Len Walker’s letter to the editor (BC Hydro should be key election issue - The News, March 23) is quite right in recognizing BC Hydro’s mismanagement as a massive scandal, now in debt by $18.8 billion and headed for another $12 billion.
After 37 years of the finagling by governments, the courts and certain unscrupulous businesses, BC Hydro appears headed for the construction of Site C dam and an unsustainable $31 billion in debt, bankruptcy and privatization.
It is Christy Clark’s dream that the construction of Site C dam should proceed beyond the point of no return before the provincial election on May 9. Has this been fuelled by her dream for an energy-intensive (fracked) liquified natural gas bonanza? And by BC Hydro’s unlawful tendering of up to $900,000 in work and materials?
Site C is not needed. Hydro now has 10 terawatts of excess supply and demand has been flatlining for the last decade. With solar electricity trading on par with generated electricity by 2020, flatlining seems to be the future of generated electricity until its total redundancy.
Moreover, according to the Joint Review Panel, the project will result in permanent and irremediable damage to the best agricultural land in B.C.’s north.
Decades of intensive lobbying along with the province’s infamous Clean Energy Act, 2010, exempts Hydro from obtaining a “Certificate of Public Convenience” from the BCUC — which had rejected the dam proposal in 1980.
Thus regulations were improperly stacked in favour of Site C. Now watch the Hydro rates go up even faster than the 34 per cent since 2001.
Stan Gauthier
Parksville