February 20, 2017

More Hum; Less Varoom

The Economist reviews the speed of change in motor vehicles.  The internal combustion engine’s replacement by the electric motor is happening faster than expected. It often seems that technical progress exceeds expectations, while we humans change slowly.

e-vehicle

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The implications are clear.  More electrical energy usage; less fossil fuel usage, leading to demand reduction.  Greater impetus to “leave it in the ground”, and growth of such stranded assets as an issue for utilities, fossil-fuel corporations and the governments that subsidize and enable them.  If, that is, we can overcome resistance to change by fossil-fuel companies, their captured governments, and their well-funded propaganda agents. And if we can continue to take advantage of the dropping costs for renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
The demand reduction scenario is especially concerning for Alberta’s highest-of-all high-cost tar sands industry.

THE high-pitched whirr of an electric car may not stir the soul like the bellow and growl of an internal combustion engine (ICE). But to compensate, electric motors give even the humblest cars explosive acceleration. Electric cars are similarly set for rapid forward thrust. Improving technology and tightening regulations on emissions from ICEs is about to propel electric vehicles (EVs) from a niche to the mainstream. After more than a century of reliance on fossil fuels, however, the route from petrol power to volts will be a tough one for carmakers to navigate. . . .

Ford’s boss is bolder still. In January Mark Fields announced that the “era of the electric vehicle is dawning”, and he reckons that the number of models of EVs will exceed pure ICE-powered cars within 15 years. Ford has promised 13 new electrified cars in the next five years. Others are making bigger commitments. Volkswagen, the world’s biggest carmaker, said last year that it would begin a product blitz in 2020 and launch 30 new battery-powered models by 2025, when EVs will account for up to a quarter of its sales. Daimler, a German rival, also recently set an ambitious target of up to a fifth of sales by the same date.

Posted in

Support

If you love this region and have a view to its future please subscribe, donate, or become a Patron.

Share on

Comments

Leave a Reply to Alex BottaCancel Reply

  1. In Vancouver this is going to be a big issue considering how many people don’t own their own parking spots, and the extent of garages being replaced by laneway houses.
    The city should roll out as many on street chargers as they possibly can. AC chargers are basically just fancy extension cords with a fault checking mechanism. They could rolled out in a manner similar to street lighting. There are already mechanisms for cost recovery, principally using payment systems like charge point.

  2. The case for converting public transit vehicles, taxis, and delivery vehicles to electricity is even stronger than for private cars. What needs to be done to accommodate and speed up this transition?
    PS. My thought is that trolley wires may be the best way of charging transit buses, at least until batteries become much lighter per unit of energy. Batteries have become much less expensive, but only slightly lighter per unit of energy.

    1. That’s a good idea. I remember Seattle had hybrid buses that were trolley electric buses downtown but then they could also fire up the diesel engine and go into the suburbs that didn’t have trolley wires.
      The same could be done with battery electric buses, hybrid trolley/battery. Charge and power from trolley wires in town but then go full battery elsewhere.
      Okay, I can’t be the first one to think of this. It must be out there.

  3. Leaving fossil fuels in the ground is not really an option because a typical oil refinery produces a variety of essential products many of which find their way into the embodied energy and materials of the car itself and in addition the car is operated on asphalt pavement. Removing gasoline from the equation certainly helps the environment but to what extent? considering that the average oil refinery produces naphtha, diesel fuel, kerosene jet fuel, lubricating oils, paraffin wax, waterproofing, roofing felts, roof sealing, tar>roofing shingles, tar paper, petroleum coke>calcined to anode coke>for use in the aluminum and steel industry, sulfur; >sulfuric acid, sulfate and phosphate fertilizers, sulfur matches, sulfur derived insecticides, fungicides, bactericides, pharmaceuticals> protein and organic cofactors>and so forth. Fossil hydrocarbons are very useful but combustion emissions need to be eliminated.

    1. Take away combustion and the volume of fossil fuels required drops enough that the industry will fail to exist as we know it. We all appreciate there are other uses for oil but it is energy that is the driving force for its extraction. We’ll probably also find substitutes for the other uses over time.
      Leaving fossil fuels in the ground will increasingly become an option. Especially since it’s mostly only the difficult expensive stuff with lower energy return that is left.

        1. Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal…
          But if your talking about grease and not ‘grease’ I’d suggest there will still be a fossil industry. It will be less about fuel. And if fuels are taken out of the industry’s economics we’re likely to find other forms of grease (among other things) that aren’t so expensive and environmentally damaging. Even if we don’t, the industry will be a small shadow of it’s former self.

        2. From Wikipedia we have:
          Grease generally consists of a soap emulsified with mineral or vegetable oil.
          No fossil materials required if vegetable oil is used. Also, ;synthetic greases can be made using silicone – again, no fossil fuel required. And we can currently produce hydrocarbons from air and sunlight. Who needs fossil materials? Keeping follil fuels in the ground is not really an option – it is a necessity if we want to keep the planet livable.

      1. With about 95% of transportation using fossil fuels, that is an excellent place to start substituting petroleum out of the picture. Road transport can and should convert over time to clean grid-based power. Today’s North American locomotives burn diesel to operate generators to in turn power electric motors to turn the wheels. Grid power removes two steps in that process, eradicates GHG emissions from operations and is very efficient compared to internal combustion.
        There are bugs, inefficiencies and of course politics to weed out, but oilseed-based biofuels do have the potential to currently dilute (up to 20% without engine modification) then eventually replace diesel in farm vehicles and possibly ships. What’s more, the farmers themselves could own their own fuel production through that great Canadian tradition: farmer’s cooperatives. Even the most conservative among them would leap at the chance to kiss Esso goodbye and receive both deep discounts on their fuel bills and dividends on their shares. The key is to enact agricultural policies to limit biofuels to marginal, non-food producing land using conservation tillage and to supply fuel only for farm, commercial and emergency service vehicles.

        1. Put another way, remove private non-commercial cars and SUVs from the energy equation and it will suddenly balance in the opposite direction.

