BC's Massive "Site C" Dam gets go ahead
 

This huge project when completed is said to power the equivalent 450 000 homes or 8% of BC's total electricity needs. Also said to be BC's largest infrastructure project ever?! Not sure how to post news releases so if Metro or Cranespotter could help in that regard that would be awesome.

$8.8 billion - that's not cheap! $20,000 per house powered - that seems absurdly high?

Ya im not sure of where all this cost is going. Does seem uber expensive.

10% margin for error given current electricity prices (provided that they need to pay this off in 25 years. Under current prices, they cannot expect to pay it off in 20 years.)

Yeah, that timescale was what I figured it at too. I'm all for hydro power (and whatever, I'm not going to be paying for this anyway!), but when I saw that price tag I was expecting an incredible amount of power, not less than a gigawatt.

I guess if it's got a lifetime of 50+ years the economics would look a lot better.

I thought they mentioned a 100 year lifespan? It is possible as there's a few dams between here and Nelson that are around that old.

Earth fill dam :yuck: And for that price tag :yuck::yuck:

At $8.8 Billion (most recent budget that just jumped...) or nearly $20k per home, I wonder how many other non-polluting options could be built? Wind, solar, run-of-the-river, tidal etc. Lots of options out there. I don't know their respective costs are but I would hope that is part of the business case for this dam being built. Far less long-term costs with a dam I suspect.

Out of the 'green' options this seems like the least to me. You have to flood ridiculous amounts of farmland (a very scarce commodity in BC), build massive hydro lines to distribute then energy, potentially cause severe geological damage (didn't some recent dam projects cause earthquakes?), move residents, remove everything from flood area, piss off the natives that have unsettled land claims in the area etc.

I wonder how much of this being pushed through is really just the feed the energy requirement of LNG terminals. If that's the case, then most of their requirements will likely be met with using natural gas electric generators.

Nothing wrong with earth fill dams as long as the resevoir storage is controlled, and isn't built on top of a fault line. There is a book written about a fictional terrorist event that takes place in BC, the book is called "the wave" ( http://www.randomhouse.com/book/8486...ristopher-hyde ) and it specificly calls out BC's earth fill dams on the Columbia as a disaster in waiting. In the novel, damage to Mica plus a landslide pushes over the dam. The novel was written before Revelstoke dam was built, and obviously before Chernobyl froze most new Nuclear plant plans.

As for BC, geothermal http://www.cangea.ca/bc-geothermal-r...mate-maps.html , Wind and Tidal generation are still options.

But do we need it?

Realisticly, for domestic emery use, no. We still have the Columbia river treaty power generation we can call on, as an option. Right now BC just sells it for a pittance to the US. http://blog.gov.bc.ca/columbiarivert...ty-highlights/

Building it now, the farm land value is of questionable viability (eg it's less valuable than land in Surrey) but, once it's lost, it never comes back. That was one of the huge issues with the land lost by the Columbia river treaty dams. It would almost be worth trucking the top soil to another more viable valley to create new usable farmland.

But in the end, BC's lack of farmland is a direct result of flooding a lot of it for hydroelectric capacity. Deja vu?

I agree. If its built right, inspected constantly we would never see a repeat of the Teton Dam disaster.

Is this a dead river for fish? Or is a fish ladder part of the design?

It is downstream from two other dams, one of which is very large. Compared to the damage already done by the Bennett Dam, this one should be negligible.

The Peace flows into Lake Athabasca, not the Pacific, so it does not have a salmon run.

Bennett is one of the largest earth fill dams in the world and implants one of the largest reservoirs by volume. It required remedial work in the nineties to repair sinkholes.

I wonder why there are no dams on the Alberta side of the Peace. They could benefit from the storage providing by Bennett Dam.

New $400 million wind farm to be built near Tumbler Ridge

New wind farm is going to cost less in capital costs per home powered. $400M to feed 54,000 homes is approximately $7,400 per powered house vs Site C costing $20,000. Yes, operating expenses are likely to be higher with wind versus hydro. I still stand by my opinion that Site-C is a waste of money and there are cheaper clean alternatives.

I think we need both. Cite-C only address part of the incremental growth BC is projected to have. Wind is also needed but variable.

Wind is variable, but if you have enough wind generators in enough different areas would that not resolve the variability issue?

Geothermal has yet to be tapped.

In theory, but you will end up producing way more electricity than you ever will need, and you will still need to build a backup plant (pumped storage or natural gas) unless you're willing to accept the 1% of time when your system produces nothing. Ends up being super expensive.

Today it is expected that Elon Musk is going to announce that his new giga factory will also be producing lithium ion batteries for homes, offices, and industry drastically cutting the cost of having a personal home battery system. This coupled with evermore cheaper solar panels is democratizing the energy grid. SolarCity (Musk is Chairperson) will likely carry the products.

The near-future is not having large centralized power stations with expensive infrastructure to where it is needed. The near-future is to generate the power where you use it with a backup of centralized power.

I really do hope those lawsuits stop Site-C from being built. The dam is too expensive, to risky, and not the right solution for BC. Geothermal, Solar, Wind. All great options!

Certainly for single family homes and less dense distributed generation is the future, at the very least 30 years out.

Site-C road contracts have started going out to tender

BC has embarrassed itself twice now by talking the talk but being unable to walk the walk. Northern Gateway and the LNG export facilities have fizzled. Let's stick to what we know. This is going to be a mega project that actually comes to fruition

A reporter from Dawson Creek today flew over the Site C dam site in a Cessna and took a bunch of pics. In his words... "Stunning what they've done in 42 days".

Here is a teaser pic with the rest to be released tomorrow apparently.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/COVSY1fUcAEMfr3.png:large

Source: Jonny Wakefield

Bye-bye arable land.