Weighing the cost of another dam

A scan of the Prince George Citizen digital archive reveals Site C was a topic as far back as 1974.

At the time, the W.A.C. Bennett Dan was relatively new (flooding took place in 1968) and B.C. Hydro was thinking ahead to additional power needs. With the two rivers policy in place, additional power from the Peace was one major option.

It is interesting to read the opinions and news from the time.

One particularly vitriolic editorial "damned W.A.C. Bennett to hell" for building the dam. It described the dam as an appeasement to the captains of industry, providing low cost power which corporations wouldn't pay for and leaving the taxpayer in the lurch for the costs of financing the project.

Where have I heard that before?

It does seem the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Back in 1974, when Site C was still a distant dream, there were other sites on the drawing board, including one in Alberta. The reservoir for the Dunvegan dam would have reached across the Alberta/B.C. border while Site E could have flooded Site C.

In any case, it is evident from reading old newspaper accounts that the damming of the Peace has been a long standing controversy.

For that matter, the damming of the Columbia was equally controversial as was the construction of the Kenney Dam. After all, dams have major environmental impacts.

But they also generate the energy we use in our daily lives.

Every year, we are using more and more energy. I have made this comment before but consider the devices we employ in our daily lives with little thought to the embedded energy content. For example, it takes about 1 gigajoule or 278 kWh just to put a smart phone together. The actual energy costs for using the device are dwarfed by the energy invested in creating one.

How many people in this province have a smart phone? Perhaps more to the point, how many people have traded in an old phone for a new one in the last year?

Industry sources estimate a life span for the typical phone of between 2.5 and four years. There are around three million phones in British Columbia, which would lead to a turnover rate of around 800,000 per year. It is not hard to see that our lifestyle is very energy demanding.

Of course, smartphones are not made in British Columbia. They are made in countries which don't enjoy the benefit of clean hydro-electric plants. To put things in perspective, wind turbines and hydro-electric dams come in at 26 tonnes of carbon dioxide per GWh generated while nuclear power plants are around 29 tonnes/GWh. Coal-fired power plants,

on the other hand, generate

888 tonnes of carbon dioxide per GWh while natural gas generates 499 tonnes/GWh.

So, on the one hand, we can say our electricity doesn't generate greenhouse gas emissions.

We have clean energy. But on the other hand, we import devices from countries where generating electricity is much more carbon dioxide intensive.

British Columbia has some of the cleanest energy in the world but our insatiable demand for more consumer goods and technological devices means we are still using more and more energy on an annual basis. We are simply exporting the carbon dioxide emissions.

And we still have an ever-increasing demand for electricity.

For the average consumer, the dams on the Peace and Columbia have meant clean electrical power at relatively cheap prices for the past 40 years. We have been willing to sacrifice land for lower energy costs and reliable supplies.

This is particularly true when the land is 1,000 kilometres from our major urban centres.

But for the environmentally conscious, dams represent the worst form of rape of the Earth as they completely change the local ecosystem and affect the migration and grazing patterns of countless species of animals while impacting local vegetation.

For local farmers and ranchers, Site C and its predecessors represent the destruction of homesteads and the drowning of farmland. Interestingly enough, in 1974, the Peace River region was fine with the creation of the W.A.C. Bennett and Peace River Canyon Dams as they did not affect the local communities. It was Site C and Site E, along with Dunvegan in Alberta which caused one councillor to declare there would be a "holy war" if any of these dams went forward.

In the intervening years, Site C has been on the backburner of B.C. politics. We have increased our energy demands to the point where the overall system cannot keep up with expected growth. Alternative energy sources, such as wind turbines and run-of-the-river projects, have limited capacity to fill in the gaps.

We are at a point where we need to consider our overall energy consumption. Is our lifestyle worth the cost of a new dam?