  4. The issue not discussed is SCALE. We have over 1B vehicles on the roads today that use gasoline or diesel. Over 120M vehicle PER YEAR are added to it, or replacing aging vehicles. Yes, over 100M cars PER YEAR.
    While e-cars for urban use make sense today, due to capacity and range constraints they do not make sense for anything long or medium distance incl. family cars, trucks, tractors, ships and airplanes.
    We use 100M barrels of oil daily. 1M electric cars would replace about 50,000 barrels of daily barrels of oil. http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/will-electric-cars-unplug-oil-prices 10M cars would be 5M barrels. Peak oil is expected in about 2040 i.e. it is almost 25 years out when world oil production is expected to peak due to peak demand.
    There is just not enough solar or wind capacity to replace this quickly. We ought to discuss nuclear in this context as that is the only energy source of scale to replace enough oil for energy use.
    Due to these range constraints I believe hybrid vehicles will be more and more common.
    I love e-cars as they are quiet and actually cheaper to use in cities, per km or per h of use counting all costs incl. maintenance. Just don’t believe all the hype of an imploding fossil fuel industry anytime soon, due to SCALE.

    1. And now for an antidote to Thomas’s conjecture, which always fails to account for the decline of CHEAP oil, and the lack of sustainable production capacity of expensive oil from unconventional, hard-to-reach sites that oil industry and its media hypesters say isn’t anything to worry about.
      *We have analysed future yearly oil production until 2050 using the available statistics for discovered, produced and consumed oil and oil products. Conventional crude oil, the type of oil produced from the Middle East and the North Sea, reached its maximal rate of production of 70 million barrels per day (Mb/d) in around 2007. Since then, production of this oil type has declined. Production of unconventional oil, such as from Canada’s oil sands and the “tight oil” from shale formations in the USA has, up until 2016, compensated for the decline in conventional oil production. However, by 2050 total global oil production will have declined.
      *In the fall of 2014, the marked increase in production of tight oil (shale oil) in the USA, Russia’s increased oil production in its Asian regions, and Saudi Arabia’s upgrading of old oil fields caused a surplus of oil production leading to a crash in the price of oil. Now the production of tight oil in the USA is declining. This means that the annual rate of production decline from today’s currently producing conventional old fields becomes decisive in determining overall future production. The fields that today are producing 66 Mb/d will, by 2050, only produce 15 Mb/d.
      *Importation of oil is critical to the survival of most nations. The volume of oil available on the world’s export market were greatest in 2005 at 43 Mb/d. Now the available export market volume has contracted to 40 Mb/d. Over the same period, the demand for imports of oil into the Oceania region and those Asian nations outside of the OECD has increased by 5 Mb/d. The opportunities for oil importation available to the world’s remaining nations have declined and will decline further. The world’s oil importing nations including the EU are unaware that they face this problem.

      Kjell Aleklett, energy analyst, 2017.
      https://aleklett.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/the-swedish-parliamentarians-receive-the-book-a-world-addicted-to-oil/

      1. With rising oil prices more supply will be found and/or brought on stream. It will also curb demand i.e. smaller cars, more car sharing and more e-cars.
        Peak oil is expected around 2040 .. many articles on that just google
        peak oil 2040
        here’s one: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-outlook-iea-idUSKBN13B0OP
        Canada’s oil production is expected to rise anther 50% or so by then .. see here https://www.neb-one.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/ftr/2016/index-eng.html#s5 and oilsands is a big part of it. That of course assumes far higher price than today’s $50’s/bbl
        “By 2040, Canadian crude oil production in the Reference Case reaches 963 10³m³/d (6.1 MMb/d) , 56 per cent higher than 2014 levels. By the end of the projection period, oil sands production accounts for 79 per cent of total production, compared to 59 per cent in 2014. Figure 5.1 shows the Reference Case projection by type of crude oil.”

        1. Thomas, The reason you like Trump so much is because he can help you in your mission to be right on this. Some politicians and political parties will do their best ensure that fossil fuels hang on long before it’s past-due date.
          Take away the $trillion subsidies and they’d already be in decline.
          Scale is big.
          Exponential growth in renewables and EVs and urbanizing cities with improved transit is bigger.
          Even Trump can’t help you with that.

        2. What subsidies ?
          Renewables make up a tiny TINY portion of the 250 BOE (barrel of oil equivalent) daily energy use.
          Don’t believe all the “renewables are our saving grace” fake news ! It will all be very very slowly .. and if peak oil is 2040 20-25% higher than today then I’d say it is 2060 – 2065 when we will finally will use LESS oil than today, 1/2 a century from now.
          We might see 25-30% of new cars being electric, mainly in an urban setting or as second cars.

        3. I love it when someone who wants to be taken seriously extinguishes all credibility with a grand absurd statement:
          What subsidies?

        4. The “subsidies” decried by the anti-everything crowd are mere business writeoffs or legit tax reduction expenses such as depreciation. There is no principal difference between writing off a windmill in 5 – 15 years or an oil sands refinery in 5 or 12. Is your PC subsidized because you can write if off in 3 years, but may use it for 5 before you buy a new one ? Do oil companies get free land ? Do they get cash ? Those are subsidies. Look at the benefits sch as tax revenues, royalties, PST or GST generated too. Does it not make sense to encourage an oil refinery, for example, with accelerated depreciation if it creates billions in tax revenues ? Similar to many car or aerospace plants. Only Bombardier to my knowledge got real subsidies ie CASH not one oil or gas company in Canada.
          Kindly enlighten me re these alleged “subsidies”. Kindly.

