Tag: Site C dam

BREAKING: West Moberly First Nations Threaten Court Action Regarding Site C Safety Risks

25 January 2021

Also see story here.

WEST MOBERLY FIRST NATIONS

PRESS RELEASE

Court Motion Brought to Access Site C Safety Risks Kept from Public

First Nation “actively considering” new court injunction if work on “unsafe, unnecessary, and unlawful” Site C dam continues

January 25, 2021. Moberly Lake, B.C: In an open letter to the Premier and his cabinet, Chief Roland Willson of West Moberly First Nations has called for an immediate suspension of work on the “unsafe, unnecessary, and unlawful” Site C dam until there is a cabinet decision on cancellation.

News of serious problems with the dam’s foundations surfaced publicly in July of last year, but documents obtained by reporters reveal that BC Hydro knew of the problems as early as September 2019. Today, nearly one and a half years later, construction continues at a cost of $100 million per month with no safe solution to the problems in sight.

Details of the escalating costs and safety concerns remain shrouded in secrecy, with BC Hydro withholding its two latest progress reports from regulators and the Premier refusing to release the report prepared by his special advisor, Peter Milburn. Chief Willson’s open letter reveals that his First Nation will bring a court motion to obtain the information being kept from the public. This includes Peter Milburn’s report, two new expert reports commissioned by BC Hydro, and all draft reports, terms of reference, emails and geotechnical information.

The open letter warns that West Moberly is “actively considering” a return to court for a new injunction if the Premier allows construction to continue. In October of 2018, the Court denied a previous injunction but stated that a new injunction could be granted if there was an “unforeseen and compelling change in circumstances” before trial.

In the letter, Chief Willson urges the Premier to make good on promises to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and to uphold the rights guaranteed by Treaty 8:

“You can reject the madness of ploughing ahead with this unnecessary, unsafe, and unlawful project. You can choose instead to immediately suspend the project. You can work with West Moberly and other Indigenous treaty partners to provide truly clean energy alternatives that meet the needs of all British Columbians. You can show Canada and the world that the only way to escape our colonial history of neglect and betrayal is to act boldly and honourably in the decisions that lie before us today.”

Read the open letter here:

https://issuu.com/sagelegal/docs/2021_01_25__ltr_chief_willson_to_premier_re_site_c

Globe editorial: The Site C dam has been a disaster in the making for decades. Should B.C. pull the plug?

3 January 2021

Globe and Mail editorial, January 3, 2020

The report must have landed on British Columbia Premier John Horgan’s desk with a thud. It was not a welcome Christmas present.

The report in question is an independent assessment of the troubled Site C hydroelectric dam under construction on the Peace River in the province’s northeast. It was scheduled to hit the Premier’s desk in the days before Christmas, and could be made public as soon as this week.

It will be grim. How grim is the question.

Last summer, BC Hydro revealed Site C was in big trouble. A shaky foundation on the river’s right bank threatened the stability of the dam, and costs were spiralling. The $10.7-billion project was already over budget, with about half the money spent. Mr. Horgan ordered an independent review and said halting Site C for good was possible.

“If the science tells us and the economics tells us that it’s the wrong way to proceed, we will take appropriate action,” the Premier said.

If this sort of story sounds familiar – big dam, big promises and big problems – that’s because the saga of Site C has many prequels in the world of hydroelectric megaprojects. Backers exaggerate the benefits and minimize the challenges; then construction starts and predictable surprises pop up like weeds. What started life as a reasonable idea is suddenly twice as expensive – and no longer so reasonable.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, the Muskrat Falls dam is, at $13.1-billion, more than double its original budget. It has pushed the province to the financial brink. Ottawa, which had guaranteed $7.9-billion of project debt, stepped in again in mid-December and deferred $844-million in payments. Power is finally supposed to flow late next year.

The feds are also aiming to make Muskrat Falls viable – or are they throwing good money after bad? – by backing the so-called Atlantic Loop, a network to carry the electric power to Atlantic Canada.

For B.C., there is still time to turn back at Site C, as difficult and financially gutting a choice as that may be. Killing the project now means $6-billion-plus spent for zero power. But it may make sense, if pushing forward means a final bill at upwards of $15-billion.

There is bipartisan blame for this mess, which is decades in the making. There are two large dams on the Peace River, one completed in 1968 and the second in 1980. They have supplied plentiful and affordable power to the province. The plan had always been for a third dam. In 1967, a spot near the Alberta border, Site E, was seen as the best location. The terrain was firm, but it was rejected because of cost.

Instead, a decade later, the seemingly cheaper but geologically troublesome Site C was chosen.

