Quote:
Originally Posted by whatnext
Yay, let's all hear it for BC Hydro's green power grid! Where's the details on how this imported power was generated? 
BC Hydro imported a quarter of the province’s power in the last 12 months
By Amy Judd & Aaron McArthur Global News
Posted November 28, 2024
New numbers show BC Hydro imported a record amount of electricity over the last 12 months.
According to documents filed with the B.C. Utilities Commission, BC Hydro imported 13,600 gigawatt hours of electricity in fiscal year 2024, at a cost of nearly $1.4 billion.
“It’s very disturbing that British Columbia’s now relying on 25 per cent of our electricity to come from outside the province,” Barry Penner with the Energy Futures Institute told Global News.
“Most of that’s from the United States. Just how we got here, I know we’ve had some low water years, but it’s also an indication we just have not been planning ahead and doing what’s really needed to keep pace with the growing demand.”....
https://globalnews.ca/news/10892803/...wer-12-months/ |
I have had a couple of interesting conversations over the years about PowerEx Corp (BC Hydro's for-profit energy trading arm) that might shed some light on the situation.
The short version is that the Columbia River Treaty (currently up for renegotiation, with an Agreement In Principle reached this past summer) establishes obligations and opportunities for BC Hydro.
The
obligation side of the coin is that a guaranteed minimum amount of river volume must be continuously sent across the border from the Canadian side to the US side (no Grand Ethiopian Dam situation allowed). In addition to this baseline, whenever they wish, downstream US treaty partners can "request" BC Hydro release X hundred thousand or million cubic metres of water and specify that it must reach US dams downstream over Y period of time, up to a certain treaty limit. BC Hydro
must comply and release the required amount of water from its reservoirs to ensure that the required amount of water reaches the US in the set timeframe. Understandably, the whole thing is functionally automated at this point, with many hundreds, if not thousands of release requests sent annually, and BC Hydro uses a tremendous amount of sophisticated modelling to figure out how to optimize the release of water from its system of reservoirs to fulfill its treaty obligations with the least impact - short and long-term - on its generating capacity.
On the
opportunity side of the coin, BC Hydro, by treaty, can 'bank' the equivalent amount of electricity that the released amount of water would have created, as measured in megawatt hours, were it to have gone through a generator. Depending on the situation, BC Hydro might flow the treaty request water through its generators to make power, or, if the grid was running at capacity, it would just open the sluicegates and dump water over the top of the dam, so to speak, sending it down river. Regardless, BC Hydro adds X megawatts to its ledger and bides its time.
Through PowerEx, BC Hydro monitors the energy spot market in the US and when it is advantageous to do so, it can compel the treaty partners to buy a certain banked amount of megawatt hours from the BC grid at the US spot market prices for the 'buyers' region. PowerEx times its sales to achieve the highest possible yield, which it pays out to BC Hydro. BC Hydro flows the required amount of water through its dams to generate the amount of purchased power that is sent to the US (this is over and above whatever BC Hydro would normally be generating for the BC grid).
Separate from the Columbia River Treaty, PowerEx regularly buys power from US and Canadian markets when the price is low (i.e. late at night) and puts that into the BC grid, allowing BC Hydro to reduce the flow on dams (aka "turning off the dams at night and plugging an extension cord into your neighbour's grid"). This makes a lot of financial sense, especially from producers supplying thermal power (e.g. Alberta coal) and nuclear power (e.g. California) that always have a base load output to the interconnected west coast grid, especially if it means conserving reservoir capacity for peak periods and any Treaty demands.
Other times, the opportunistic sale under Treaty of our power at peak periods compels BC Hydro to be simultaneously purchasing power from Alberta to keep the grid stable, all while making a profit. To preserve adequate reservoir capacity, especially in the dry months, BC Hydro undoubtedly must find itself preferring to conserve its own long-range production capability by buying power from its neighbours at less advantageous times, which costs more money. If the total amount of purchased power is going up, like the article says, then BC Hydro is also undoubtably buying more and more power in absolute terms, regardless of cross-border arbitrage.
Increased purchasing from our neighbours is also likely a deafening canary in the coal mine for climate change, since less snowfall means shorter-lived snowpack storage which means less water in summer for the reservoirs.
Anyway, just wanted to put some perspective on the
BC Hydro imports a quarter of its power headline. BC Hydro should still absolutely be installing generators on existing dams where space was left for their installation in the future, retrofitting existing dams with more efficient generating equipment, investing in grid-scale storage (battery, pumped water, etc.), get serious about building the next Site C ASAP, and sign on to be a pilot project for the use of small modular nuclear reactor for a high-demand point-source location like Kitimat, if not committing to a full-scale nuclear reactor as soon as possible, possibly jointly owned and operated with Alberta (locating it in the Peace Region would make a lot of sense).
Incidentally, some among us might remember the 2000-2001 California energy crisis, when Enron, among other wholesalers, and some electrical production companies manipulated the electricity market to create astronomical profits when they spiked the daily spot market prices. PowerEx, holding a treaty ledger full of guaranteed power purchasing, made an absolutely killing compelling its treaty partners to buy BC power at catastrophically high spot market prices. PowerEx got caught up in the ensuing lawsuits from Federal and state regulators and lumped in with Enron as one of the villains. The court cases dragged out for more than a decade, with PowerEx defending itself against more than 3.2 billion dollars in claims on the grounds that the Columbia River Treaty permitted PowerEx's actions. Ultimately it agreed to settle for $750 million, which was actually going to be less than $300 million in real terms because PowerEx was still owed nearly half a billion dollars from its California-based litigants party to the settlement.
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