Because BC Hydro is paying for power at the inflated prices during times of year when we don’t need it, we have to sell it at market value to other jurisdictions. IPPs have already cost us $3 billion in losses and are about to cost us $16.2 billion over the next 20 years. I asked an independent expert, former treasury board director Ken Davidson, to take a further look into IPPs. So when I became minister of energy and started to review BC Hydro, it became clear that we needed to get a handle on just how much the IPPs were costing us and if they were worth the power. Over the past ten years, however, IPPs proliferated around BC, all getting contracts to sell their power to BC Hydro at around $100 per MWh. I brought our voices to Victoria as your MLA and we succeeded. Not surprisingly, our region rose up against this project to save the two creeks and our pocket books.
The result would have been empty creek beds, dumped waste rock, dead blue listed bull trout and us paying for power at an extremely inflated price when our generators on our major Kootenay dams were already going full tilt with the spring freshet. They would have sold that power to BC Hydro at roughly $100 per megawatt hour which is significantly more than than what BC Hydro could sell it for.
Axor was planning to burrow 16-foot tunnels through the mountain, diverting the creeks into generators to develop power during the spring freshet. In 2008, Gordon Campbell’s plan for independent power production (IPP) came to the Kootenays with a Quebec company’s plan to build run-of-river hydro power projects on Glacier and Howser Creeks that flow into Duncan Lake.
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