Scott Simpson of the Vancouver Sun has his columns online and they are worth reading. Today he wrote about the idea that NAFTA somehow forces the government here to continue sales of power to the US once they start. Not that he is saying that, some of the NDP candidates are saying that.
There are some major fallacies with the argument that NAFTA would force a commodity to be sold in perpetuity.
1) No one can force a private company to sell the power they produce to the Americans.
2) BC has a sovereign right to regulate water issues under constitution. The federal Crown does not have the power to force the provincial Crown to bend to their will. No treaty Canada signs can bind a province in an area of provincial jurisdiction.
3) No one has ever come up with a true scare story of what NAFTA does.
I suspect that the licenses will be renewed in the future given the fact that it makes rational sense because the infrastructure is in place.
Of course our power is going to the US, we can produce loads of green power and are connected into a north - south grid.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
IPPs and Campbell River
The Campbell River Mirror is running a poll about a moratorium on run of the river power projects. As of this moment the vote is very close with about 407 in favour of a moratorium and 395 against. I am surprised that it is this close given the huge amount of energy that the anti-green power lobby is putting into to stopping all the projects in BC.
At the same time, the opposition to green power projects on the coast of BC is pushing more and more aboriginal leaders to be either be opposed to the NDP or actively in favour of the Liberals. Lately Eppa(Gerrard Peters) of the In-SHUCK-ch and Judith Sayers of the Hupacasath First Nation both condemned the NDP stance on IPPs. Gerrard was strong supporter of the NDP in the past. Judith Sayers was the public face of the campaign against the Liberal referendum on the Treaty process.
First Nations in rural BC are looking for ways to diversify their economic options and green power is clearly one of the ways they see getting long term jobs, revenues for their governments and reduce dependency on forestry or fishing.
At the same time, the opposition to green power projects on the coast of BC is pushing more and more aboriginal leaders to be either be opposed to the NDP or actively in favour of the Liberals. Lately Eppa(Gerrard Peters) of the In-SHUCK-ch and Judith Sayers of the Hupacasath First Nation both condemned the NDP stance on IPPs. Gerrard was strong supporter of the NDP in the past. Judith Sayers was the public face of the campaign against the Liberal referendum on the Treaty process.
First Nations in rural BC are looking for ways to diversify their economic options and green power is clearly one of the ways they see getting long term jobs, revenues for their governments and reduce dependency on forestry or fishing.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Atlin Run of the River project
We still have some small towns that rely on diesel generators, Atlin was on one such town. Run of the river in BC has been done well and requires a lot of reviews before you can go ahead.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
The NDP and the Carbon Tax
I am finding the debate on this issue tedious. The NDP clearly has made a huge error on this issue as every recommendation for dealing with climate change is to price carbon, a carbon tax is the easiest way to do it. A carbon tax that uses tax shifting, meaning no net increases in tax take by the goverment, is truly using taxation as a public policy tool. The BC Liberals have chosen to be on the forefront on public policy on this issue. The simply are more forward thinking and progressive than anyone else out there.
Instead of supporting something the government is doing that is a very smart idea, the NDP is opposing this. There is no shortage of public policy differences the NDP could highlight.
The carbon tax is the most progressive of taxes possible because it is your choice to pay it or not. The poorest in society have almost most direct impact from it because their purchases of fuels is limited. People choosing to have several cars, a truck, a boat, a quad etc will end up paying the most.
The carbon tax will also increase the demand for transit, getting rid of it will reduce the demand.
The alternative to a carbon tax is a cap and trade system. Cap and trade will require huge amounts of regulation and monitoring, it will be very open to corrupt behaviour. Cap and trade will always be open to government meddling with the cap - if the cap is high enough, there is no need for the trade. One only needs to look at how public power has worked in BC, even though it would make good sense for conservation reasons to raise electrical rates, no government has the guts to do it. Cap and trade honestly scares me given the dangers I noted above.
A tax we can choose to pay or not is the best way to price carbon. It is my choice how much gas I want to buy and therefore how much tax I pay. The tax will rise over time. The $30 a tonne price we will see in a few years will still likely not be high enough, but it will be higher than elsewhere and people will make decisions to avoid paying the tax. We will reduce our fuel use compared to elsewhere.
