VICTORY: GSX & Duke Point are dead - for now

Tom Hackney, GSX Campaigner and this year’s winner of the Sierra Club of Canada’s Conservation Chapter Award

Duke Point is dead. After six years, BC Hydro has shelved plans to build a gas-fired power plant at Duke Point near Nanaimo. With it goes the last vestige of a plan that would have seen 900 MW of gas-fired power generation on Vancouver Island and a pipeline across the Strait of Georgia.

The story began in September 1999, when BC Hydro announced plans to partner with the US giant, Williams Gas Pipeline Company, to build the Georgia Strait Crossing (GSX) natural gas pipeline from Washington State to Vancouver Island, linking to the existing Centra Gas pipeline.

Hydro planned to meet all new electricity demand using gas-fired power plants on Vancouver Island. The 250-MW Island Cogeneration Project was slated for Campbell River, MacMillan Bloedel (now Weyerhauser) was partnering with a private firm to build a 250-MW power plant at its mill site in Port Alberni, and BC Hydro planned to locate a 640-MW plant near Duncan by 2007.

The Sierra Club of Canada, BC Chapter became involved when Bo Martin and Tom Hackney of the Energy and Climate Change Committee decided to intervene in the federal regulatory process. Bo and Tom thought the climate change harm of fossil fuel use was unjustifiable, especially when BC Hydro’s own Electricity Conservation Potential Review (1994) showed potential to cut electricity demand by 25 percent or more. This theme has remained constant, and has gathered public support and political recognition. In 2003, the BC Utilities Commission ruled that a greenhouse gas (GHG) liability should be factored into the costing of gas-fired generation. And then in February 2005, the Kyoto Protocol became law, along with Canada’s GHG reduction targets.

But in early 2000, the energy to fight Hydro’s plans came mainly from people’s shock at seeing maps showing high-pressure pipeline routes through their back yards, past schools, and across farm fields. People became furious at community meetings when BC Hydro officials said the decisions were unalterable.

The BC Chapter linked up with citizens in Cobble Hill and Duncan and with the Georgia Strait Alliance and other groups to form the GSX Concerned Citizens Coalition. The Coalition (GSXCCC) devoted huge amounts of time and energy to refuting Hydro’s claims, bringing powerful evidence to the National Energy Board review of GSX and the BC Utilities Commission’s two reviews of successive power plant proposals for Duke Point (first BC Hydro’s Vancouver Island Generation Project, then the private Duke Point Power roposal).

GSXCCC also mobilized people all over the mid Island, as BC Hydro sought sites for the next power plant. First, the Coalition alerted Port Alberni residents, who blocked rezoning near a residential area. Next, the Coalition brought out crowds in North Cowichan to warn municipal leaders against changing their industrial zoning. BC Hydro finally found a site and sympathetic municipal leaders in Nanaimo, though by 2005, Mayor Gary Korpan was forced to acknowledge that his support for the power plant represented his personal views, not those of the City.

Despite a rubber-stamp approval of GSX by the National Energy Board in 2003, the GSXCCC and others delayed the pipeline so long that BC Hydro cancelled it in 2004, citing high gas costs and unfavourable economics for gas-fired generation (which we had warned of in 2001). Accordingly, BC Hydro then reduced its gas-fired generation plan to a single additional plant, part of the 252-MW Duke Point Power electricity purchase agreement. Hydro claimed this was needed to ensure “the lights wouldn’t go out” on Vancouver Island.

This already represented a big success, given the Sierra Club’s goal of reducing the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity. But we were going for gold. GSXCCC developed extensive evidence to refute the myth that a power shortfall could only be met by building power plants, and brought that evidence to the Utilities Commission’s review of the Duke Point Power deal.

In February 2005, the Commission approved the purchase agreement. But the GSXCCC, the BC Sustainable Energy Association, and the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation, working with the Joint Industry Electricity Steering Committee, applied to the BC Court of Appeal for leave to appeal the decision. It claimed that information was inappropriately kept secret and that there was a reasonable apprehension that the Commission had acted with bias.

On June 14, the Court granted leave to appeal. But the Coalition’s appeal never went ahead. Three days later, BC Hydro publicly announced it was cancelling plans for a gas-fired power plant at Duke Point.

There is a footnote to this story. BC Hydro is still looking for ways to generate more electricity on Vancouver Island in 2006, and will be again accepting bids from independent power producers. But it would seem the table has tilted slightly in favour of renewable energy. For the first time – undoubtedly because of the evidence submitted by the GSXCCC – the BC Utilities Commission will consider the liability of greenhouse-gas emissions and the cost of offsetting them when it assesses power generation proposals.

From the Fall 2005 Sierra Report