According to some estimates, BC would have to double its electrical output if everyone switched to electric vehicles by 2035. Others talk about blackouts and rolling brownouts if we don’t back renewables up with LNG or nuclear power. Clean Energy Canada has just released a report that claims this is not true, the province’s electricity grid can handle the increased demand from EVs, heat pumps and extreme weather events, while electricity trading keeps energy bills low.

“Over the last year or two, we’ve been seeing quite a bit of incorrect information on BC’s electricity system.  It’s being circulated and reiterated in the media. The purpose of this report was to do some myth busting and do some deep dives into the actual data to figure out what trends are actually happening,” explained Mark Zacharias, Executive Director of Clean Energy Canada. 

 “We went into three areas. The first one is looking at EVs and heat pumps. What they would do to the grid due to future demand and whether there is a need to go back and revisit government climate policies around EV sales mandates. The second one is there has been lots of commentary on how much power BC is importing from the US over the last year.  We wanted to  explore the balance between imports and exports and what’s the value of the trading? The third one that we looked at was there are lots of commentators that talk about wind and solar as not being affordable and not being able to integrate into our grid because they’re intermittent.”

Cortes Currents: So tell me about  the impact of EVs and how we supposedly don’t have enough electricity to meet that demand.  

Mark Zacharias: “This is a pretty common theme worldwide. There’s a set  mantra a lot of people have that says ‘EVs and heat pumps will break the grid.’  So we went back and we looked at the actual number of EVs that will be on the road in 2030, should BC keep its very ambitious sale targets, requiring 90% of new car sales to be EVs by 2030. We looked at the impacts on the grid and an additional 2% capacity that would be needed to  make all those EVs become real. So that was fairly minor.” 

“Then when we started looking at heat pumps, it actually got even more interesting. 42% of BC households heat their homes with electric baseboard heating, and it’s very inefficient compared to heat pumps.  If you actually swapped out that 42% and gave them heat pumps instead, you’re not drawing down on the grid you’re actually building capacity. You’re actually adding about 5% of capacity to BC’s electricity grid just by swapping out its old and inefficient baseboard heating with heat pumps.” 

“Overall, what we’ve concluded is that British Columbians can buy as many heat pumps and EVs as they want. For the next couple of years, we’re actually in good shape.” 

Cortes Currents: Wind and solar have long been known to be one of the world’s cheapest forms of energy. 

Mark Zacharias: “Wind and solar are incredibly cheap. If you look at the Alberta experience back in 2017 and 2018, they were procuring new wind at less than 5 cents kilowatt hour. That is incredibly cheap compared to any power you can make from fossil fuels.”

Cortes Currents:  What about their intermittency? 

Zacharias mentioned a time when there was not sufficient renewable energy to fill the gap when Alberta’s conventional power plants failed.  

Mark Zacharias: “People keep pointing to the Alberta near-blackout in January 2024. That was caused by the natural gas fired power plants having parts of their machinery freezing.” 

Cortes Currents: I’ve just been googling it. As a result of the extreme cold weather, Alberta set an all time record for hourly power demand. Two natural gas generators went down at a time when there was very little renewable power to fall back on.    

Mark Zacharias: “There were a whole bunch of failures in the system that contributed to that, it wasn’t all the fault of wind.” 

Cortes Currents: There is a similar story from January 6 and 7, 2014, when wind energy saved the grid during an extreme cold snap in 13 mid-Atlantic and Great Lake states. Many of the conventional power plants went down. At the extreme peak of freezing temperatures, 22% of the system’s generation was down. Only in that case, wind energy was able to pick up the load. The American Wind Energy Association claims they saved the rate payers in those thirteen states $1 billion during those two days.

One thing I don’t think many people realize is that conventional energy plants go down. A US Energy Information Administration article about gas plants states: “Weather can have a significant effect on both electricity and natural gas demand. During times when natural gas supply is constrained, particularly during the winter, some plants are forced to reduce their output, or shut down entirely.”  

The recognized solution to renewable energy’s intermittency is backing the power up. How’s that coming along? 

Mark Zacharias: “We did an analysis a couple of years ago in Canada, and we looked at Ontario and Alberta. We took natural gas combined cycle levelized cost of energy,  so what it costs to produce energy. We compared that against wind and solar, along with battery storage. As long as you have a carbon price in place,  wind and solar and battery storage are equivalent in costs to natural gas combined cycle. You deal with the intermittency piece, having the battery storage with your wind and solar.  We would expect that to apply equally to BC.” 

“We went and did a deep dive into the US. The five states with the highest share of wind and solar on their grids all happen to be Republican and one purple state,  but they have electricity prices that are 25% less than a national average.  What’s happening is they add wind and solar onto their grids in these states. The delta between the US Electricity price, the average US Electricity price, and their’s actually gets wider and wider over time. So not only are their grids getting cleaner, they’re getting cheaper because of renewables.”  

