is to remove the BC Hydro monopoly of sales of power so that consumers can choose where they get the power from.    The short paragraph and recommendation there make no sense in the context of green energy.  They do not say who should attract these business to locate in the interior BC or the other impediments to being there.

There are very few clear concrete recommendations within the taskforce report.  A number of the ones verging on having a clear direction are things that are already going on.

 Here is a list of the somewhat more clear recommendations I could find are:

• Complete Revelstoke and Mica dam capacity for power generation
• Move forward on Site C and Site E
• Move procurement, generation operations, and export outside of BCUC regulation.
• Develop a Lowe Carbon Transition Plan (though dates for when)
• By September 30, 2010, and using existing data and information layers, develop a renewable energy zoning map for the Province that identifies where development of renewable energy and transmission is appropriate and inappropriate.
• Direct BC Hydro to amend bioenergy electricity purchase agreements (EPAs) to transfer the biomass fuel price risk through to BC Hydro so that if biomass fuel prices increase, BC Hydro will correspondingly adjust the purchase price of electricity. (I do not like this one)
• Establish a B.C.-owned Biomass Fuel Aggregator to access and aggregate woody biomass from provincial forest land, and supply fuel to bioenergy project developers.
• Increase the Innovative Clean Energy (ICE) Fund from $25 million to $50 million with a commitment to review funding levels every two years. Restructure the ICE Fund with an expanded team of investment professionals and consider moving it outside of government as a separate, stand-alone organization.
• Implement a royalty credit and/or tax credit program to provide the necessary incentives to industry to use clean energy technologies at remote installations in B.C., such as mining, natural gas operations and communities.
• The Province should develop a regional green energy planning process
• The Province should expand the current revenue sharing model to include the sharing of revenue collected by the Province with First Nations on all types of green energy.

Even this list find is full of statements that are really not offering much.   What I was looking for was something with a lot more specifics.   I was looking for detailed background on each recommendation including deadlines and how the recommendation should be implemented.  All in all, the report is short enough on details that it could be used to justify almost any action in relation to green energy in BC.

There are other recommendations that many will say have specific actions for government, but I would argue they are too vague or they are not realistic in BC.

The submission I made to the taskforce had some very specific recommendations with details of what should be achieved and by when.  It also contained a lot more details with respect to scope and scale of power production now and in the future, prices for power here and elsewhere, specific issues with the grid, and where new green power could accessed without building any significant infrastructure.   I am only one person and working on that on the side of my desk.  They taskfroce report does not impress me.

Where we sit one third of the way through 2010

I have to say that I am convinced that there is clearly something going with respect to climate, that there is a warming trend happening that is occurring very quickly. I am also convinced that human activity is having an impact on this and that if there were a reduction in green house gases the warming trend would be slowed and the climate would be more stable.

I did not jump on this bandwagon in some sort of fear of an impending Armageddon. What ever happens, the world will survive, it has survived much worse in the past. The issue really is what will it cost to mitigate climate change and is that expense worth it? Can we afford to make changes? Can we afford not to?

Climate change has been in the headlines for two decades now. There is clear evidence of the rising CO2 levels and the source of the CO2. But the world is acting as if it is not happening or freaking out as if the world is going to end. There is very little serious long term thought and planning happening with respect to the issue. The issue has also been high-jacked by the left as a way to attack the capitalist system and by the right as a way to galvanize their supporters against the left.

I am going to look at the social and economic aspects of climate change in the context of where we are now and what is likely to happen. I am not going to focus on the environment as the majority of the public shows over and over again that in financial terms they are unwilling to part with much money for the environment.

So here in early April 2010 where can go?
Do nothing - this would seem to indicate increased temperatures and over time some major economic and social dislocation. It is survivable and ultimately the most dislocation would be felt in regions near the equator. In the case of Northern Europe, Russia and Canada, for generations to come the net impact of global warming will be positive for the economy. Ultimately there is no way this direction will be allowed to happen.

Dramatically restrict parts of the economy - Prying people out their cars is not going to happen. Getting people to own less stuff is not going to happen. Adding large costs to industry is not going to happen. The anti-capitalist left approach to the issue is doomed to failure as an approach and will mean a delay of action of any sort.