Clearly the NDP chose to oppose the carbon tax because they thought they could gain political points. There was no debate of this as a policy at any NDP convention, it was just born over a coffee in the legislature by the brains trust that gave the province one of the weakest oppositions ever. This is not a thought out or rational policy decision, but a spur of the moment one they chose in the hopes of bad polling numbers for the Liberals. The wierd thing is that there environmentalists out there supporting the NDP in this decision, clearly these are people putting political partisan views ahead of a better environment.
I find a lot of the crapping on the NDP from the right on the issue of the carbon tax as annoying as the NDP opposition to the carbon tax. Many of the people suddenly voicing support in a round about way for the carbon tax are people that were until recently skpetics on climate change. Admittedly the NDP move to be side with the climate skeptics means many borderline climate change skepitcs on the right are now on board with carbon pricing.
The people that have remained rational and reasonable in this debate are:
Instead of supporting something the government is doing that is a very smart idea, the NDP is opposing this. There is no shortage of public policy differences the NDP could highlight.
The carbon tax is the most progressive of taxes possible because it is your choice to pay it or not. The poorest in society have almost most direct impact from it because their purchases of fuels is limited. People choosing to have several cars, a truck, a boat, a quad etc will end up paying the most.
The carbon tax will also increase the demand for transit, getting rid of it will reduce the demand.
The alternative to a carbon tax is a cap and trade system. Cap and trade will require huge amounts of regulation and monitoring, it will be very open to corrupt behaviour. Cap and trade will always be open to government meddling with the cap - if the cap is high enough, there is no need for the trade. One only needs to look at how public power has worked in BC, even though it would make good sense for conservation reasons to raise electrical rates, no government has the guts to do it. Cap and trade honestly scares me given the dangers I noted above.
A tax we can choose to pay or not is the best way to price carbon. It is my choice how much gas I want to buy and therefore how much tax I pay. The tax will rise over time. The $30 a tonne price we will see in a few years will still likely not be high enough, but it will be higher than elsewhere and people will make decisions to avoid paying the tax. We will reduce our fuel use compared to elsewhere.
Clearly the NDP chose to oppose the carbon tax because they thought they could gain political points. There was no debate of this as a policy at any NDP convention, it was just born over a coffee in the legislature by the brains trust that gave the province one of the weakest oppositions ever. This is not a thought out or rational policy decision, but a spur of the moment one they chose in the hopes of bad polling numbers for the Liberals. The wierd thing is that there environmentalists out there supporting the NDP in this decision, clearly these are people putting political partisan views ahead of a better environment.
I find a lot of the crapping on the NDP from the right on the issue of the carbon tax as annoying as the NDP opposition to the carbon tax. Many of the people suddenly voicing support in a round about way for the carbon tax are people that were until recently skpetics on climate change. Admittedly the NDP move to be side with the climate skeptics means many borderline climate change skepitcs on the right are now on board with carbon pricing.
The people that have remained rational and reasonable in this debate are:
- Serious environmentalists like Tseporah Berman
- Climate change scientists like Andrew Weaver
- Business people like Jim Hoggan
- Gordon Campbell and his government
- Jane Sterk and her party
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Implications of opposition to Green Power
Numerous people opposing green power production on the grounds that it is damaging to the environment - not that I have seen any substantive data from a project that has been received an environmental assessment certificate to show that run of the river power projects have negative environmental impacts. Andrew Weaver has a well written piece about the lack of data and scientific backing to the anti-green power people.
Various people say we should use less energy - fine, but the way to to do this is raise electrical rates to something crushingly high or to ration electrical power. Try selling the idea of paying $0.15 a KWh for electrical power in BC, not this is high enough to reduce demand enough.
There is a huge swath of electrical power in North America produced by coal fired power. To take this offline through conservation over 20 years means we would have to use 57% less electricity per person than we do now. This means no electrical heating - the most common heating source for renters. No plug in hybrids.
This is not to say that we should not work on conservation, though conservation will happen when we raise the prices of power, a lot. In most of the US the electrical rates are already much higher than here and consumption has not plummeted.
