A Spanish-Lheidli T'enneh wind power project is coming

And the mayor wants to be ready for Donald Trump deportations

Yesterday, the province announced a series of new wind power projects for the province:

British Columbia has given the green light to nine wind energy projects that it says will boost the province's hydroelectric grid by eight percent a year, providing almost 5,000 gigawatts of energy annually, or enough to power 500,000 homes.

That number is roughly equivalent to the power projected to be generated by the Site C dam, which recently started feeding power into B.C.'s electrical grid at a construction cost of $16 billion.

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The development and construction will generate between $5 billion and $6 billion in private spending on the projects, four of which will be located in the B.C. Interior, four in the North and one on Vancouver Island, said the premier.

Among them is a project called the Nilhts’I Ecoener Project, which is a partnership between the Lheidli T’enneh and a company called Ecoener. I couldn’t find much info on it — it was discussed in-camera (private) at last month’s chief and council presentatoin, according to the meeting agenda. Ecoener is a Spanish company with, apparently, a Canadian office in Quebec City and a series of wind farms and other renewable energy projects around the world. I’m not seeing, immediately, any information about where this particular project will be but it, and all the other wind projects approved, will apparently be exempt from the regular environmental review assessment process which is designed to look into the “potential environmental, social, economic, health and cultural effects” of new builds.

If you’ll indulge me, what struck me about this is that the province is projecting the power generated from these nine projects is going to be about equivilent to what will be generated by the Site C dam. And I recall reporting, back in 2017, about a report the B.C. Utilities Commission published, at the request of then-premier John Horgan, which indicated that at that point B.C. could choose to stop building Site C, which is flooding a huge tract of land in the northeast, and instead focus on solar and wind projects to generate roughly the same amount of electricity. And now Site C is built and has flooded the land and is generating that power and we’re moving ahead with the wind farms, too. I’m thinking about this because last year I learned about something called Jevons Paradox which holds that as production of something becomes more efficient, rather than use less energy to get thing, it simply generates more demand. I learned about in the context of the Las Vegas sphere via this post, which I will excerpt now:

Jevons wrote The Coal Question after James Watt developed the condensing steam engine that used 75% less coal than the Newcomen engine it replaced. It was not an incremental increase in efficiency but a technological breakthrough. It was so efficient that engineers started thinking up wild and crazy new uses for it, putting it in factories, on ships and even sticking wheels on it and running it on steel rails.

LEDs are having a similar effect. They have not just replaced light bulbs but have changed the way we use light. I have seen living rooms with a grid of 30 fixtures on the ceiling and dining rooms where you could do surgery on the table. LEDs assembled into screens have transformed our phones, computers and TVs. Architects have been encrusting building exteriors with them, but there has been nothing ever like The Sphere. Aaron Timms, in an article titled Sphere eats the Soul, describes it:

“Everything about the structure is big, designed to blow you away, both figuratively and literally: it’s the world’s biggest spherical structure, contains the world’s biggest LED screen, and boasts the largest concert-grade audio system on the planet (with 1,586 loudspeaker modules and 167,000 speaker drivers, amplifiers, and processing channels), while the exterior shell contains 1.2 million hockey puck-sized LED panels that can be programmed to create colossal image displays. These numbers are so impressively, almost meaninglessly gigantic they induce their own kind of statistical vertigo.”

That’s 53,883 square meters of LEDs. The interior features 14,864 square meters, the equivalent of four football fields. The estimates of electricity consumption are almost meaninglessly gigantic, too; One estimate on Twitter claims it draws 150 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. A more plausible one from S&P Global Market Intelligence says the Sphere consumes about 95,779 MWh annually. Its peak load is 28 megawatts, equivalent to the power required to run 21,000 homes.

Based on the carbon intensity of the Nevada grid, running the Sphere will produce 46,835 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.

LEDs are efficient, and it is estimated that converting an average house from incandescent to LED will save about 2,000 kWh per year or two mWh. That means that the Sphere is negating the savings in energy and carbon emissions from converting 47,889 houses. What is the point of promoting energy conservation in lighting when one Sphere can wipe out a small city’s worth of savings?

Listen, I’m part of this. I have an EV and installed a heat pump and those require more electricity. But it is really striking to me that less than a year ago our future energy consumption needs were presented as “megadam OR wind power projects” and now it’s both — and more.

Anyways, in other energy news, new Prince George-Mackenzie MLA Kiel Giddens sent out several tweets (X posts?) yesterday reponding to these wind power projects by calling for more focus on diesel to mixed results (twitter really is something these days).

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News roundup:

• Mayor Simon Yu wants the city to be prepared if Donald Trump enacts mass deportations.

• UNBC offering $350 tuition credits to 350 students to celebrate 35th anniversary.

• While October had the lowest number of toxic drug fatalaties in B.C. in four years, it drove the total deaths in Prince George to an all-time high.

• Heidt heads off to world junior camp in Ottawa.

• The head of the WHL says he’s happy with the Cougars’ business performance.

• Freeman Street house fire causes $200K damage.

• New associate coach for the Spruce Kings.

• Reduced transit schedule for the holidays.

• Should Prince George create a youth city council?

• New at The Exploration Place: The Blackout Girl Remembered.

• Here’s the cheapest house in town at the moment.

Here’s a frosty spiderweb on some mountain ash berries:

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Send feedback by emailing northerncapitalnews@gmail.com. Find me online at akurjata.ca.