      2. As always, the overly optimistic reports on the global oil supply in the financial press selectively choose their data. As the result, they constantly underestimate — or in Thomas’s case, disregard — depletion rates. That is the most glaring flaw of today’s forecasts.
        Here is the reality: when depletion rates from all sources are accounted for we can expect production to decrease between 41 and 60 million barrels a day by 2040. That will cause prices to escalate, then bump against the affordability ceiling and cause a recession. This is the standard volatile pattern of the story of oil.
        Here’s a simpler translation: we’re already up the creek.
        HSBC Global Oil Supply Report (2016):
        Executive Summary, p4:
        If we assume 5-7% [per annum] decline rates on a benign estimate of 59mbd of global post-peak output, the supply lost between 2016 and 2040 amounts to 41-48mbd. For context, this is broadly 4x the current crude oil output of OPEC’s largest producer, Saudi Arabia (c.10.5mbd). Assuming all other pre-peak production is held constant, this is the amount needed just to keep supply flat.
        To provide in addition for the expected rise in global demand over the period, the additional supply needed could be closer to 55-60mbd.

        http://www.getreallist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/HSBC-global-oil-supply-Sept-2016.pdf

        1. The tar sands will not make up even 15% of the lowest estimated global shortfall in the HSBC report. Moreover, all the expensive unconventional production sources (tar sands, deep sea, shale) will collectively jack the price even higher as the cheap, easy stuff diminishes further. And shale regularly has precipitous decline rates after the first 12 months of production.
          Oil has become a fool’s game.

        2. I certainly will not bet on the oil supply. Peak Oil was touted years ago by many scaremongers, including an ex-bank economist who wrote a book on it and calls himself an expert. Then the price crashed and crashed again.
          All turned out to be fake news. Yes, a fools game.
          New oil is being discovered all the time. As Iraq comes back there will be more. Once Venezuela becomes stable with a new government they will start cranking out loads more. Expect the USA to drill baby, too.
          If you want to short oil go ahead but be careful.
          http://www.ogj.com/oil-exploration-and-development/discoveries/more-discoveries.html

    2. Agreed. These folks haven’t even thought through the fact that “renewables” can’t be manufactured without the support of a fossil fuel economy..

      1. For now.
        Eventually they will be. The best use of fossil fuels is to build a renewable energy base robust enough to be self supporting.

  5. Grid-based clean electric power in Canadian cities is probably the most efficient use of energy all around and the best way to address GHG emissions short of deep conservation. Kudos to Vancouver / TransLink for keeping and upgrading the trolley fleet over the decades and adding high-performance electric rail transit.
    Electrical generating capacity could become a potential limiting element in the widespread conversion of the private car fleet from fossil fuels to electricity. BC Hydro’s debt is already $18B with another $4B about to be booked as the first installment on Site C, which is expected to exceed $11B in construction cost. There might be a market to sell power for urban EVs being that there isn’t one for LNG or trans-border sales to Alberta, but all ratepayers (including EV owners) will have to pay for it.
    The other limiting factor on EVs, not fully realized yet, is the vast public infrastructure private transport requires. It amounts to a massive subsidy of an inefficient form of mobility. The rich may love their Teslas, the middle class may soon have more Volts and Leafs to whittle away at Tesla’s EV market share, but the working poor will always require transit. One day the mandarins may wake up to fact that public money doesn’t wash in with the tide, and decide to start shifting these funds toward public transport and zoning more suited to today’s demography and needs.

  6. So can we conclude that we will be refining oil for some time to come and probably long past the down side of peak oil as well simply because the stuff is so fundamental to the mechanics of a global industrial production system. Its products include fuels, lubricants, asphalt pavement, water sealers, roofing, and it is a feed stock for; sulfur, sulfuric acid, phosphate, polyethylene, polypropylene and so forth.
    We can dream of building the Site C Dam and generating clean energy for off peak over night charging of millions of lower mainland e-cars. We can imagine reducing the gasoline demand to near zero, but we will still need all of the other products that come from hydro carbons. Maybe gasoline will become a giveaway by product of the refinement process. Just saying, the future is hard to predict.

    1. Not exactly.
      A good start would be to go after the 95% fossil fuel dependency rate in transportation, and there will then be plenty left for all the other non-fuel products.
      Someone (urbinflux?) once worked out that converting the Metro’s 1.5 million private car fleet to EVs will require the equivalent new electrical generating capacity of two? three? Site Cs. Solar and wind could supplement the stable base-load power of hydro. However, there are very good reasons to lower our dependency on cars altogether based on economic and energy efficacy.
      It needs to be noted that hydropower will be increasingly threatened by glacial melt and lower reservoir volumes beyond mid-century. The BC and Alberta glaciers have already lost about 30% of their mass on average over the last century. That rate is increasing, so we’d better get cracking on developing geothermal, tidal and other renewables

        1. Um, you know that weather ≠ climate, right? California is SUCH a great example … But now that you mention it, what is to prevent SiteC in quakey BC to not have the same issues as Oroville? That’s a lot of problems created by one potentially leaky basket.

  7. It’s going to be pretty expensive for condos to retrofit charging stations so that you aren’t paying for your neighbour’s transport every time he plugs into a common outlet. Much easier to do in a SFH with a garage.

    1. It’s easier to use a service such as chargepoint to monitor usage and charge independently through that rather than retrofit outlets to each electrical metre.
      Hook the system up to the strata metre, reimburse the strata. Just charge via credit card.

      1. Our strata is just now discussing it. Is there actually enough capacity to the building – usually not – or even on the road to feed into numerous buildings/stratas to allow 20-30 high voltage e-chargers per building ? The cost for BC Hydro and stratas’ infrastructure implications are enormous.
        As such the e-car pickup is initially limited to second cars for affluent folks that have a garage.

        1. That’s leading utilities to investigate being able to control the load of car chargers. A car uses as much power as a stove, but you don’t see brownouts every night at dinner time.
          Hydro just needs to make sure that everyone doesn’t max out their charging at the same time as they use all their other heavy loads. They should also do some big upgrades in distribution, but I think they know its coming.

        2. Kindly point me/us to BC Hydro’s plan here as our strata is doing this investigation right now. This debate must happen all over BC for apartment buildings, commercial properties or stratas wishing to install “a few” chargers. When in a condo complex of say 100 condos “a few” exceeds say 3 or 5 there might, or might not, be an expensive upgrade issue. Most units are not laid out for an add’l stove, for example, and certainly not 100 stoves that might be on at the same time. That might also affect the whole road if there are say 12 buildings on a block. Can the grid handle 400-800 new “stoves” ??

