British Columbia's energy minister Bill Bennett took to the airwaves the morning after his government announced it will build the Site C dam on the Peace River near Fort. St. John.
It is a sizable public investment, at close to $9 billion.
At capacity, it will generate enough power to provide electricity for 450,000 homes per year, which will be needed as B.C.'s population grows by another million people, Bennett told the CBC. That's pretty tantalizing when you think about that same energy coming from coal or nuclear plants, which bring costly, and perhaps deadly, long-term environmental impacts.
However, there is a more pressing need that's going to gobble up most of those kilowatt hours, and that is the massive amount of energy needed to convert natural gas into a liquid form for export.
But whether it's for charging smartphones or supporting the province's adventures in LNG, we have our doubts about how soon, or even if, this project will proceed. It has cleared the regulatory hurdles but local First Nations and residents are only just gearing up to fight.
Bennett told the CBC that the lawsuits pending by three local First Nations are "just something you're going to have to work through," when dealing with any large project in Canada today.
That could be costly optimism in the wake of the landmark Tsilhqot'in Nations vs. British Columbia ruling in the Supreme Court this summer, which affirmed First Nations have title to their traditional lands.
Bennett claimed construction should begin sometime in the summer of 2015. Thank you, Bill. We appreciated the laugh.
