Times Colonist letters
Thursday May 6th, 2010
Sir, re: “We need power; Site C offers it”, May 2.
In your editorial you dismissed wind energy by saying that “because wind farms are entirely weather-dependent, they need five times the generating capacity of a hydro system to produce the same amount of power.”
A typical new wind farm has 35% generating capacity – it produces power 35% of the time. Site C dam’s generating capacity – if it’s built – will be 58%, so a wind farm needs 65% more capacity, not 500% more.
Site C will cost $6.6 billion for 900 MW of capacity, assuming no cost overruns. At current prices, wind farms in BC cost around $3 million per MW. For the same $6.6 billion investment, we could buy 2200 MW of wind power, and use the existing dams to firm it up.
Site C will produce 4,600 GWh a year of electricity. For the same investment, a wind farm could produce 6,700 GWh a year, without flooding any farmland. The area involved would be similar, but the actual land impacted would be 20 times less – around 220 hectares.
A wind farm could also be built more quickly, and produce power earlier than Site C. By these reckonings, Site C makes neither economic nor environmental sense.
Guy Dauncey
President, BC Sustainable Energy Association
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May 21, 2010 at 9:13 pm
CBC ‘The Current’ program May 20 AM had Peace Valley farm owners Gwen Johansen and Larry Petersen speaking against the proposed Site C Dam project this morning.
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/
They did fairly well, yet could have been far more effective. They need to present clean cut ideas that will win over a mass public following. Logical concepts clearly outlined can make all the difference.
Gwen Johansen came closest when points were made about the need to produce power near the places of use like homes business and industry. This saves million$ spent on lines, towers and power stations. It also saves line losses and transformer losses, not to mention wages for staff who maintain all these things. Power lines are prone to weather outages, of course.
http://windenergy7.com/
Walmart, Google, Fedex and other corporations have power production ‘Bloomboxes’ on their grounds for reliable energy supply. No power lines, hence no power outages. Bloomboxes look something like a heat-exchanger only larger.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/18/60minutes/main6221135.shtml
Wind power generation can take place on your garage roof and provide power for lights and electronics. The concept of huge remote wind farms with costly power lines, stations , and staff seems silly. You can’t put a site C dam in your back yard, but you CAN install wind generation there easily. One needs the grid for heavy power appliances like clothes dryers, ovens, base board heaters at least until Bloomboxes or the like become available much as home heat exchangers are now. Volkswagon is also working on a home based power supply appliance.
By the way; What is this pressing need for Site ‘C’ anyway? Since we stopped shocking bauxite into aluminium in Kitimat, all that tremendous power has been added to our BC power grid. And it looks as though the huge power dam near Prince Rupert for northern coastal mining is going ahead. California can’t afford to pay us for power we supplied them and are still in arrears. Is Site C an ego boost for Premier Gordon Campbell just before he gets voted out ?
May 22, 2010 at 6:09 am
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