      2. You don’t seem to understand Thomas.
        You never design for the connected load. You design for peak load. They’re different things. If the new cars are generally charged at night, then its not when everything else is maxing out the demand, so you’re fine for capacity.
        BC Hydro isn’t there yet, they don’t even have time of use charges yet. That is something that smart meters can do though. The cars generally come with timers built into their software, so you can do it that way.
        Take a look at chargepoint.
        https://www.chargepoint.com/products/how-to-choose/

        1. I get the idea. Smart metering as done in Ontario is a huge ripoff as everything went up 2-4 times. My understanding is is that electric lines are designed for peak load as in everyone has the toaster, stove, W/D and car charger on at the same time .. otherwise fuses will blow. As such, for mass adoption for e-cars a lot has to change in the grid. And that ain’t cheap.
          Tesla 3 btw is US$ 35,000 for the base model. In Can $ with a decent range it is $60,000+.

        2. That’s one more reason that switching out the entire car fleet in the Metro and eventually the province to electricity will likely be problematic. That’s three million cars.
          And one more reason that decreasing car dependency in urban areas while improving transit makes more economic sense.

        3. No. Peak load means the most power you actually consume, not that the most power that you could theoretically consume. I
          Lets say you have a clothes dryer, two ovens, two electric cars, an electric furnace, a water heater and an air conditioner. Its very unlikely all will be on at full power at the same time. Some will be on, some will be off.
          Engineers only size your wires and transformers to handle maybe a couple of those big loads at any given time. Your stove and your baseboard heater, your air conditioner and your washing machine, your car and your water heater. They’re probably not going to be all on at the same time.
          As is, electric heating and stoves are the biggest load spike. It’s the worst case because they start to get used at the same time as offices and other daytime loads are still in play.
          I doubt overnight car charging and any other loads at night will compare to daytime uses of power.
          Power companies typically have problems finding customers to take their power at night. Hydro doesn’t have this problem, but lots of utilities essentially give away power for free at night because nobody wants it and they can’t turn off the plants.

  8. Tesla start delivering the Model 3 later this year for $35,000 which is below BMW prices. With a 350 km range this car could well be a game changer.
    Within the next couple of years there will be at least eight E vehicles to chose from. Chevy Bolt EV, Ford Focus Electric, VW e-Golf, BMW i3, KIA Soul EV, Nissan Leaf, Mercedes Benz B Class electric, etc.
    The BC Liberals probably saw all this increased need for clean energy coming. Site C will be needed sooner than we think. It’s the future.

    1. That assumes that max power draw occurs simultaneously. Just like adding 400 bathrooms to existing houses doesn’t make the same difference than 400 houses … there are only so many people who are going to go to the washroom during the superbowl halftime.
      The ‘smart’ car charger will do so when rates are lowest, so exactly not when most people are using their stoves to cook dinner.

      1. This is also overlooking the alternatives to SiteC .. the same $ could buy solar panels on half the province’s houses. Could renovate 70,000 houses to PassiveHouse (which would save the same energy as SiteC would generate).

        1. As is, BC Hydro provides under 20% of the province’s energy. Most is gas, and oil.
          If you want to replace that other fraction, we basically need all of the above to be built. The anti-Site C discussion is moronic when it’s framed that way. That isn’t the mandate of the BCUC though.

      2. Solar Panels get old and cruddy after a few years, they don’t last for more than a couple of decades. I know, I was looking at some recently. Unless the frames are stainless steel and expensive, they rust too. Even aluminium frames corrode and rot. Whereas, Site C will be operating and providing power for many years.
        Even renovating an old house to PassiveHouse standards is very expensive if the walls and the windows, as well as perhaps the roof has to be replaced. Then, you have a building that will be good for another 30 years, maybe.
        All the tax money invested is then lost. The solar panels and the whole house then goes to the dump.
        Site C will still be providing power.

        1. Just so we’re clear … solar panels on half the province would provide much more power than siteC .. so its an apples to bushel of apples thing. One could also install just those we need, and then when need more, install more (and by that time let them be better/cheaper/more efficient/etc).
          I didn’t say PH wasn’t expensive, but there is a lot more jobs created doing them than there is building Site C (several times more man-years). 30 years? Um, the debate in Vancouver is whether to protect houses built in 1940, installing a new roof is cheap, and would be necessary for that house no matter what system chosen. And then you get a huge number of people trained in future building technology, not past.
          If the current estimates hold, we’d still be paying off site C in 75 years+ … it won’t be providing power so much as wasting money all that time.
          This isn’t to say that any the above need to be done in isolation, just that there are many different ways of getting to a similar goal that don’t drown useful farmland. If each was done to some extent, we’d generate/save the same amount of power for much less to no-more cost, with many fewer externalities.

        2. 1) The farm land isn’t as useful as the foodies say. There are currently 6 farms there. Even optimistically taking the entire reservoir area over as food production primary lands wouldn’t go very far in terms of food production. The majority of the reservoir is a canyon.
          2) The power it makes will conservatively have a value of about $250M/yr. That pays for a lot of dam.
          3) Solar isn’t a direct replacement for hydro because it has no storage. Adding storage currently more than doubles the cost of solar power. In BC the power production wouldn’t at all line up with demand. As is, you can’t just save up summer solar production for winter heating needs.

        3. There is a massive difference between a new roof and a really new roof. Old buildings tend to change roof claddings: tile, shingles, EPDM, etc. These are now what makes a PassiveHouse. A new roof is a new structure with new insulation and tight joints and a new cladding on the top. Different tings. Different prices. I doubt if my shingles can be replaced with a cheap product to bring my house up to PassiveHouse standards.
          Site C is really a piddly little dam in world, or even in Canadian scale. The lost land is less than 28 square kilometers. Recent approved developments in Quebec of the James Bay hydro electric project have flooded and changed the direction of rivers and cover an area over 140,000 square kilometers. That’s big. Site C covers an area about one five thousandth the size of the Quebec project. No wonder the Trudeau federal government and the Minister would not even look at the Site C project for consideration.

        4. This is getting so off track … the point was, and is, there are more ways to skin a power supply than simply saying “Electric Cars = We need more peak power supply = SiteC” … there are ways to think differently about the issue, and to think better.

