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It's 90-odd pages of dense engineering verbiage, but it boils down to one remarkable fact; tens of millions of dollars and years of work on the part of B.C. Hydro has been shelved, at least temporarily, because the numbers don't add up.

After almost 10 years of work and an outlay of something close to $80 million, B.C. Hydro was found late Monday to have failed in establishing that the $370-million gas-powered generating plant proposed for the Nanaimo area was the most cost-effective means to meet Vancouver Island's power needs. There's no immediate word on the future of the equally expensive Georgia Strait pipeline crossing. But with the destination in doubt, the pipeline now looks just as sketchy as the plant it was supposed to supply.

The B.C. Utilities Commission issued the declaration after several months of study. And based on that declaration, it is denying the legal certificate that the utility needs to build the plant.

And there is next to nothing B.C. Hydro can do about it.

It's fair at this point for Vancouver Island electricity users -- now that more than $700 million worth of public mega-project has been stopped in its tracks -- to ask one simple question: What the hell is going on here?

How can the major Crown corporation in this province spend years going further and further down one road only to be told at almost the last possible moment that it may have taken the wrong fork a few years back?

To be fair, it hasn't been a static environment since the mid-1990s, when the previous government told the utility to start looking at doing something about the Island's power needs. After all, that was four premiers ago. The volatile price of natural gas has gone all over the map. The government has changed. And the province's energy policy has been redrafted.

But many observers were still startled Monday to realize that a regulatory agency has told B.C. Hydro it simply hasn't made its case. The early line from the provincial government is simply that they empowered the commission to regulate Hydro and make these kinds of decisions, and that's what's happened. But if this evolves into total chaos on the Island power grid in the next few years, the Liberals won't be able to escape the blame by pointing to the New Democrat government.

The Vancouver Island Generation Project had a rocky road under the NDP, it's true. It migrated to a different location and went through assorted versions and private partners before taking its present shape.

But Liberals let it drift on for another two years after taking office, and after installing their own people at Hydro, without asking much in the way of questions. And their new energy policy, which sidelines Hydro's continued role in favor of private partners creating all the new power that will be needed, may have contributed to the utilities commission decision to toss Hydro for a big loss.

The commission wants Hydro to proceed with a call for tenders on other Island-based ways to address the power shortage (which elsewhere was declared to be very real and very near). Those tenders will likely come from assorted big users who popped up in the last year or so with ideas that the commission obviously took seriously. But those users have a healthy distrust of B.C. Hydro, which is nevertheless now in charge of reconsidering their proposals.

"The denial of a certificate for VIGP is a result of the commission panel being unable to find that VIGP is the most cost-effective solution to the problem at hand," the decision states. "The future reliability concerns remain and the panel expects B.C. Hydro to reapply for a certificate ... by spring 2004 to resolve these concerns."

The immediate problem is obvious in the commission's very attempt to dismiss it.

"It is the panel's impression that bidders into the call for tenders can anticipate a fair and transparent process, especially given Hydro's willingness to engage an independent reviewer and the commission's eventual review of a certificate application."

That may be a bland assurance to Norske Canada and the others who were interested. Or it may be a veiled threat to Hydro, which has provoked criticism from such prospective partners in the past.

Either way, the winter of 2007 is crunch time in terms of peak demand exceeding supply. Reaching that milestone with enough electricity on hand -- cost-efficient or otherwise -- is going to be a very close shave.

leyne@island.net