“BC is in a unique situation too. We have base load power with our hydroelectric reservoirs. So, what we’re doing by adding renewables on top of that is building capacity. We also have some storage to deal with things like times of the year when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. It also gives us a huge opportunity to use the wind and solar when they’re operating, to keep our hydro reservoirs high. So when the price spikes in the US or price spikes in Alberta, then we trade and make it very beneficial to British Columbians.” 

Cortes Currents:  In your report, you say BC has benefited from electricity trade, reducing residential bills by 10%, but I’ve heard that we are sometimes selling electricity to the United States at discount prices. 

Mark Zacharias: “There are times of the year where we can overproduce electricity, particularly when all the snow is melting in the mountains. Overall, because we have hydro reservoirs we’re able to withhold water.  Only when the reservoirs are full and we need to spill water, would we sell power back into the US at a cheaper rate. Normally it works the other way. We’re waiting for prices to spike, and that’s when we would sell power into Alberta or into the US markets.” 

“Between (January) 2019 and November 2024, which is the last month that there is data for, overall there was $1 billion to $1.5 billion Canadian benefit to BC through electricity trading with the US. Even though we are importing more power from the US than we’re exporting, we are exporting when power costs are high and we’re buying when power costs are low. That’s mainly because of the amount of solar and wind in the southwest US. During the day US electricity gets very cheap. When that power is very cheap, we buy it in British Columbia, and we use it to keep our reservoir levels high. There are certain months where power is very cheap too. In April and May, when the U. S. is not using a lot of air conditioning yet they have a lot of solar on the grid because of the time of year, power can actually approach near zero costs.”

“So it makes a lot of sense for BC to grab as much of it, use it here, and then save our reservoirs for when it’s needed.”

Cortes Currents: We have such  aging infrastructure throughout North America, does that have an effect on what we’ve been talking about?  

Mark Zacharias: “It is relevant for some jurisdictions.”

“You may have read or may have seen that a lot of the California wildfires in the last 5 or 10 years have actually been started through aging infrastructure and aging transmission infrastructure. I’m not quite sure how the latest two LA fires were started, but I believe one of them might have been started from a power pole. So, it’s a relevant concern.” 

“We’ve been fairly lucky and due to good planning in BC that a lot of our large hydro infrastructure is on a capital replacement cycle. Hydro right now has a $36 billion capital plan over the next 10 years to be able to go back and look at some of the legacy assets. We have John Hart dam up in the North Island near where you are.

Cortes Currents: The John Hart Dam in Campbell River is currently going through upgrades which will supposedly make it able to withstand a 9. 0 earthquake, which we get once every 10, 000 years. 

Mark Zacharias: “There has been a replacement at a lot of these facilities. What that’s also allowing BC utilities like hydro to do is taking older dams and installing more turbines or more efficient turbines. So we’re actually getting a lot more power out of these dams than we have in the decades that they’ve existed. It’s really interesting in terms of the infrastructure for electricity trade.”  

“We have been advocating that under a tariff regime, should that come to fruition with the U. S. and Canada, we need to trade power more east-west, not north-south. That comes back to your question that we actually need to put more effort and emphasis on infrastructure build out.”  

“The intermittency question is a really interesting one because yes, wind and solar are intermittent, but  if you balance your electricity loads off over large areas in multiple jurisdictions, it all tends to balance out. The more inter-ties you have, the more ability you have to  move power around. The more likely it is that you will be able to import power when you need it, and you’ll be able to export power when you have too much.”

“Overall that balances out the intermittency effect of things like wind and solar. Ontario has nuclear as a base load. We have hydro as a base load. For much of Canada, we are in fairly good shape.”  

“If you’ve been paying attention to some of the government announcements over the last couple of months, you will have seen that Site C is coming online this year. That adds 8% capacity to our electricity system, and then we have 10 new wind and one solar project coming online. All of them will be up and running before 2032.  That’s going to add another 8%  capacity to the grid and then through efficiency measures, BC Hydro thinks they can get another 3%.” 

“So if you look at their actual plan, which looks at all of the height needs, either residential, business, industrial consumers  before 2030, they’re looking at about a 15% increase in the amount of electricity needed by 2030. But if you add up the 8% with Site C, the 8% with renewables and 3% with efficiency,  you can very quickly see that we’re generally on track to meet new loads before 2030.” 

“Now what happens after 2030?  It’s a little further out. We don’t know whether we’re going to have more LNG plants that have electric drives.  If we do, then that’s going to be a huge draw on the system. We don’t know if we’re going to have many more critical mineral mines that are going to be electrified, whether we’re going to create green hydrogen through electrolysis, all of these things, but they’re well past 2030 by the time they get set up. So it gives us a bit of time to plan.”  

“South Australia was predominantly a fossil fuel powered electricity grid until about a decade ago.  This year, they are 75% powered by wind and solar and going to 100% by 2027. They’re doing it with residential electricity rates that are actually dropping over time, not going up.” 

Links of Interest:

• B.C.’s electricity grid can handle increasing demands and keep costs low thanks to renewables and energy trading: report
• Clean Energy Canada website
• Articles about, or mentioning, Clean Energy Canada

Top image credit: Image by Peter H from Pixabay

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