Public purchase orders issued to private power licensees to date will cost British Columbians more than $30 billion dollars. A number expected to climb dramatically.

BC’s public rivers and public rights are being abused as is the public electric utility.

British Columbians are guaranteeing the costs of completely unnecessary private power developments while lucky licensees reap forty years of publicly guaranteed profits.

Behind a veil of confidentiality BC’s public utility is continuing to issue forty year contracts to buy electricity from license holders possibly appointed by the Premier. Inclusive of green credits and upcoming carbon offsets the public pays $120.00 for a megawatt of electricity made from private facilities built with public money based on free energy sources that yield no public benefits.

Private river power from BC, as it is sold to the US, will fall under US energy security rules and the people of BC will be left without recourse. Generations of British Columbians will shoulder compound losses occurring through losing control of rivers and access to water and watersheds which are being devastated today by private river power projects without public or First Nations consultation although a few exceptions do exist.

Compounding public financial losses will grow while citizens pay private power producers for very expensive power on terms of up to forty years. BC Hydro is buying electricity from private power licensees at $100 plus per megawatt which is almost twice the price it can be sold for. When private electricity is bought and sold each day as it must be, it is sold, on the US spot market, as an example at $50.00 which adds another $50.00 to every $100.00 taxpayers have already spent to buy the needless power. At first citizens were told small private projects of ten to fifty megawatts were to be built by private investors. Public consultation and oversight over private power developments in BC was ended by law in 2006. General Electric’s partner got a 500 million dollar public purchase order on its first try. GE’s partner, mining stock promoter Donald McInnes is rumoured to be in line for an award for his green success. The next GE/McInnes target is estimated to be a twenty billion dollar public purchase order that would change one of the planet’s most beautiful places, the Bute Inlet into their private power project, putting seventeen rivers into generators.

Since the middle of the last century British Columbians, through their wholly owned public electric utility, BC Hydro, made and benefited from their own green electricity made from their own rivers. Since 2001 with the introduction and rapid development of expensive and unnecessary private power projects that come with compounding public debt formulas BC’s next generation will have to pay for all of those projects, they will own none of them, benefit from none of them and will be left with no choice but to forfeit the most powerful and profitable public electric utility in Canada, the economic mainstay of BC, BC Hydro.

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