IPPs destroy environment

January 20th, 2010

[Letter to the editor, The Local - Sunshine Coast, January 14, 2010]

IPPs destroy environment

The Provincial Government has taken a radically new direction of providing energy for BC citizens and industry. There are basically two reasons why this direction needs to be reversed: one, we cannot afford a doubling or tripling of electricity costs and two, nature, which provides the life-support system sustaining all life, including ours, cannot afford the reckless environmental destruction caused by almost all the proposed Independent Power Projects (IPPs).

The government’s new Energy Plan has taken away BC Hydro’s right to create new energy and given that job to the private sector. It is forcing BC Hydro into long-term “use or pay” contracts with private producers that I understand already amount to over 30 billion dollars. Investors are falling over each other trying to get into this action. You cannot beat a return on capital of at least 10% come “hell or high water” over 30+ years, guaranteed by BC Hydro and paid for by us, the electricity users. No wonder the BC Utilities Commission has found that the government Energy Policy is “not in the public interest.”

While the financial exploitation of BC energy users, mainly average citizens, via this new Energy Plan is bad enough, the environmental destruction caused if even a small portion of the hundreds of proposed IPPs are allowed to proceed is devastating. For example, the proposed hydropower project on the Tzoonie River in Narrows Inlet involves building three dams four metres in height, an 8.5 km transmission line that crosses over the Caren Range, and diverting water from streams and lakes at 19 different points. This is essentially an investment in environmental destruction.

Increasingly, people today understand that the most important asset we have on this planet is the natural life-support system. Nature produces the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and regulates the planet temperature. Therefore, the first and vital step we must take, if we and all our fellow living things want to survive long-term, is to protect the remaining intact areas of the natural environment. The new Energy Plan does exactly the opposite. Like the Tzoonie River, hundreds of other natural watersheds are threatened with destruction for the sake of providing a fat return for wealthy investors. We cannot allow this to continue.

The Green Advisory Task Force on Procurement and Regulatory Reform must recommend that the Government restore and reaffirm BC Hydro as a publicly held, fully integrated power generation and transmission system; permit BC Hydro to investigate and construct small hydro, wind, tidal, and other forms of renewable energy; prohibit the private export of electricity; and conduct a provincial environmental assessment of all private power projects.

Hans Penner
Roberts Creek, BC