California’s Energy Planners Looking to Canadian Power
Each summer as demand for energy rises in California to power air conditioners, it falls in British Columbia as heaters switch off. At the same time, the Canadian rivers that can turn electric turbines are gushing with snowmelt.
The potential symmetry of this has not been lost on West Coast energy planners, who increasingly talk about the possibility of a unified power line grid stretching from the Yukon to the Mexican border.
The rewards are clear. Trading electricity between the Southwest’s peak summer season and the Northwest’s peak winter season, said Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.), could postpone the need for up to 7,500 megawatts of new generating capacity in the West, and with it the immense problems of siting new nuclear or coal-fired plants.
The idea has never gone far, in part because it is imperfect symmetry. In reality it means that British Columbia, a province more than twice the size of California but with only 3 million people, would become a major supplier of power to the south with all the attendant problems of development and transmission.
But two events may be changing the power equation:
- British Columbia’s present government sees power export as a potential economy booster, and publicly owned B.C. Hydro, the province’s electric utility, has even formed an export subsidiary called Powerex.
- The Pacific Northwest’s huge Bonneville Power Administration, which has earned up to $600 million a year selling its own surplus hydroelectricity to California, has been reluctant to open its transmission lines to Canadian competition. But BPA Administrator Jim Jura has become more amenable to accepting transmission ties with Canada now that Bonneville’s hydroelectric sales have been curbed in recent drought years and the Northwest’s power surplus is rapidly disappearing.
Two private Washington state utilities--Puget Sound Power & Light and Washington Water & Power--have proposed new cross-border transmission lines of their own to British Columbia. Bonneville is likely to follow suit.
“We’re in an era of greater flexibility,” said Sue Hickey, Bonneville’s assistant administrator for energy resources.
May Use Its Lines
Another impetus to cooperation is that a 1961 treaty giving BPA up to 1,400 megawatts of Canadian-owned power at a bargain price is due to begin expiring in 1998 and is up for renegotiation.
In return for extending that agreement or replacing that power with other Canadian electricity, Jura said, BPA may be willing to make available its lines for Canadian export to California.
“I believe it is time to include California interest to a much larger scale than we have in the past,” he said.
That is welcome news to Robert Mussetter, commissioner of the California Energy Commission, who is worried about the political struggle necessary to upgrade or replace the state’s aging oil- and gas-fired plants.
He said at a conference of Canadian and U.S. utility executives in Portland, Ore., this spring that energy conservation alone is unlikely to take care of rising demand in California. “We don’t have much of a back door,” he said.
Meanwhile, British Columbia has developed only half of its economically feasible hydroelectric power, but has enough proposed projects in its files--totaling 87,000 gigawatt hours--to equal 47% of California’s annual energy requirement.
A key element still missing from the regional rapport among utility executives is the concurrence of environmentalists and the opposition party in British Columbia, who warn that flooding Canada’s valleys or digging its coal to satisfy American energy deeds is political suicide.
Plan Draws Fire
“We’re not going to degrade our environment to power air conditioners in Southern California,” vowed Calvin Sanborn, staff lawyer for the West Coast Environmental Law Assn. in Vancouver.
A B.C. Hydro proposal to build a 900-megawatt dam on the Peace River in northeastern British Columbia, called Site C, has enraged some environmentalists because it would create a 50-mile long reservoir and flood more than 23,000 acres of the only prime farmland in that part of the province.
The utility is careful to emphasize that such a dam would only be for domestic Canadian power production. Nevertheless, the project is a powerful symbol of the company’s intentions.
“The government of British Columbia has said it will export power,” said Anne Edwards, the province’s Legislative Assembly member who is the opposition’s designated energy critic. “The people of British Columbia have not.”
Sanborn and Edwards predicted that the Social Credit Party in power can expect energy exports to be a key campaign issue in the next election, expected next year.
“It clearly is an emotional issue as well as an economic one” to nationalistic Canadians, conceded B.C. Hydro Chairman Larry Bell.
Chris Boatman, president of Powerex, agreed. But he said cross-border cooperation makes too much sense to be ignored. Powerex recently asked for private proposals to provide 600 megawatts of power for sale to the United States. Thirteen companies replied in May with various generation projects totaling 4,000 megawatts.
Negotiations are expected to take years and take many twists and turns. “Everyone talks globally, but they get parochial pretty quickly,” Boatman cautioned.