  9. @ urbinflux
    Your dismissal of the agricultural potential of the Peace River lands to be flooded for Site C as merely a “foodie” concern needs to be taken up with this person:
    http://holmonfood.blogspot.ca/2014/01/smarties-4-dummies-land-lost-to-site-c.html#!/2014/01/smarties-4-dummies-land-lost-to-site-c.html
    Holm is an agronomist who conducted one of the most intensive analyses of the site conditions and concluded that the project’s publicly-stated impact on the potential is grossly underestimated.
    The fact the productive soils on the benchland is in a valley is an advantage, not a liability as you assert. The winter and shoulder season temps are higher because the land is protected by the valley slopes. It’s a supersized solar collector. The halfways-to-the-midnight-sun insolation is far higher than the Lower Mainland, which supercharges the photosynthetic rates when it really counts: during the growing season. Holm estimated that if the Class 1 soil alone in the sun-catching protected valley (a bit less than 2,000 ha.) was farmed as intensively as our local ALR, the farm receipts would ring in at around a billion bucks a year. In terms of lost opportunity, 11 years of high-value food crop production would equate to the cost of the dam with generations of productivity to come.
    While true the valley produces only low value hay crops at present, the soils were built over millennia. Once flooded, they will never return. Who can say where this factoid on a permanently lost opportunity will rest in a few generations when the BC population has doubled and the long supply chains that bring imported food from California and Mexico start to break at their weakest links?

      1. Are reasonable question would be; why has this land of Eden not been used before for a higher value crop than hay feed?
        This is like the movie theatre declaring that after fifty years it’s going to close and then all the locals turn out and promise to start going if they stay open.
        Why we’re the farmers up there not growing food crops if the earth so magnificently wonderful?
        The only thing they are offering now is sour grapes.

        1. The reason is that it is far easier to be AGAINST s.th. than FOR s.th .. as it takes real effort, money and ingenuity to create but protesting and objecting to other people’s money, effort and ingenuity is very very easy. Ditto with highways, bridges or pipelines ..

        2. “The reason is that it is far easier to be AGAINST s.th. than FOR s.th ”
          That would explain your opposition to addressing human-accelerated climate change. It is just easier to let future generations worry about it. Very sad.

        3. The benefits of a warmer climate are underdiscussed as are the benefits of human progress the last 100+ years due to far cheaper energy vs human suffering due to far far higher energy prices needed to address alleged climate change by man. I just don’t buy into the hype and climate religion, like millions of others. The temperatire is ring 2-3 degrees. Woopeedoo.
          Underdiscussed in this context is also massive debt accumulation .. another issue left for future generations to deal with. Party now – pay later is better why ?

        4. The benefits of a warmer climate are not under discussed, rather they are understood as a contributor to there being no net benefits. If you want to take the good, you need to acknowledge the bad, and the resultant net negative overall. Cherry picking is for orchardists.
          Climate impacts by man aren’t alleged, they are well understood. Open your eyes and your ears. Stop going on blind faith alone. That is the true manisfetation of what you call climate religion.
          Your expressed concern for massive debt is totally at odds with your frequent calls for rapid transit to be built everywhere you travel, not to mention the much higher cost of dealing with climate change later instead of sooner. You continue to promote party now pay later in this respect. It doesn’t matter whether you want to believe it, it is happening regardless. Science doesn’t depend on your unsupported opinions.

        5. The Government of Ontario just won an important award for their Green Energy Programmes.
          Lifetime Achievement Teddy: Government of Ontario for its mishandling of the energy file.
          The Government of Ontario has a long track record of mismanaging the province’s energy policy, resulting in an expensive disaster for Ontario consumers. In her 2015 Annual Report, Ontario’s Auditor General found that Ontario consumers paid an extra $37 billion above the market price for energy between 2006 and 2014, and estimated that current energy policies would cost Ontarians another $133 billion by 2032.
          Such eye-watering numbers are not the result of any single policy mistake, but rather a series of ill-advised policy decisions, including long-term fixed-price energy contracts at above-market rates; the Green Energy Act (GEA), which has transferred billions from Ontario taxpayers to money-losing renewable energy providers; the promise to cancel planned gas plants in the middle of an election; a smart meter program that ran $1 billion over budget; and boneheaded decisions such as overruling the Ontario Power Authority to convert a Thunder Bay coal plant into a biomass facility that can only run on imported wood chips from Norway, generating electricity at 25 times the normal cost.
          “The Ontario government has a proud tradition of ignoring their policy failures and lurching blindly on to the next one – as their decision to impose a new cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, which the Auditor General says will increase electricity prices by around 25% – clearly shows.” said Wudrick

        6. Ontario has the HIGHEST debt per capita of any sub-nation. Not only is Ontario drowning in debt due to green energy mismanagement due to false climate beliefs, but also the green king of the US, California: crumbling schools, highways and water infrastructure due to excessive regs, overpaid civil servants, an eroding middle class, fleeing corporations, illegal immigration widely supported and misguided focus on socialist climate policies. The physical collapse of a social state: http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rex-murphy-in-ontario-the-taxpayers-sustain-wynnes-green-energy-perpetual-motion-disaster .. or this here on their equally mis-managed cities: https://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2012/07/12/california-cities-go-bankrupt-but-bullet-train-barrels-on/#2b69f43f8eb9
          This too is likely in BC with an NDP government blind to anything economic. Canada is heading down that path. Meanwhile, as Rex Murphy points out, the Tesla guy gets a rebate at the expense of the over-indebted middle class.
          We cannot discuss green energy and climate policies without looking at the fiscal mismanagement, incl. excessive debt and overly large public sector pay packages. These items are linked !

      2. You missed the point, Eric and Thomas. Soil and viable agricultural environments are some of the most undervalued and least understood natural resources and practices that exist today. This is exactly what the agrologist said when she took the environmental reviewers to task for their near absolute negligence and ignorance of this issue. If you intend to kibosh a resource, then you should know and acknowledge the real value of the resource, and understand the relevance of opportunity costs. The greatest friend to this ignorance is the site’s relative remoteness.
        The Site C location contains seven classes of soil, rated on their ability to produce food. The fact this resource has not been developed to its fullest extent is nearly irrelevant to the history of drowning valley farmland for dams and reservoirs, no questions asked. Who cares about dirt and farmers?
        You also missed the point about the future. Just because a resource hasn’t been developed fully doesn’t mean it will not have great value to future generations building a sustainable self-sufficient society. You certainly wouldn’t say that about undeveloped gold or oil or forest resources, would you?

