B.C.'s Environment Minister Barry Penner, joins Chris Walker to discuss hydroelectric projects in B.C.

CBC Radio, Daybreak North

7:22 AM, July 18, 2007

Announcer: Last week on the show we heard from Wilf Hanni. He's the leader of the B.C. Conservative Party, and he has some new ideas for energy production in our province. Here is some of what he had to say last week on Daybreak.

Wilf Hanni: Hydroelectric dams have a habit of damming up productive, fertile land that's good for farming as well as being useful habitat for our wildlife, and we just can't afford to lose any more of this land.

Chris Walker: Where, then, would our power come from?

Hanni: Alternate sources. There are a number of alternate clean sources of fuel available today that could be explored, such as wind power, tidal power, even nuclear power.

Nuclear power is one of the safest forms of power in the world, and it is one of the cleanest forms of power in the world. Unless we want to dam up B.C. and have no more land left for our own use, we have to explore these alternatives, and nuclear power is the most feasible alternative there is, and it's also the cleanest-burning electricity you can get.

Do you realize there's over 300 dams in the planning stages for B.C. right now? That's a lot of lost land. And so this prompted us to speak out about it.

Announcer: That was Wilf Hanni. He is the head of the B.C. Conservative Party.

Well, those comments raised the ire of the B.C. Liberal Party. Chris Walker spoke to the Minister of Environment yesterday. He started by asking Barry Penner what he thought of Wilf Hanni's comments.

Barry Penner: It's important that people actually do their homework. In fact, there are about 20 or 25 active licence applications for water related to power projects in British Columbia. To put it in perspective, there are about 12,000 named creeks, rivers and waterways in the province. Out of that number, last year we issued water licences for about 17 creeks and rivers out of more than 12,000. So that puts it in perspective.

The other thing where he is quite mistaken is the claim that somehow this would result in flooding of valley bottoms. What we are talking about is quite different than the old-style dams of the sixties and seventies. We're  talking about small run-of-the-river hydroelectric projects that typically take place on a steep mountainside where a small portion of the water is diverted from a creek or a stream and that's put in a pipe, run down a steep embankment down a mountain, through a turbine to generate electricity without producing any greenhouse gas emissions, and then that water is returned back into the river.

Walker: Now, Wilf Hanni has called for a moratorium on hydroelectric projects in B.C. Why is that not a good idea?

Penner: We need more electricity in British Columbia. We're currently importing about 12 percent of our electricity needs from outside of the province. A lot of that's coming from the United States, some of it from Alberta. But in both cases it's coming, to a large degree, from coal-fired electricity plants of the traditional type. We don't want to contribute to climate change. We're trying to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, and one way we can do that in British Columbia is by producing renewable clean electricity from run-of-the-river hydro projects.

Walker: He's calling for more nuclear power in B.C....well, not more, some. What do you think of that?

Penner: Well, that's not consistent with our government's plan. My colleague, Minister Neufeld, the Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources, from Peace River North, updated our energy plan this spring, and it, again, says that we will be looking to other energy sources to meet our needs, because we have those other options in B.C. with water, with wind, perhaps with tidal or ocean energy as well and some other sources. But we do not have nuclear power as one of the options that we're pursuing.

Walker: The Liberal Party in B.C. not used to defending itself from the right flank. How seriously do you take the political threat from the Conservative Party?

Penner: Well, I'm just concerned about misinformation that's out there. I think British Columbians need to know the real state of our energy challenge. We do have a challenge. We're importing electricity now because not enough was done [previously. It takes a while to plan these things. Not enough was done two decades ago or even a decade ago to plan for new supplies.

We are doing that now, and over the last number of years quite a number of small hydro projects, probably around 15 or 20, have got completed, and they're helping. But there is more energy that's going to be needed in our province, and we want to do it in a way that's clean for the atmosphere but also has minimal impact on fisheries or other environmental considerations.

Walker: Mr. Penner, thanks very much for your time today.