Government regulation - This is what we seem to be doing the most of at the moment and the law of unintended consequences is hard at work. Cap and Trade is not having any effective impact on CO2 levels being emitted, in fact I would argue it is slowing the movement in the direction of any success in dealing with CO2 levels. The bio-fuel bonanza caused food prices to skyrocket.

The IPCC - they exist, but they remind me of the worst aspects of committee decision making. The reports they issue leave a lot to desired and take much too long to write, though they have been the source of much good data. There are areas that the IPCC is not looking at that it should be considering, biggest of these is economics. The IPCC needs to have their reports include the economic costs of actions and no action. The central question that no one is answering - is it economically better to act now or in the future?

To date there has been very little done to actually reduce CO2, and other green house gas, emissions. There may have been some slowing, but there is no reduction in green house gases. What we have been doing for the last 20 years has not been working, it has been effectively a waste of time and energy.

In a rational world we would make long term goals and create plans to meet them, but the problem with this is that there is that tendency to put off to tomorrow. Goals are not the right direction, there needs to be some other mechanism. Ideally any mechanism would be a price based mechanism that need little or not government regulatory input. The simplicity of a market based price seems to be the only way something significant could happen.

The goal of cap and trade is to set a price for CO2, but it is much to heavily influenced by government regulatory mechanisms and a lack of ways to monitor if it is really working. The pricing mechanism has to be one that is clearly included early on in the decision making process of any business venture. The simplest method would seem to be a carbon tax.

Carbon taxes are being resisted in many places and the political backlash has been severe enough to make governments think twice before going down that path. A tax the public can see is unpopular even if it is cheaper and better than an alternative pricing mechanism. The problem is how do you get the public to demand a carbon tax?

As we are going at the moment, there is almost zero chance that any concrete reduction of emissions will occur within the next ten to twenty years. Being able to change this is going to hard and is not served at all by people saying we should not drive, we should live in a smaller house, we should not aspire to be wealthy. Change will happen when we can show businesses will make more money through being carbon neutral, that the public will be able to travel more cheaply in the future, and that more goods will be available at a lower cost.

Change is also not served by ignoring the rising emission levels in Asia and Africa. BC could build all of the planned, proposed and possible green energy projects in the province and it would still not equal what China is adding each year in coal power. Why should Canada bother if Asian economies will not reduce their green house gases as well?

I would say the UN needs to deal with the issue, but I have little faith in them being able to do anything quickly or effectively. There needs to be some sort of statement of values from the largest economies with respect to climate change, things like setting a price for emissions through taxes or affirming higher wealth and consumption by the public. They need to be statements that allow the public to understand there are ways to manage climate change and be better off for doing it. The public needs to know that they have a brighter future and are not going to have to do with less and flagellate themselves.

Electrical Production in BC

BC is consistently needing to import electrical power. In 20 of the last 25 months BC has had to import power to meet the demand in BC. We seem to about 4,000 GW/h short per year of the power that we need.

The imported power is a mix of gas fired, coal fired and nuclear power. By not being able to even meet our own needs, we are increasing the demand for CO2 source electrical power. The power we had to import added 2.5 million tonnes in CO2 emissions in 2009, this does not count the need to run Burrard Thermal in the lower mainland.

The scope of scale of what we need in BC is larger than the Plutonic Energy Bute Inlet project, the biggest green project currently contemplated. The Bute Inlet project will only bring in 2900 GW/h per year. We are not only short, but we are falling further behind each year as our population grows.

Growth in demand will add the need for about 1500 GW/h per year. We need to build a Bute Inlet scale project every other year just to keep up with demand. If we want to get ahead of the the problem and become one of the major sources of a climate change solution we need to dramatically increase the speed at which more green power is brought online.

The opposition to green power production in BC does not seem to be related to any quantifiable environmental issues, it seems to be related to the fact that a Green Economy means businesses are going to be making money from saving the world. The opposition to green power in BC is harming the environment.

If I did not believe in conspiracy theories I would think that the opposition to green power in BC was some sort of funded campaign by the coal business. I find it crazy that the opposition to green power seems to be willing to ignore all the evidence in favour of environmental harm. The data is in, BC does not come close to producing enough power to meet our needs.

I continue to read all the websites and all the reports that relate to non storage hydro and I have to find anything that indicates a measurable environmental harm form non storage hydro. If anyone out there knows of a report that shows environmental damage, please send it to me.