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Home  News Stories Quebec view: Hydroelectricity Star power versus (somewhat) green power |
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Quebec view: Hydroelectricity Star power versus (somewhat) green power |
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Thursday, 18 January 2007 |
The Globe and Mail- By Konrad Yakabuski
Celebrity activism is a rather underdeveloped genre in English Canada. There are no Sean Penns to kayak through the towns south of Winnipeg when the Red River floods, blaming it all on global warming and inept governments. No Barbra Streisands who sing at Liberal conventions to blast the right. We even had to import Brigitte Bardot to save the seals.
It's an entirely different story in Quebec, where big-name actors and singers wade constantly into the murky waters of public debate. The impact of their interventions is not to be underestimated. Causes that barely make it on to most media radar screens one minute become page one news as soon as a 'vedette' shows up.
So, when Roy Dupuis -- aka The Rocket -- arrived at a press conference last week to denounce Hydro-Quebec's official launch that day of construction on a $5-billion hydroelectric development, guess who stole the show?
"We can no longer encroach on the environment, unless it is absolutely necessary," the actor warned as the camera flashes went off. "There are alternative solutions: wind energy, geothermal, conservation. . . . We waste an enormous amount."
It's hard to disagree with that last point. Cheap electricity has made Quebeckers energy gluttons, consuming more gigajoules per capita than almost any other people on the planet. What they don't waste by cranking up the thermostat or air conditioner, they sell at rates below cost to electricity Hoovers called Alcan and Alcoa.
It's also hard to disagree with Mr. Dupuis' point about environmental protection. For too long, the true price of ransacking the planet in the name of progress has been left out of the equation.
But thankfully, that's changing. And it's also why Mr. Dupuis may be in over his head in opposing Hydro-Quebec's plan to partly divert the Rupert River and flood a 350-square-kilometre territory in northern Quebec to feed the turbines of two new hydro stations. The total project will produce about 888 megawatts of electricity by 2010 at an unbeatable $51 per megawatt-hour.
There is only one source of electricity cheaper than that. Unfortunately for the planet, it's coal.
Legislated caps on carbon emissions are coming, probably sooner rather than later. That will partly reduce the cost advantage of coal over hydroelectricity. It probably won't eliminate it, unless costly carbon sequestration -- burying greenhouse gases underground -- becomes the industry norm. Big if.
So, the Hydro-Quebec project -- known as Eastmain-1A -- must be considered not only in a provincial context, but in a continental and even global one. Especially since much, if not all, of the electricity produced by Eastmain-1A will be headed west to Ontario.
In November, Hydro-Quebec and Hydro One broke ground on a new $800-million, 1,250 MW transmission interconnection between the two provinces. It heralds a new era in interprovincial energy trading and will be a major link in a long-recommended east- west transmission grid.
Currently, very little electricity actually flows from Quebec to power-starved Ontario, and what does is sold on an ad hoc basis. But Premier Jean Charest has indicated that will change with the completion of Eastmain-1A and the new interprovincial connection.
The new long-term electricity sales agreement the two provinces are expected to sign soon would be a first. It would also be a piece of the puzzle Ontario needs to put together to end its reliance on coal-based power. Not a big piece; but it's better than no piece at all.
Fossil fuels produce about two-thirds of the world's electricity supply. Thanks to China, the proportion is actually going up, not down. And there is yet no word in Chinese for carbon sequestration, or not one that gets used much, anyway.
The high cost and low reliability of non-hydro renewable power sources -- primarily wind energy -- means it is neither realistic nor desirable to consider them major alternatives to hydroelectricity or nuclear power in the race to cut greenhouse gases. They are complementary sources, not substitutes.
No one -- probably not even those Hydro-Quebec engineers who live to build dams -- wants to see the majestic Rupert River reduced to a trickle in some places or pristine forests drowned in others.
But no single hydro development in the history of Canada has been as scrutinized, environmentally evaluated, or adjusted to accommodate the concerns of natives and ecologists as the Rupert project. Federal and provincial environmental review boards, both of which included Cree representatives, strongly recommended that their respective governments approve the project. Hydro-Quebec, once decried as a bully, has been a model of corporate flexibility.
The Crees are understandably divided. Who wouldn't be? Their lives will be irreversibly changed; their health (from temporarily higher mercury levels in fish) potentially compromised. But the vast majority of the 15,000-strong Cree nation of northern Quebec and its leaders support the project. They will share fairly in the economic benefits.
And the planet might even breathe a little easier.
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