        1. BC wins kudos from environmental organizations all over the world for the clean, environmentally sustainable green hydro electricity that it provides to its citizens.
          The alternatives are all inferior.
          British Columba is growing and the energy that will increasingly be required is electricity. This is not difficult to understand.
          Of course, if you hate the present government then you are obliged to complain about everything they do – even if makes perfect sense.

        2. Indeed.
          A hydro dam in a far away place in the middle of nowhere makes more sense than ugly noisy wind turbines by the hundreds all over the Lower Mainland or solar panels in cloudy BC places. 6-10 c per kWh at the house is tough to beat and all renewable options in BC would be triple to quintuple that hydro rate.
          Solar panels ought to stand on their own feet and in many places they do, and in others they do not.
          No need to replicate Ontario’s, California’s or Europe’s costly subsidy and debt creating mistakes with 50% higher gasoline costs, 3-6 times the electricity costs or 50% higher consumption taxes – although it appears we are heading that way in Canada for unknown reasons anyway in a socialist scheme to impoverish the middle class like a frog in boiling water bit by bit.

        3. Since any major project be it a bridge, pipeline or dam is so hard to get through the environmental review, legal and native “consultation” process these days in BC it makes sense to have this dam ( like Massey Beidge ) slightly oversized for the next 20-30 years as these project last a century or longer !!

    1. I did a fun calculation several months ago when I got invited to an Anti Site C protest.
      I figured out how many potatoes the entire area of the reservoir (including cliff banks and the current river etc.) could possibly make (given the average per hectare yield of potatoes in Canada) and compared it to the CO2 likely offset potential of the dam (using average oil and gas consumption rates in BC).
      The result was about 20kg of CO2 per kg of potatos, and that’s with everything tilted as far in the crops favour as possible.
      I see that equivalency, and know that those crops simply aren’t more valuable than the carbon emissions that this dam offsets.
      Solar and Wind aren’t a panacea either. The amount of energy used in their construction currently means that they emit somewhere between 30-50g CO2 per kWh. Hydro currently sits at about 4g CO2 per kWh in our climate. Pushing a big pile of dirt around is much easier than making square km of semiconductors.

      1. Conservation tillage, N-fixing crops, inter-cropping, poly-crops, biochar …. these obviously did not factor in to your calculations.

        1. Ok, so how much CO2 do you think you can sequester annually in a 9,330 hectare area with that climate?
          Unless it’s being pull out of the biosphere it’s not sequestered.

      2. @ Urbinflux
        You also missed the point Holm made about growing a wide variety of food crops. A diet consisting of nothing but potatoes? Hmmm.

          1. Lets assess this need more power thing … in 2015 Electric cars made up 2% of the fleet. http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/electric-vehicle-numbers-growing-in-b-c-but-still-far-behind-gas-powered-counterparts
            Has there been a corresponding increase in power usage? No
            https://in-sights.ca/2017/02/11/induced-failure/
            Where might that power go? http://www.ammsa.com/publications/windspeaker/site-c-dam%E2%80%99s-electricity-destined-lng-industry
            If so, powering LNG with clean power isn’t a carbon sink in any definition I understand.

        1. I have visions of big diesel powered trucks bringing potatoes from the Peace River Valley to we hungry souls in Vancouver. Or maybe big diesel powered refrigerated trucks bringing us fresh lettuce.
          It’s about the same distance from the valley to Vancouver as it is from southern California. Could they grow blueberries up there too?

        2. “I have visions of big diesel powered trucks…”
          That isn’t vision, Eric, that is nostalgia. Now if you were having a vision of electric powered rail freight….

        3. It’s tough to get a rail line to Langley, never-mind a 1,000 kilometer electrified rail line up to hay fields in Fort St. John. Sorry, blueberry fields.
          Is it pretty flat going up there? No big mountains to barrel through. Shouldn’t be more than about $5 million a km. That’s only around $6 billion, as long as there aren’t any tunnels or bridges. As you may know, bridges can be costly.
          Could be a good idea since there’s plenty of gas to frack up there. I could easily see the population jump to 30,000. That justifies a few billion right there.
          How’s the weather? Rotten potatoes are probably not much good to eat.
          “Fragility and vulnerability: overhead electrification systems can suffer severe disruption due to minor mechanical faults or the effects of high winds causing the pantograph of a moving train to become entangled with the catenary, ripping the wires from their supports. The damage is often not limited to the supply to one track, but extends to those for adjacent tracks as well, causing the entire route to be blocked for a considerable time. Third-rail systems can suffer disruption in cold weather due to ice forming on the conductor rail.”

        4. There is of course an existing rail line to Fort St. John. And a number of lines going in various directions from Prince George. Even if wasn’t all exported, more fresh food closer to Northern communities would address a significant problem for people who live further north with regard to food prices.

        5. “It’s tough to get a rail line to Langley, never-mind a 1,000 kilometer electrified rail line up to Fort St. John.”
          It wouldn’t be tough to get a rail line to Langley if political support matched that given to new highway bridges.
          We’ve been here before. How quickly they forget. There is of course a rail line to Fort St. John.
          And the Tumbler Ridge subdivision that connected to that line was electrified in the 1980’s. Partly due to the two long tunnels. Lowest elevation rail crossing of the Rockies. Carried met coal from the Tumbler Ridge mines. Ran through many a winter. Seems the problems were figured out over 30 years ago. While some mock, others are out there doing.
          Here is a shot of the last remaining former BC Rail electric freight locomotive from that line, now in Prince George.
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_George_Railway_and_Forestry_Museum#/media/File:BC_Rail_GF6C_6001.jpg

        6. Norway is similar to BC in terms of population, topography and climate, though it is about 1/3 the area.. From Wikipedia:
          The Norwegian railway network consists of 2,552 kilometers (1,586 mi) of electrified railway lines, constituting 62% of the Norwegian National Rail Administration’s 4,114 kilometers (2,556 mi) of line.[1] In 2008, electric traction accounted for 90% of the passenger kilometers, 93% of the tonne kilometers and 74% of the energy consumption of all trains running in Norway, with the rest being accounted for by diesel traction.[2]
          Perhaps we could encourage the railways to electrify if we subsidized them to the same extent as we subsidize trucking.

