Business in Vancouver February 20-26, 2007; issue 904

BCTC president Jane Peverett, on the corporation’s $3.2 billion plans for upgrading the province’s power grid

The British Columbia Transmission Corp. has proposed a 10-year $3.2 billion high-voltage transmission upgrade program, $700 million more than was included in its 2006 capital plan, to keep pace with rapidly growing electricity demand and to replace aging infrastructure and equipment. For 2007/08, it’s asking the B.C. Utilities Commission to allow it to proceed with $269 million in projects it considers a priority to ensure the smooth operation of the 18,000-kilometre electricity grid.

BCTC president and CEO Jane Peverett gives the inside story to reporter Krisendra Bisetty.

Why the $700 million difference in the capital plan between 2007 and 2006?

We look at the plan every year, and we look out 10 years. What’s happened in-between last year and this year is predominantly an increase in both the load forecast, which we use to describe demand, and the amount of generation. It’s driven largely by a hot economy and even more rapid growth than we foresaw last year.

What does the $3.2 billion capital plan entail?

About $1.1 billion is what we call sustainment capital. That’s replacing the bits and pieces of the system that’s just wearing out because they hit 50 years old and they break; $1.9 billion of it is growth capital to increase the capacity of the system. There’s a handful of big projects in there which could be new transmission lines. The next big project that we’re actively involved in discussions with stakeholders is called the Interior to Lower Mainland Transmission Project. We need to increase the ability to move electricity from the Interior, roughly around Merritt, into the Lower Mainland. As you add new generation there and as the load increases in Vancouver, you need increasingly to be able to move more electricity.

How vulnerable is the existing system to failure that could result in blackouts, and what are the current capacity constraints?

Like any system that covers 18,000 kilometres, it’s got its new parts and its older parts, but the system in total is highly reliable. We have a reliability target that we set for ourselves that says that, on average, a delivery point will only be out of service for two hours a year. So you’re working on 99.99% reliability.

However, as the use of the system has grown – both the amount of the electricity that’s moved and the complexity of the movement – we’re finding ourselves needing to invest more into it to make sure we can continue to provide the reliable service. At the moment there are no serious constraints, but as we look forward over the next three of four years, we certainly see areas where constraints will develop if the system isn’t expanded.

What are some of the areas targeted for expansion?

One of the big projects we have underway right now is to expand the transmission capacity over to Vancouver Island, because that’s an area developing constraint. The island is served roughly 70% with generation on the mainland that is then is transmitted over there. One of the two cables is reaching the end of its dependable life. Our plan is to have the new cables in place by October 2008, which is about the time that we need them.

With public concern over the perceived health risks from electromagnetic fields near overhead high voltage lines, evidenced by recent opposition by residents in Tsawwassen, are there plans to bury transmission lines underground?

We actually had proposed to the commission that we would like to underground 3.5 kilometres through Tsawwassen, and the commission’s decision was that it should go overhead.

Would the threat of weather-related damage justify going underground?

That’s being asked all over North America.

When people think about undergrounding lines, they tend to think about the lines that come down more often with wind and those tend to be the lower voltage lines [that service homes], not the big transmission lines. Our system actually did very well through all the storms we had in November and December, except for a line serving Lions Bay and a line out to the west coast of Vancouver Island that were down for quite a long period. Most of the outages on the transmission system were brought up very quickly.

For that reason, you look at the increase in reliability that you would get by undergrounding to avoid damage from wind storms, which is quite rare, versus the cost of undergrounding which is about 10 times the cost of putting the lines overhead.

You would have to have a transmission line that was coming down regularly before you justify the cost of undergrounding.

BCTC seems to have abandoned a regional integration plan, Grid West Development, despite millions of dollars invested by the province. What’s the reason, and what’s next?

Grid West is no more. It has stopped being pursued by the 10 utilities who were pursuing it. But one of the lingering benefits of Grid West is the relationship that we developed with those other nine utilities, and we’re now working with them on what we call a bilateral basis. Whereas Grid West tried to develop a new independent entity in a kind of a big bang approach to integration, what we’re doing is more step-wise, but we’re actually making integration progress.

The hope was that for all of the utilities from B.C. all the way down to California that Grid West would start to operate them and plan them and consider them more like one great big inter-connected grid.

It was a whole lot of change all at once, and I think that there were so many stakeholders with different perspectives that to ask everybody to come to the same place at the same time just proved to be more movement than anyone could take.