BC Hydro recently released its new Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), the Crown utility’s approach to meet future electricity needs for the coming decades. While the plan is a thoughtful combination of actions to keep power affordable and reliable, its overly conservative assumptions for future electricity loads, especially including industrial ones, aren’t sufficiently visionary to build B.C.’s electrified future.
Premier David Eby has articulated a vision of the province becoming a “clean energy superpower.” Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s list of now 11 projects of national interest for fast-tracking includes both projects that create potentially massive new electricity demand as well as significant new transmission and production capacity. For B.C., this includes two large LNG facilities, the North Coast Transmission Line and a mine expansion. If fully electrified, these “nation-building” projects could consume up to two Site C’s worth of power—and that’s before accounting for the additional critical mineral mining projects the North Coast Transmission Line might unlock.
As a result, BC Hydro’s cautious approach to integrated planning could leave the utility scrambling to meet demand. The IRP contains three scenarios (low load, reference load and high load) informed by economic forecasts, immigration levels, trading relationships and government policies—but these new, large industry-oriented electrical loads are not fully envisioned in any of the IRP scenarios.
Under the reference load scenario—considered the most likely future—BC Hydro estimates the province must add 13 per cent more capacity by 2030, which is equivalent to 1.7 more Site C dams. Between 2030 and 2035, the utility must add another 8.5 per cent, equivalent to 1.2 more Site C dams.
To fill these gaps, BC Hydro has already initiated additional resources, including last year’s new call for power, renewing energy purchase agreements while moving forward on community solar and efficiency measures. Still to come by 2030 are new resources in the form of more customer solar, efficiency programs, and new power acquisitions. Taken together, these resources result in small electricity surpluses (three and five per cent, respectively, above the reference scenario in 2030 and 2035). But while the utility has a clear plan to smartly meet the electrification needs it forecasts, using a range of programs and technologies to keep electricity rates affordable, its narrow-sighted long view of demand threatens to undermine otherwise positive steps forward.
In other words, BC Hydro’s new plan has the right ingredients but the wrong portions to meet Canada’s nation-building moment.
Globally, the pace and scale of electrification have surpassed estimates nearly every year. While having buffers for 2030 and 2035 is a positive development, the estimates they’re based off are nonetheless conservative, failing to heed the IRP’s own conclusions that overbuilding the electricity system is preferable and cheaper than underbuilding the grid. The IRP also ignores a provincial commitment for scheduled, periodic calls for power to provide business certainty and insure against future shortages.
Critically, none of the IRP’s load scenarios assume the province will meet the climate change targets defined in the Climate Change Accountability Act and the Clean Energy Act. Despite recent pullbacks on climate policy, including eliminating the consumer carbon price, pausing the EV sales incentive, and rescinding the requirement for LNG facilities to be net zero, the fact remains that the province’s climate targets are in law, just as the global trajectory toward an electric future is unambiguous.
British Columbians’ electricity bills are already among North America’s lowest and roughly half of what an Alberta household pays for power. Thoughtful planning decades ago set the stage for the affordable and reliable electricity system we have today. As electricity becomes the new oil in the global economy, BC Hydro and the province must ensure that the IRP is built to overachieve, not underachieve.
This post was co-authored by Rachel Doran and first appeared in Business In Vancouver.