Response to private power

Letter to the Editor, Golden Star, February 20th, 2008

When I read Bruce Sanderson’s letter titled ‘In Praise of Private Power,’ I was immediately skeptical.  It seems to me that Mr. Sanderson, obviously in favour of private

power, is trying to argue that privatization of energy in B.C. is not occurring.  Rather than convincing the reader of the ‘benefits’ of private power, the letter seeks to divert the reader by implicitly offering a choice between ‘green’ and ‘clean’ electricity from B.C., and ‘brown’ and ‘dirty’ electricity from Alberta.  Wait a second… wasn’t he just talking about privatization?

To quote Mr. Sanderson, ‘I think something very important gets lost in that kind of rhetoric.’

Sanderson seems to dismiss the claim of more than 500 licenses in the application process as being completely ridiculous.

However, according to Richard Neufeld, B.C.’s Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, ‘Between 2001 and 2007, 396 power licence applications were received…’  Given these numbers, it seems to me not unlikely that these numbers would have grown over the course of 2007-08, and 500 doesn’t seem so far out of the ballpark.

While an individual run-of-river hydro project is most likely less environmentally destructive than a massive dam and reservoir, the cumulative effects of all of the projects proposed and underway have not been accounted for.  Besides which, this is not really the point.

The point is that B.C.’s need for more energy has been vastly overstated (http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/10/30/BCHydro/), and the condition that virtually all of this ‘needed’ energy must be purchased from private power corporations at much more than the projected market prices has been arbitrarily created.  This benefits private power corporations, not British Columbians in general.

I urge anyone concerned about any of these issues to do some digging of their own and see what’s really happening to the energy and rivers of British Columbia.

Nick Furfaro

Golden, BC