        7. There is a CN rail line not 10 km south of the Site C dam site, and as mentioned above, it terminates in Ft St John. It branches south about 32 km east of Hudson’s Hope and follows the Pine River to Chetwynd and of course on to Prince George where it is connected to the continental rail system.
          If the dam is expected to have a lifespan of say, two centuries, then it stands to reason that the agricultural capability of the flooded land should be accounted for as an opportunity cost for at least as long, even though if farmed to modern conservation practices with neutral or even positive soil volume and nutrient gain, the viable soils should last far longer than that.
          The agrologist cited above made a calculation based on scientific analysis that the farmland to be flooded has very specific conditions (high insolation, sheltered bench land, readily available irrigation source) that afford a capacity to potentially feed a million people a year with diverse, high-value food crops ringing in at a billion dollars per annum, or 200 billion dollars over two centuries at today’s market rates. Even if she was off by a third (no critic has run the numbers yet to prove this), that’s still a huge potential pile of money, hundreds of permanent jobs, millions of man hours of labour, and a hit to our future food security to take out of production.
          There are several alternate sources of renewable energy that could provide substitutes for Site C. There are no alternates to the unique Peace River bench land conditions for farming.
          In the context of climate change, the growing season will likely be extended even more, which is very beneficial at that latitude. With the advent that agriculture is destined to grow exponentially in Canada as the south and Midwest U.S. dry up, removing productive Canadian farmland now for a dam is short sighted, especially when the need for more power is not well defined.

        8. I think that report overstates the amount of people that could be fed. There are 2 really oddly contrasting statements made.
          “The Vegetable Study identified 1,788 hectares of alluvial soils within the Site C project area that would support fresh vegetable production. Cropped to vegetables for the fresh market, this would according to the vegetable study be sufficient to meet the nutritional requirements of a population of 1,082,896 people.”
          “Today, over half a hectare of farmland is needed to produce food for one person for one year. BC currently produces 48% of the food it consumes.”
          The first statement implies that this area could feed that population, but second one implies that the whole reservoir area would barely support a town of 10,000.
          Is the first statement implying that this area could meet a specific nutrient requirement for that population, or is the second statement massively skewed by low intensity ranch lands and the massive land requirements of beef production?
          The spin off benefits are also a questionable yard stick. If you include activity enabled by electric power there would probably be a massive multiplier.

        9. I believe she was alluding to the inefficient farms of Peace River today and what could be farmed to achieve maximum potential (e.g. hay / cattle pasture vs, 150 vegetable crops + small livestock). Holm does have an email address and my guess is she’d be happy to provide further clarification.
          wendy@wendyholm.com
          Electrical generation spin offs — agreed. However, electricity can be generated (no doubt within a 100 km radius with wind) without taking this farmland out of production. This is not a trade between one and the other. It’s the premature elimination of one for the other while there are viable alternatives.
          In other words, irrational politics. And Clark’s Libs are not the only party susceptible to irrationality.

      3. I suggest the damage done by dams on the landscape and to agriculture to date should be classified as sunk costs, and that the substantial hydropower level we now have provides a good foundation upon which to diversify into other renewables like geothermal, wind, solar, tidal, and of course much deeper conservation. Using less overall energy will result in lower emissions and environmental damage regardless of the energy source.
        With a great build-up in renewables diversification, the displacement of CO2 from fossil fuels by hydropower becomes moot. In fact, in a world where petroleum plays a lesser role (we can only hope), the long-term emissions from submerged forests and the organics in drowned soils becomes more obvious. Clearcutting the forests and scraping off and stockpiling the organic soils from 12,759 flooded hectares of the Peace River Valley would add enormous costs to an already burgeoning project cost, though a return on timber sales will help.
        Your conjecture about emissions offsets will not be worth the time it takes to make if the power is eventually sold at greatly discounted rates to LNG operations, which was what the BC Libs had in mind initially until the market told them otherwise. Hydropower will not eliminate fugitive methane. Domestic users will get the same rates, right?

        1. Domestic users never get the same rates as industrial users. They require many more connections and much more distribution infrastructure for the same amount of consumption.
          If you don’t think we need to replace a vast amount of energy consumption with renewables that is currently majority provided by natural gas and oil you are sorrowly mistaken.
          BC Hydro will need to double or triple production to meet even the most pathetic environmental goals we’ve set. That will require all hands on deck for generation.
          You don’t think I’d support geothermal, wind, RoR Hydro and solar in BC? I’d support any and every one of them. I have over $100K in renewable power investments personally, predominantly wind operators. I have shares in almost every single major renewable generator in Canada.
          LNG is a stupid argument for the time being because the landscape is shifting very rapidly for energy.
          The NDP arguments don’t spell out a consistent narrative. The liberal ones are disgraceful as well, but they’re consistent. Either you replace fossil fuels and build like mad, or you admit that were not going to meet any climate change goals and dither. That’s it. Game over.
          Conservation can’t stretch 20% of our energy needs to cover the other 80%. Maybe half. After that diminishing returns will dominate unless a huge leap in heating technology happens.

        2. Actually, I agree completely that we need to displace a large share of the massive amount of fossil energy in our society and economy with renewables, and the best place to start is transportation and building heating. Yes, we need more electrical generating capacity, but we also need to pull down the huge inefficiencies and overconsumption of energy and goods that require excessive energy (a big chunk of which is fossil) to produce.
          This is one of the key reasons why I am a strong advocate for public urban transit (very importantly coupled with better land use initiatives) and buildings that use less energy with greater per capita efficacy. There are also huge gains to be made in reducing emissions from agriculture through low / no till practices, using N-fixing crops and mulching covers to replace fertilizers, and taking advice from people like Michael Pollen to eat moderately from a wide food selection, and mostly from the plant kingdom.
          I think, Urb, we agree on some key principles. One thing that Heinberg and other pessimists may be right on is that the one-time endowment of fossil energy will never be replaced entirely with renewables, mostly because of energy density, cost and the amount of debt swirling around in the world’s financial system. The total BC debt with the massively increasing committed future contractual obligations tallies $165B for a population of 5 million as of last year (thanks, Libs). Depleting fossil fuels will shake everything to the core. Therefore, reducing the total amount of energy in society ASAP is in our best interests because, if anything, to reduce the cost of building up renewables to reasonable levels, and to enable the conversion of transport and building energy to electricity.

