The government's risky push for 'green power' The Globe and Mail By MARK HUME Monday, October 22, 2007 Page S1 When Miller Creek nearly ran dry one day this fall, it did more than expose the gravel bars that whitefish, bull trout and salmon spawn on. The incident, which took place because of a malfunction at an independent power project, or IPP, revealed just how environmentally risky the government's push for "green power" is in British Columbia. In 2002, the government introduced a new energy plan, which opened the way for the privatization of B.C.'s rivers by forcing BC Hydro, which had been doing a brilliant job of serving the province, to stop building new power plants and start buying energy from private producers. Soon investors were rushing to stake claims to rivers all over the place. According to Gwen Barlee, a Western Canada Wilderness Committee director who is alarmed by the growth of IPPs, there are 35 now in operation, with 60 more coming online soon, and about 500 water licences for potential IPPs have been approved. This "massive onslaught of poorly regulated private hydro projects," she says, is taking place without adequate environmental oversight. "This is about much more than Miller Creek and the fact that a creek nearly ran dry," she says of the recent incident. "It's about the lack of checks and balances in the province to monitor these independent private power projects." Government and industry promote IPPs as environmentally friendly because plants are built upstream of natural barriers to fish and because the water is returned to the stream after being diverted through turbines. Certainly such run-of-river power is relatively clean. But the projects are not environmentally benign. To build IPPs, roads are pushed through pristine wilderness to the banks of some of the most beautiful streams in the province. Power lines march off through the forests to connect to the grid. One shocking proposal, that would dam eight tributaries on the Pitt River, wants to put power lines through Pinecone Burke Provincial Park. How can damming all the major tributaries on a salmon stream and violating a Class A park be green? The Miller Creek incident shows how IPPs can damage fish habitat. On Sept. 8, the headpond for the EPCOR plant ran low on water. Here's how Marc Nering, EPCOR plant manager, Hydro Operations B.C., explained the incident in an e-mail to concerned Miller Creek residents: "For reasons we are continuing to investigate, the water level at the headpond dropped overnight. "On Saturday morning at 08:01 hours, the plant went off-line when the plant-monitoring system detected that penstock pressure was low, which can represent a possible penstock rupture. For this reason, the turbine inlet valves and penstock isolation valve closed. This prevented water from flowing through the penstock and plant. This effectively stopped water entering the creek below the power plant while the headpond recharged." So Miller Creek was turned off for about four hours, allowing the plant to recharge and get back to generating power. Alarms, which should have alerted controllers off-site, didn't go off. Jay Shukin, a company public relations spokesman, said EPCOR is taking steps to ensure the same thing doesn't happen again. He also said a contract biologist found only nine dead fish downstream, suggesting little damage was done. Had the accident occurred when fish were spawning, however, it could have been disastrous. Veronica Woodruff, a member of Stewardship Pemberton, a community group concerned about the environment, is worried because there have been other problems on Miller Creek. There are reports that families playing on sandbars in the summer have had to scramble to dry land when the stream level suddenly rose. Asked about this, EPCOR wasn't aware of any such problems, but promised to look into it. "I'm sort of on the fence a bit with green power, because I know we need to find ways to generate green power, but I don't know if this is the way," says Ms. Woodruff. Others are beginning to wonder, too. After all, if a good company like EPCOR can do something like this, one has to wonder what others might do as they wring power from B.C.'s priceless streams. For more information on IPPs, see John Calvert's important new book, Liquid Gold: Energy Privatization in British Columbia. In it, the Simon Fraser University professor describes the economic and environmental questions raised by the government's new energy policy.