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Tidal Energy: “Not for us” says power company

February 6th, 2009

By Paul Crossley

Green is everywhere these days. Even in tough economic times, governments are speaking about ‘green jobs,’ the ‘green economy’ and such noble concepts.

Talk like this can give us hope that these harsh economic days, months and years to come will see the birth of new industries focussed on giving us what we need albeit in a greener overall package.

So, in a Canadian province ostensibly on the forefront of everything green it seems incredible that the province’s power company has turned down green power. British Columbia’s Crown Corporation, BC Hydro says that it now requires that any new technology which would provide power to the grid must have at least three years of ‘proven commercial reliability’. In short, BC Hydro is saying, “Sell your power to someone else, and after you’ve done that for three years, then you can come and talk to us.”

Ostensibly, BC Hydro claims that the strategy of not buying energy from ‘unproven’ sources is to ensure that customers face no undue additional risks to their power supply and the cost of electricity. This is fairly plainly a cop-out. In fact, this is a question which deserves debate at the highest level, since this is not a privately owned power company.

In an age where government-affiliated organizations will face legislated carbon emissions reductions, and where every new home added to the grid in British Columbia is effectively powered by coal since hydro-electric capacity is maxed-out, green energy must be welcomed at any technology level - fully proven or otherwise! In the coming years, BC Hydro will likely be required to purchase Carbon Offsets in order to stay within legislated guidlines, but ironically those carbon offsets will be purchased by the taxpayers.

At the center of this shameful debacle: Coastal Hydropower Corp. Over the last two years this Nanaimo BC based company has spent millions of dollars testing submerged turbine technology in order to harness energy from the tides.

Contrary to the “unproven technology” argument from BC Hydro, Neil Anderson, Coastal Hydropower’s president says, “We’ve used other people’s technology to develop our own turbine based on our experiments in the Campbell River area.”

Anderson further indicates that, “Even though our new turbines are more efficient, we have to look to places like Quebec, Ontario and the U.S. to sell and use the technology due to B.C. Hydro’s policy. This policy is impacting about seven or eight other clean energy companies in the province. This province tends to flip-flop on a lot of these issues and it’s a setback for small companies like us.”

In a province that has seemed to indicate that green is the way to go, regardless of cost or initial discomfort or teething, BC Hydro states that, “There’s the cost issue in that unproven and new technologies will likely cost more and there’s also technical issues around connecting the new technologies to our systems and the safety concerns that go with it.” It would seem that BC Hydro is simply saying that they don’t have the technical prowess, or the willingness to embrace new technologies for the sake of this proclaimed worldwide green revolution.