In the 2000s, building Site C became a priority of the BC Liberals. It was exempted from an independent review and construction started – with a budget of $8.8-billion – in 2015. Former premier Christy Clark promised to get the work beyond the point of no return. In 2017, the NDP formed government. They had opposed Site C but Mr. Horgan decided to push forward. Mike Harcourt, a former NDP premier, in 2017 called Site C a “clear, unmitigated disaster.” And that was when only $2-billion had been spent.

More warnings came behind closed doors, before finally spilling out last summer.

Mr. Horgan’s first big decision as Premier in 2017 was whether to continue construction at Site C. The first big decision of his second term will once again be Site C.

Is the project already so far along that stopping it makes no sense?

In October, the C.D. Howe Institute released an analysis from two hydro experts, which concluded that the case for Site C is “getting weaker.” At $10.7-billion, it is only “marginally economic.” Cancellation, the report said, should be on the table if costs jump. At $15-billion, it makes more sense to shutter Site C, absorb the costs, and invest in wind power and battery storage, the report said. Wind power plus battery storage would also allow for smaller projects, rather than one huge one.

Site C was always a problematic place to build a large dam. Numerous decision makers over the years pushed ahead anyway.

Now, Mr. Horgan has to eyeball the sums and consider the conclusions in that report on his desk – and decide whether prudence means pressing forward, or turning back.

Globe and Mail: B.C. needs a public inquiry to sort out the Site C mess

31 December 2020

By Konrad Yakabuski, Globe and Mail, December 31, 2o20.
Article is paywalled so full text is here.

The evidence is now indisputable that British Columbia’s Liberal government erred in 2014 in approving construction of the Site C hydroelectric dam on the Peace River, and that the province’s current NDP administration should not have allowed the project to proceed in 2017.

The question now facing Premier John Horgan is whether, more than five years into construction and with about $6-billion spent on the 1,100-megawatt hydro generating station, his government can pull the plug on the project without causing more problems than it solves.

Either way, it is a bad situation that calls for a public inquiry into how Site C got this far in the first place. The pattern of a provincial hydroelectricity monopoly influencing gullible politicians to back its anti-competitive ambitions regardless of the costs is a familiar one in Canada. In its desire to block potential renewable energy interlopers on its turf, BC Hydro appears to have provided its political overlords with a less than fulsome explanation of the downsides of Site C.

This is not to say Mr. Horgan and former Liberal premiers Christy Clark and Gordon Campbell do not bear blame for what is becoming a financial fiasco. Independent energy experts warned them against building Site C, arguing that BC Hydro had used questionable assumptions about future demand and the cost of alternatives to make the economic case for Site C.

The risk that Site C would become a financial sinkhole was not even the biggest strike against the project. It had been common knowledge that Site C was a suboptimal location for a big hydroelectric project. There was a reason for that. The best sites in B.C., and indeed across Canada, had all been developed by the 1970s. Since then, provincial hydroelectric utilities had been pushing increasingly marginal developments to satisfy their thirst for empire building.

The extent of the problems now facing Site C and the likely cost of fixing them have been the subject of a review commissioned by Mr. Horgan after BC Hydro’s July disclosure that “foundation enhancements would be required to increase the stability below the powerhouse, spillway and future dam core areas.” In other words, the worst-case scenario that geological experts had warned about from the outset had, in fact, materialized. Quelle surprise?

In October, The Narwhal published the results of a months-long investigation based on Site C documents, obtained under a Freedom of Information request. The report noted that the technical advisory board overseeing Site C warned in May, 2019, that the stability of the dam is “a significant risk and the hazards of the weak foundation have been adequately recognized.”

Mr. Horgan has insisted that he was not aware of the geotechnical issues facing Site C until BC Hydro disclosed them publicly in July, more than 14 months after the technical advisory board had shared its conclusions. It remains unclear who knew and when about Site C’s problems along the chain of command within government leading to Mr. Horgan’s office.

“We put in place significant oversight on this project and it hasn’t proven to be adequate at this point,” Mr. Horgan this month told Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer.

Frankly, that is not good enough. Only a public inquiry, similar to the one Newfoundland and Labrador conducted to get to the bottom of the Muskrat Falls boondoggle, can identify those responsible for allowing a misguided project to continue unchecked. The original $8-billion cost of Site C was revised to $10.7-billion in 2017. But foundation reinforcements alone could boost the construction price tag by another $2-billion. More cost overruns seem inevitable.