No green power here means the power has to come from somewhere else. The grid in North America, or I should say the three grids, are integrated across national and regional political boundaries. BC is not in isolation with respect to power, we are intimately connected to Alberta, the Western US and Baja California. That whole grid needs a specific amount of power. If it does not come from run of the river in BC, it will come from tradional sources like coal and natural gas or possibly some other sources, all of which are somewhere on the Pacific side of North America.
If we can nto be shown to be a source for a lot of green power through things like run of the river, other juridictions will seek other energy sources. Bruce Power has said they are going forward with plans to build a nuclear power plant near Peace River Alberta. Alberta released a report last week on nuclear power. Bruce Power is also looking at nuclear in Saskatchewan.
Ontario specifically has chosen to go further down the nuclear path because of the Kyoto Accord.
Few other renewable energy sources are as cheap as run of the river in BC. A number of them are not yet inexpensive enough to be able to compete with coal and other traditional fuels. The first wave energy operations are coming into being, but the costs remain high. The same with solar.
Wind is being roundly condemned by people as being ugly and intrusive on the landscape. Some people even claim health impacts from the wind turbines. Wind also remains expensive.
In the short term, that is the next five to ten years, lack of numerous run of the river projects in BC will lead to more natural gas fired power plants being built and coal fired plants continue operating. If the opposition does not end soon and if we see projects stopped, this will push more and more jurisdictions to build nuclear power plants.
So irrational opposition to green power here will have major energy policy impacts elsewhere. It also impacts the finances of the province of BC. Each Bute Inlet scale project, and we could easily have 100 or more on the coast of BC with no impact on wildlife, should annually net governments about $60 000 000 a year in taxes. I am only talking about watersheds that are currentlypart of the timber harvesting land base or are already within a developed region.
If we add 1000GWh of green power per year in BC for the next 20 years, the governments will have close to an extra $500 000 000 a year to spend. About 4% of the budget by then.
Since the gird we are part of is more north south and east west almost all of the revenues from green power would be money flowing from the US to Canada, helping with our national current account. We have to balance all the things we buy from the US such as food, computers, movies along with all the money we spend in the US. This is a good way for us to protect our macro-economic health and save the environment at the same time.
The construction of the projects are a large inflow of capital into BC. We are not asked to pay for the capital costs to build these projects as we are with government infrastructure. The influx of capital investment into BC will increase the net value of the province.
There are so many upsides. I am at a complete loss as to understand the rationale for the opposition.
Various people say we should use less energy - fine, but the way to to do this is raise electrical rates to something crushingly high or to ration electrical power. Try selling the idea of paying $0.15 a KWh for electrical power in BC, not this is high enough to reduce demand enough.
There is a huge swath of electrical power in North America produced by coal fired power. To take this offline through conservation over 20 years means we would have to use 57% less electricity per person than we do now. This means no electrical heating - the most common heating source for renters. No plug in hybrids.
This is not to say that we should not work on conservation, though conservation will happen when we raise the prices of power, a lot. In most of the US the electrical rates are already much higher than here and consumption has not plummeted.
No green power here means the power has to come from somewhere else. The grid in North America, or I should say the three grids, are integrated across national and regional political boundaries. BC is not in isolation with respect to power, we are intimately connected to Alberta, the Western US and Baja California. That whole grid needs a specific amount of power. If it does not come from run of the river in BC, it will come from tradional sources like coal and natural gas or possibly some other sources, all of which are somewhere on the Pacific side of North America.
If we can nto be shown to be a source for a lot of green power through things like run of the river, other juridictions will seek other energy sources. Bruce Power has said they are going forward with plans to build a nuclear power plant near Peace River Alberta. Alberta released a report last week on nuclear power. Bruce Power is also looking at nuclear in Saskatchewan.
Ontario specifically has chosen to go further down the nuclear path because of the Kyoto Accord.
Few other renewable energy sources are as cheap as run of the river in BC. A number of them are not yet inexpensive enough to be able to compete with coal and other traditional fuels. The first wave energy operations are coming into being, but the costs remain high. The same with solar.
Wind is being roundly condemned by people as being ugly and intrusive on the landscape. Some people even claim health impacts from the wind turbines. Wind also remains expensive.
