The flood gates seem to be opening to independant power producers here in BC. And while i don’t like that BC Hydro isn’t doing the dirty work, clean power is still the most important thing in the long.
I saw the notice of purchase of Crown Land today in the Alberni Valley Times.
The application for the land is being submitted by the Barkley Power Group of Nanaimo, BC. I have not yet found who the actual purchaser and subsequent power provider, but I will speculate that it is likely another First Nations-based proposal similar to the China Creek
project near Port Alberni.
This application is halfway between Port Alberni and the Pacific Rim, on Highway 4 near Kennedy Lake. It’s on Canoe Creek.
In the process of doing a little research for this, I found an AMAZING tool on the BC government website:
The The BC Water Resource Atlas.
It’s a completely webbased (and cross-platform!) Atlas for BC that includes rivers, lakes, watersheds, minerals, fault lines, and ALL SORTS of other information. An incredibly powerful tool.
While I was looking for the funder of this project, I did come across 2 other projects in the Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District area that I had not previously known of:
The Marion 3 and South Sutton projects provide 4.6 and 5.5MW each. Certainly not huge projects, but everylittle bit counts. And both of these were done with the expressed intent to leave as little footprint on the land as possible. This looks to have been done successfully! So good on them.
Vancouver Island, and especially the growing Pacific Rim, is in need of more reliable, and simply more, power.
All these projects are great news. I’m glad to be seeing so much activity. If these projects can be done low-impact, then there is little reason to oppose them. It’s in everyones interest for the generation load to be spread as much as possible, even if Run-of-River projects may not run 365 days a year.