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Note: In the video, I say that BC currently has 1.9 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of LNG production. The correct number is 19 mtpa. Prime Minister Mark Carney said in his Terrace speech that he thinks the West Coast can produce 100 mtpa by 2035.
British Columbia’s new electricity strategy has a problem. It confuses having a clean electricity system with having an electrified economy. The distinction matters.
For years, politicians have pointed to B.C.’s hydroelectric dams as evidence that the province is a clean-energy leader. The province’s electricity grid is, indeed, among the cleanest in North America. But according to the government’s own figures, electricity supplies only 17 per cent of BC’s total energy needs. The remaining 83 per cent still comes largely from oil and gas used in transportation, home heating, industry, and other sectors of the economy.
That reality casts the government’s new “Powering Growth, Fueling Opportunity” strategy in a different light.
The announcement earlier this week was presented as a comprehensive plan to power economic growth, support electrification, and prepare the province for rising electricity demand. Yet much of what was unveiled had already been announced. BC Hydro’s recent calls for power. Upgrades to existing hydroelectric facilities. Transmission investments already underway. Even some of the headline-grabbing hydroelectric proposals remain little more than concepts that are years, if not decades, from construction.
The deeper problem is one of scale.
Energy Minister Adrian Dix has spoken admiringly of emulating Norway’s model: a jurisdiction with a large hydroelectric system, extensive electrification, and significant oil and gas exports. The province hopes to expand LNG exports, support new mining projects, accommodate growing electricity demand from data centres, and electrify more transportation, buildings, and industrial processes.
All of those goals require enormous quantities of electricity.
Yet the strategy provides little evidence that B.C. is preparing for the magnitude of the challenge. Electric vehicles represent only 4.9 per cent of the provincial vehicle fleet. Heat pumps are installed in only 13.5 per cent of homes. Electrification of commercial buildings and industry remains in its early stages. At the same time, jurisdictions such as China are rapidly scaling electric technologies and building the infrastructure needed to support them.
The question facing British Columbia is whether the province is prepared to build power generation on the supply side while electrifying consumption, the demand side, by three or four times by 2050. That would bring it in line with the trends in Asia and Europe.
As UBC Professor Werner Antweiler explains in this interview, if other economies electrify to increase efficiency and drive down costs, but BC doesn’t, then the province will become less and less competitive. Rising productivity supports a rising standard of living, while falling productivity leads in the opposite direction.
If BC hopes to become the clean energy superpower it claims to be, Premier David Eby and Dix have to provide better than empty boasting and warmed-over strategies.