In the short term, that is the next five to ten years, lack of numerous run of the river projects in BC will lead to more natural gas fired power plants being built and coal fired plants continue operating. If the opposition does not end soon and if we see projects stopped, this will push more and more jurisdictions to build nuclear power plants.
So irrational opposition to green power here will have major energy policy impacts elsewhere. It also impacts the finances of the province of BC. Each Bute Inlet scale project, and we could easily have 100 or more on the coast of BC with no impact on wildlife, should annually net governments about $60 000 000 a year in taxes. I am only talking about watersheds that are currentlypart of the timber harvesting land base or are already within a developed region.
If we add 1000GWh of green power per year in BC for the next 20 years, the governments will have close to an extra $500 000 000 a year to spend. About 4% of the budget by then.
Since the gird we are part of is more north south and east west almost all of the revenues from green power would be money flowing from the US to Canada, helping with our national current account. We have to balance all the things we buy from the US such as food, computers, movies along with all the money we spend in the US. This is a good way for us to protect our macro-economic health and save the environment at the same time.
The construction of the projects are a large inflow of capital into BC. We are not asked to pay for the capital costs to build these projects as we are with government infrastructure. The influx of capital investment into BC will increase the net value of the province.
There are so many upsides. I am at a complete loss as to understand the rationale for the opposition.
One more article lately pointing out the irrationality of the people opposing green power claiming to be environmentalists. This was in the Toronto Star the other day:
____________________________________________
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Published on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 by The Toronto StarThe Fierce Urgency of NowYes, windmills and dams deface the landscape but the climate crisis demands immediate action
Don't be too "Canadian" about the backlash - this is no time for Mr. Nice Guy
Watching the backlash against clean energy projects build in Canada has moved me to think about what Americans have learned from facing this same problem. I have been thinking and writing for several years about overcoming conflict-avoidance and the importance of standing up for "Big Truths" even at the price of criticizing fellow environmentalists.
It's not that I've developed a mean streak. It's that the environmental movement has reached an important point of division, between those who truly get global warming, and those who don't.
By get, I don't mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or those kinds of things - pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced.
In the U.S., there are all manner of fights to stop or delay every imaginable low-carbon technology. Wind, solar, run-of-river hydro - these are precisely the kinds of renewable energy that every Earth Day speech since 1970 has trumpeted. But now they are finally here - now that we're talking about particular projects in particular places - people aren't so keen.
Opponents of renewable energy projects point out (correctly) that they have impacts - there are (overstated) risks to birds from wind turbines, to fish from run-of-river hydro, that the projects mean "development" somewhere there was none and transmission lines where there were none before.
They point out (again correctly) that the developers are private interests, rushing to develop a resource that, in fact, they do not own, and without waiting for the government to come up with a set of rules and processes for siting such installations.
The critics also insist that there's a "better" site somewhere - and again they're probably right. There's almost always a better site for anything. The whole business is messy, imperfect.
If we had decades to burn, then perhaps the opponents would be right that there's a better site, and a nicer developer. There's always a better site and a nicer developer. But in the real world, we have at most 10 years to reverse the fossil fuel economy. Which means we have to do everything quickly - conservation and plug-in cars and solar panels and compact fluorescents and 100-mile food and tree planting. And windmills, windmills everywhere there is wind, just like off the shores of Europe.
Whatever natural endowments a region is blessed to have, these are the basis for your green economy: solar in the deserts, wind where it's windy, hydro where water's falling, geothermal if you've got it. Do it all, and do it quickly.
In the ideal world, we'd do everything slowly and carefully - but this planet is rapidly becoming the worst of all possible worlds, a place that before my daughter dies may well see temperatures exceeding anything since before the dawn of primate evolution. A planet facing hundreds of millions of environmental refugees as a result of rising seas, with heat waves like the one that killed 35,000 in Europe becoming commonplace occurrences.
The evidence gets worse by the day: already whole nations are evacuating, the Arctic is melting and we have begun to release the massive storehouse of carbon trapped under the polar ice. Scientists figure the "safe" level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 350 parts per million. This is the most important number in the world. Go beyond it for very long and we will trigger "feedbacks" that will result in runaway warming spiralling out of any human control and resulting in a largely inhospitable planet.
