In a few words, over a 15 year span, total annual revenues (what we have paid as customers) have increased by 100% , over the same period and with inclusion of contract obligations the total capital deployed more than doubled but customer needs ( as represented by volume of annual sales measured in gigawatt-hours) remained unchanged.

It seems logical that a growing population and an expanding economy would need greater supplies of electricity. But de-industrialization and lighting, motor and other efficiencies changed the proposition. Reality over the past 15 years is something difference…

Three years ago, John Horgan’s Government promised the $10.7 billion budget for Site C would be firm, final and effectively managed. Three years before that, Liberal Energy Minister Bill Bennett provided assurance that the $7.9 billion dam budget had been fully reviewed by the world’s top experts. With an overly generous contingency, he said It was final, with nothing left to chance.

In 2020, BC Hydro admits it is uncertain how the dam can be made safe from catastrophe. Consequently, the amount of money needed to complete Site is unknown…

With domestic demand in 2020 below that of 2005, the lies of BC Hydro’s spin doctors about demand growth are exposed by the company’s audited sales numbers. Site C power seems promised to natural gas producers and processors at less than 6¢ per KWh, which would result in operating losses at Site C approaching $500 million a year. Those could double if BC’s surplus power is dumped in export markets that are taking advantage of low-cost solar and wind power. With certainty of billions to be lost by completing Site C, the obvious choice is to suspend the project immediately. It would be the least-cost option…

Co-op Radio’s interview with Sarah Cox, the preeminent journalist covering issues surrounding British Columbia’s effort to ensure that NL’s Muskrat Falls is only the second worst hydro-electric project in Canada.

Right now they’re destroying two amazing landmarks on the river, tall rock pillars called “The Gates” in an attempt to cut a channel of the river off and use the rock for their mad earthworks. We hear that even locals who support the dam are becoming restive when they see the profligate throwing around of money and environmental destruction…

Most business managers are drawn to new low-price means of production, particularly when costs of innovations are trending steadily downward and costs of conventional methods are rising. Not at BC Hydro.

Every young person is taught that willingness to fail is empowering and roads to success are built atop failures. Such precepts are generally true but it is also accurate to say death-dealing disasters are usually reckless failures from which nothing good comes. Italian engineers were incautious when they chose to build a dam where the slopes of Monte Toc were unstable. Two thousand people died in the disaster that followed…

Site C did not proceed through ignorance and stupidity. It was a mean spirited and carefully designed choice to favour special economic and political interests above all others. Residential and small business ratepayers were viewed as powerless consumers who, with sufficient advertising and mistruths, could be convinced to believe Site C was appropriate and inevitable, even a wise choice. The net effect is to remove money from many pockets and deposit it into the pockets of a few.

The BC Government has no business case for Site C. Unfortunately, they also don’t have the courage to terminate this expensive white elephant.

Paul Starr of Princeton University wrote The Limits of Privatization. In the paper, he discusses an effect in which influence on government now comes from the “enlarged class of private contractors and other providers dependent on public money.”