B.C. can have affordable, renewable power – or LNG

British Columbia faces an urgent choice: renewable power or LNG? Our government claims we can have both.

But the absurd reality is that British Columbians are paying billions to build new electrical infrastructure — namely the Site C dam and North Coast Transmission Line — for the benefit of foreign oil and gas companies.

Cheered on by President Donald Trump, U.S. billionaires are moving to ramp up fracking, build new pipelines and ship as much methane gas as they can. They want more LNG terminals on the Gulf Coast, in Mexico and British Columbia.

It’s part of a strategy to prolong America’s military and economic dominance. This goal is spoken about openly by Trump, corporate allies like TC Energy and Wall Street’s David Petraeus, former U.S. Army general and one-time director of the CIA.

The oil industry’s plan is to flood overseas markets with cheap LNG, encouraging other countries to burn gas for electricity. The whole point is to fight the adoption of renewable energy. But in an ironic twist, they want renewable energy to power the gas terminals.

That’s where British Columbia comes in. Households are already paying higher gas bills for new pipelines. The oil industry wants us to pay for new BC Hydro projects too, to serve LNG terminals. So far our politicians are playing along. 

But we’re not in checkmate quite yet. There’s still time to take back our power and fight for an independent future.

B.C.’s incredible clean energy potential  

Fossil fuels like LNG are corrosive to democracy. Look at the authoritarianism, corruption and brutality of major petro-states like Russia and Saudi Arabia. Trump’s America is on track to join that list.

By contrast, countries knit together by publicly-owned networks of renewable energy – for example Sweden, New Zealand and Iceland – tend to have more social cohesion and progressive politics.

B.C. has far more in common with the second list. Blessed with abundant hydro, wind, solar and geothermal resources, our province could be a fortress of renewable energy. We have everything we need to be energy secure, and sell electricity to our neighbours.

Indigenous people all over B.C. paid a terrible price for this power. Sinixt, Cheslatta, Dunne-za and many other nations had their land flooded and their history erased. But those hydro reservoirs now serve as giant batteries, at the moment we need them most.

A new wave of Indigenous-owned wind and solar projects offers a huge boost to the grid whenever the wind blows or the sun shines. And with dams holding back water, we can open the sluice gates and spin the turbines whenever more electricity is needed.

A network linking all of us

This works across borders, as we saw last winter when Alberta’s private electricity grid failed in the cold, threatening residents with blackouts. BC Hydro shunted power to Alberta, Washington and Oregon, keeping the lights on across the West.

At the household level, an electric vehicle or battery bank provides backup power during storms. And rooftop solar panels can charge those batteries – or feed electricity into the grid for others to use. In B.C. this generates a credit, lowering your monthly bills.

A shared electricity grid literally ties us together, rewarding efficiency and cooperation. It makes electric transit and heat pumps possible. By contrast fossil fuels push us apart, commuting long distances to homes sustained by precarious supply chains.

Fossil fuel deposits must be captured and defended. Putting pipelines where they’re not wanted requires violence, as we saw on Wet’suwet’en territory. And the profits from fossil fuels all flow in one direction: to right-wing oligarchs who get richer every year.

It’s possible our politics are shaped as much by the energy we use as the media we consume. If that’s true, our publicly owned renewable energy may be partly why B.C. still holds onto some version of social democracy. But all of that is under threat.

Why they want our electricity

Blackstone is the trillion-dollar Wall Street firm behind Ksi Lisims LNG and the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline. Shell and a group of state-owned foreign oil companies own LNG Canada. They all want our electricity.

It takes an enormous amount of energy to freeze gas to the point that it becomes a liquid, so it can be loaded onto boats. Right now, the only way to generate that much power on B.C.’s north coast is to burn gas.

That’s how the LNG Canada Phase 1 terminal is set up: 15 per cent of the gas coming through the Coastal GasLink pipeline will be burned to power the giant compressors turning the rest of the gas into liquid for export.

Burning that much fuel 24/7 in Kitimat will create noxious exhaust and even generate acid rain. Shell, Petronas and PetroChina don’t care about any of that. They care that they’re losing 15 per cent of their product (on top of the methane they lose to leaks). 

So the gas companies have convinced the B.C. government to embark on a globally unprecedented scheme.

Clean energy for LNG

LNG Canada will be the single biggest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the province. It’s embarrassing for self-proclaimed climate leaders to have those numbers go up every year. So our politicians want to shift those emissions overseas.

The B.C. government’s solution is to build transmission lines to connect new LNG terminals with the public hydro grid, so they can use renewable electricity to liquify the gas. That way it can all be sold and burned in other countries – boosting profits for the shippers, while shifting emissions from B.C. over to developing countries.

The first new transmission line is estimated at $3 billion, paid for on our BC Hydro bills. Then there’s the generation capacity required. The Site C dam cost us $16 billion. But that’s only enough juice for one LNG terminal, let alone four or five as the B.C. government is planning.

The other problem with dams is that B.C. is in a multi-year drought, which has reduced hydroelectric capacity and forced us to import power for the last two years. That’s one option to meet the demand from new gas terminals: purchase coal power and use it to liquify LNG.

The other is wind and solar. Energy Minister Adrian Dix just approved nine wind farms and one solar project with a combined output of 5,000 gigawatt-hours – equivalent to another Site C dam, or the power needs of the proposed Ksi Lisims LNG terminal.

Time to fight for our home

No other jurisdiction in the world has embraced such a stupid plan. There is one large electric-powered LNG terminal in Texas, where the grid runs largely on gas and coal. But only in B.C. are citizens expected to pay for renewable energy to export fossil fuels. 

Are we really going to build dozens of wind and solar projects, and spend billions on new transmission lines, all to divert that power to foreign-owned gas terminals to undermine renewable energy in developing countries overseas?

It’s not just our BC Hydro bills – LNG exports drive up the domestic price of gas. Are we just going to watch as rising energy bills make warehouses, farms and homes too expensive to heat, driving up the cost of food and housing even further? 

As Donald Trump goes all-in on one last fossil fuel bonanza, now is the time for B.C. to position itself for the future. Our neighbours need affordable, reliable renewable electricity. So does every other sector of the economy in B.C. That should be the priority – not subsidizing LNG.

The good news is First Nations all over B.C. are ready to break ground on new wind and solar projects. BC Hydro is investing in major grid upgrades. That clean energy infrastructure still belongs to the people who live here. But we need to fight to hang onto it.