We are already well beyond 350 and accelerating rapidly in the wrong direction.
So when local efforts to delay or stop low-carbon energy projects come into conflict with the imperative to act urgently on global warming, they have to take second place. Because even if we win every other battle, if we lose 350, it won't make any difference at all. You can "keep" every river and bay and lake and mountain and wilderness, but if the temperature goes up 3 degrees globally, it won't matter. The fish that live there won't be able to survive, the trees that anchor the landscape will die, the coral reefs will bleach and crumble. Whatever the particular part of the world that we're each working on, it's still a part of the world. Global warming is the whole thing.
Believe me that I understand how difficult this is. I have spent a lifetime loving and fighting for the Adirondacks and other treasured areas. Perhaps you've spent your life fighting for birds, and I understand how wrenching it must be to acknowledge that "some birds may die from this wind farm." But what 350 forces us to say is: every bird, every fish, and everything else that we know, is fundamentally at risk in the next few decades.
In the name of birds, I want that windmill on my ridge. In the name of rivers, I want run-of-river hydro. In the name of wild beauty, I want that windmill out my window.
350 means it is too late to be arguing for theories or cool ideas. In the real world, the one where CO2 inconveniently traps solar radiation, you don't get to argue for perfection.
You can say, as opponents of clean energy projects have said, that we'd do more to fight global warming by improving gas mileage in our cars. You can say that we should insulate our homes and build better refrigerators. You can say that we should plant more trees and have fewer kids.
And you would be right, just as every Earth Day speech is "right." I've given my share of Earth Day speeches. And if we're to have any chance of heading off catastrophic temperature increase, we have to do everything we can imagine, all at once. Hybrid cars and planting trees, windmills, energy conservation, carbon taxes, emissions caps, closing the coal plants and pressuring our leaders.
I understand the opposition to clean energy projects. And I would have supported the opponents years ago - before climate science became clear. I live in the mountains above Lake Champlain, where the wind blows strong along the ridgelines. I'll battle to keep windmills out of designated wilderness if that ever comes up, but right now I'm joining those who are battling to get them built on the ridgeline nearest our home. And battling to see them not as industrial eyesores, but as part of a new aesthetic. The wind made visible.
The slow, steady turning that blows us into a future less hopeless than the future we're steaming toward now.© 2009 The Toronto Star
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
A very interesting approach to producing green power
I am across this interesting post at Tyler Hamilton's blog Clean Break. He is a reporter with the Toronto Star.
The company Riverbank Power has come up with an innovative pumped-storage hydro system, though they call it Underground Alternative Energy Production. The idea is to effectively use the movement of water into and out of an underground storage facility to produce electrical power. You let water run in during peak hours and peak demand and then you use the excess power, which is cheap, at off peak hours, to pump the water back out.
The technology to do this is clearly there, my question would be if the business case is there to do this. Is the differential between peak and off peak rates high enough to pay for the capital costs and cover the energy lost in the process?
I wonder if there are issues with storing the water underground in a created cavern and then returning it to the surface? What would the impact be on fish and wildlife? Would the water change in temperature and would that then be a problem?
I love it when people come up with interesting and innovative solutions, it is so much better than being opposed to everything and generally be negative and gloomy.
If climate change is happening, let us embrace it in the hope that it will bring us more and great wealth through the development of new technologies and new companies.
The company Riverbank Power has come up with an innovative pumped-storage hydro system, though they call it Underground Alternative Energy Production. The idea is to effectively use the movement of water into and out of an underground storage facility to produce electrical power. You let water run in during peak hours and peak demand and then you use the excess power, which is cheap, at off peak hours, to pump the water back out.
The technology to do this is clearly there, my question would be if the business case is there to do this. Is the differential between peak and off peak rates high enough to pay for the capital costs and cover the energy lost in the process?
I wonder if there are issues with storing the water underground in a created cavern and then returning it to the surface? What would the impact be on fish and wildlife? Would the water change in temperature and would that then be a problem?
I love it when people come up with interesting and innovative solutions, it is so much better than being opposed to everything and generally be negative and gloomy.
If climate change is happening, let us embrace it in the hope that it will bring us more and great wealth through the development of new technologies and new companies.
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