  10. @ Alex
    Michael’s last name is spelled Pollan – I’ve read all of his books – all worthwhile. It was through his writing I learned about the world’s most innovative farmer: Joel Salatin. I’ve read all of his books as well – just waiting to get my hands on his latest: ‘The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs’.
    The genius of Salatin is that he actually heals and improves the land while raising the best biodynamic food; making a great living for his family, and providing employment for others. He is the most intellectually influential farmer in the world – sand in the crushing axle wheel of the unsustainable, venal, fossil-fuel-based, cruel, mechanical industrial agriculture system.
    He has a metaphysical connection to farming – a preacher of the land – a biblical master of biomimicry.

  11. So what does the equation really look like? On the one side we have humans, the consumer of foods, products, services, materials and energy all of which is linked to the planet through a complex technology that can adversely affect the other side of the human equation; the biosphere in which we live and that once supported us with out an intervening layer of big, heavy technology. Of course we can’t go back in time but going forward, all technologies need to become intelligent and cognizant of life’s environmental imperatives. Hopefully artificial intelligence will help in the effort to achieve greater design consciousness by eliminating the quibbling behavior of humans.

  12. Decades ago Buckminster Fuller promoted the idea of a Global Energy Grid. It is not far-fetched and many elements are coming together. Morocco has one of the largest solar farms in the world and is planning to sell to Europe. Quebec sells hydro power to the US. France sells nuclear generated power to other Euro countries. There are missing links that will be filled in and Bucky’s dream will be realized. Doubtful that the Alberta tar sands will be part of the vision.

    1. Yes, part of a national investment scheme is not only rail, highway or oil pipelines but also electricity “pipelines” to share surplus load nationally rather than dumping it for pennies on the $s to the US, for example. Plenty of synergy here doable between east and west coat, due to weather, time zone differences and availability of surplus power.
      More on this here http://www.electricity.ca/media/pdfs/130123_Electricity_in_Canada.pdf
      Part of the Site C dam discussion is/was to use surplus electric energy and ship it to Alberta, perhaps to extract oil from the oilsands rather than using gas to heat the steam forcing he oil out with SAGD technology.
      http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/how-a-pipelines-for-hydro-deal-could-save-alberta-pipelines-and-b-c-s-site-c-dam

      1. On p. 14 of the Chamber of Commerce report is a graph with a projection of electricity production in 2035. Even with the knowledge of climate change, there remains a 21% share of carbon-based production nation-wide, 3% using coal with carbon capture and storage. I believe the Chamber kept it high because many members have invested or work in the fossil fuel industry.
        That proportion will change, and coal with CCS will be the first to drop off the list as especially wind power rolls out at very affordable prices. The potential in Canada for affordable wind and solar is enormous, as is geothermal with more R&D. An expanded smart transmission grid using high-voltage direct current lines to minimize loss through resistance would allow the peaks and valleys of intermittency to flatten out with the ability to ship stable sources into the mix, and as battery storage improves.
        Natural gas is no panacea except when it displaces coal, but that has no become part of the greenwash of the fracking and LNG industries that need to deflect attention away from troublesome elements, like fugitive methane.
        In other words, that 21% needs to be converted to clean, non-carbon renewables.

    2. And yet when we want to develop more hydro power at Site C which can help wean other jurisdictions off fossil fuels, the ecowarriors don their battlegear. They need to pick their battles and not just oppose everything.

      1. Do you always just make stuff up? Site C isn’t being built to help wean other jurisdictions off fossil fuels. It’s not surprising since the Liberals have just been making it all up as they go too.

      2. Not opposing everything, opposing certain things … you will find mention of geothermal, wind, solar, tidal, or energy savings (X watt saved = just as useful as X watt earned) as alternate means of generating that same exact power, if its needed, sure, lets build it, but not everything that looks vaguely like a nail needs a dam hammer.
        If its really needed, it will always be there in the future also, but now, the power isn’t needed, the buyers aren’t there, and there’s no uptick in demand that might suggest that either of those things is about to change anytime soon.
        The power will be generated at greater cost than it can be sold, so unless you are thinking that BC taxpayers should pay to clean up other regions carbon issues (when it has issues doing so with its own), I’m not sure how your argument follows. I’m pretty sure ‘Lets Make our Neighbours Clean Again’ won’t be on any bumper stickers. (actually, this green-thy-neighbour would be an interesting and quite honourable thing to do, but I rather doubt many want to pay for it, if it was stated in those terms).
        Just because people don’t agree with your argument doesn’t mean they disagree with all arguments.

  13. “Meanwhile Alberta’s plan to replace coal−fired power plants with 5,000 megawatts of new renewable energy — more than the total amount of renewable energy currently online in Ontario — has prompted TransAlta Corp. to dust off half−century−old plans to expand its Brazeau hydroelectric project.”
    Um, who is this neighbour who needs SiteC power exactly?
    (also, by expand, they aren’t actually making the thing bigger, they are adding reverse pumping ability to let it store more power as it is generated by solar and wind … the BC analogue would add geothermal to that mix … why not use existing infrastructure better, rather than simply building new?)
    http://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/01/16/news/companies-increasing-energy-storage-developments-renewables-grow?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=

Subscribe to Viewpoint Vancouver

Get breaking news and fresh views, direct to your inbox.

Join 7,284 other subscribers

Show your Support

Check our Patreon page for stylish coffee mugs, private city tours, and more – or, make a one-time or recurring donation. Thank you for helping shape this place we love.

Popular Articles

See All

All Articles