Mr. Horgan punted a decision on Site C’s fate until after last October’s provincial election by appointing Peter Milburn, a former deputy minister of finance under Ms. Clark, to recommend whether the project should be halted. Few observers are betting on Mr. Horgan to pull the plug on Site C, however. Organized labour, a major force within the NDP, has been a big supporter of the project and the construction jobs it has brought.

There are still a few optimists who believe the economic case for Site C could be salvaged if B.C. could sell power from the project to Alberta, enabling the latter province to decarbonize its electricity grid. Interprovincial electricity co-operation is, however, one of those uniquely Canadian ideas that never materializes. Besides, private electricity producers in Alberta have invested billions in natural gas-fired generating capacity that can keep the lights on at a far lower cost than power from Site C, even if the gap will shrink gradually as carbon taxes rise.

It will take a public inquiry to expose the folly that led B.C. to this very bad place.

 

Gary Mason: Site C is a disaster in the making

20 October 2020

B.C.’s Site C dam project is a disaster in the making
By Gary Mason
theglobeandmail.com
October 20, 2020
Article is paywalled, so full text is below.

Of the many issues awaiting the next government of British Columbia, none is more vexing and politically fraught than the Site C dam project.

On its present course, it has the potential to be the greatest financial disaster in the province’s history. And all indications are it will be John Horgan and the New Democratic Party who will have to make some enormous, financially consequential decisions related to the problem-plagued undertaking.

Before calling the current election, which concludes Saturday, Mr. Horgan ordered an investigation into the current trajectory of the project and the consequences that its myriad challenges are expected to have on final costs and timeline.

That report is expected in the next few weeks. It will almost certainly contain bad news. The question is whether it will be bad enough to cause the government to consider cancelling it, despite the billions that have already been invested – and the billions more yet that it would cost to halt it in its tracks.

Mr. Horgan had, until recently, steadfastly rejected any notion of killing the project and taking the losses. However, pressed on the campaign trail by Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau, he opened the door to that possibility.

In referencing the report that is coming, Mr. Horgan said, “We’ll take a good hard look at the evidence, and if the science tells us and the economics tells us it’s the wrong way to proceed, we’ll take appropriate action.”

While that statement may have buoyed the hearts of thousands opposed to the dam, cancelling it at this juncture seems unimaginable. On the other hand, the thought of a cataclysmic failure of the dam’s wall down the road – not to mention the small army of engineers from BC Hydro that is already working, right now, to triage the dam – must keep Mr. Horgan up at night.

The problem is the soft sedimentary shale that underlies the construction site. Harvey Elwin, one of the country’s most experienced dam engineers, has observed that he’s never seen such appalling foundation conditions for a project of this scale. Documents recently obtained by Ben Parfitt of Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) have revealed that a decision to pour massive amounts of concrete to build a buttress before a critical water-drainage tunnel was completed “could cause the notoriously unstable shale rock to move even further.” Several prominent British Columbians and the former chief executive officer of BC Hydro, Marc Eliesen, have called for the project to be stopped until an independent team of professionals can assess the situation.

BC Hydro has been less than upfront (to put it mildly) about the problems the project is experiencing. The whole thing has the feel of an issue that is growing in ugly complexity every day, the ramifications of which are enormous for the provincial treasury.

Site C started out as a concept that would cost $3.5-billion. When plans became more serious, the price tag was changed to $6.9-billion. By the time the BC Liberals approved it in 2014, the estimate rose to $8.8-billion. When the NDP took over in 2017, it ordered a project review by the B.C. Utilities Commission, but by that point, almost $2-billion had already been spent. It was determined that if the project was cancelled at that point, it would cost another $2-billion – a $4-billion writeoff.

So the NDP decided to push on with the dam, at a revised estimate of $10.7-billion.

No one believes that will be the final tally – not by a long shot. Comparisons to Newfoundland and Labrador’s infamous Muskrat Falls dam fiasco suddenly seem not so far-fetched.

As is always the case in these matters, it will be future generations that will bear the brunt of the pain. In the case of Site C, hydro rates are going to have to rise precipitously in order to pay the bill.

And then there is the indelicate question of demand. By the time the dam is scheduled to be completed in 2025, there is expected to be little need for the power it produces. Demand will be there down the road, but it can be reasonably asked if that power could have been supplied far more cheaply, with less damage to the environment, via independent producers and alternative forms of energy such as solar or wind.

There is no question that the BC Liberals deserve enormous blame for this debacle, pushing the project to the point where most believe there was no turning back. But it’s the NDP’s problem now – and they are likely to wear this, no matter what happens.

Thanks for reading! PLEASE sign the petition to halt Site C!