August 17, 2024 EnergyNow Media
By Resource Works
More News and Views From Resource Works Here
The electricity grid’s capacity will have to double in the next 21 years to meet the forecasted demand.
Experts warn that Canada, and much of North America, could face electricity shortages from now through 2028. This, they say, is due to booming demand for power — for a growing population, industrial processes, clean-energy initiatives, the electrification of vehicles, and the boom in computer data centers handling Artificial Intelligence programs. (Internet queries utilizing AI require about 10 times the electricity of traditional internet searches, according to analysis by the Electric Power Research Institute in the U.S.)
The rising demand for electricity is aggravated by increasingly hot summers, leading to more air conditioning use, and, in B.C., drought conditions that have affected the output of BC Hydro dams and led BC Hydro to import more power from the U.S. Canada’s push to switch more of us into electric vehicles led a University of Victoria professor to paint this picture: Canada would need the equivalent of 10 more Site C dams to generate enough power just to fuel the electric car revolution.
That’s because the federal government has decreed that all new passenger vehicles and light trucks sold in Canada must be zero-emissions by 2035. Meanwhile, B.C. has targeted 90% electric vehicle sales by 2030. G. Cornelius van Kooten, economics professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Studies and Climate Change at the University of Victoria, said the federal government’s timeline “isn’t realistic or feasible.”
His study says the vehicle transformation could increase power demand in Canada by as much as 15.3%. That’s equivalent to 10 new mega-size hydro dams or 13 large natural-gas power plants. That’s just in Canada, and for only one policy. And it doesn’t include an estimate of the additional cost of new and expanded transmission lines to get the new power from where it is generated to where it is needed.
B.C. certainly faces a power crunch and is a prime example of North America’s power challenges. LNG Canada is set to come online in mid-2025. It burns natural gas to generate its power because BC Hydro can’t deliver enough to the site. LNG Canada is also looking into expansion, doubling its output. It would hope to electrify the plant. But can BC Hydro meet the demand?
Then comes Woodfibre LNG, which will begin to export LNG in 2027. It says that, “powered by renewable hydroelectricity,” Woodfibre LNG “will be the world’s first net-zero LNG export facility.” Again, can BC Hydro meet the demand? And what about the Haisla Nation’s Cedar LNG project, and the Nisga’a Nation’s Ksi Lisims LNG project? They, too, want electricity to power their operations. And B.C. requires new LNG facilities to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030.
Economist Werner Antweiler of the Sauder School of Business at the University of B.C. has suggested B.C. will probably at some point have to limit industries that use huge amounts of power. LNG Canada alone could use more than a quarter of the electricity produced by BC Hydro’s Site C dam, which comes online next year. That will make LNG Canada BC Hydro’s third largest customer.
So where does all the new power come from for LNG plants, electric vehicles, greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction programs, hydrogen development, data centers, and more? The Site C dam will provide an eight-percent increase in B.C.’s power supply, but the B.C. government said in April that electricity demand is expected to increase by 15% until 2030. So BC Hydro issued a call for more power supplies — amounting to 5% more — and specified that it was for electricity from “clean or renewable resources.”
BC Hydro expects its next call to be issued in 2026, with subsequent calls to come approximately every two years. Then there’s the cost of new and expanded transmission lines. BC Hydro will be spending nearly $36 billion on B.C.’s electricity grid, an increase of 50% over its previous capital plan.
And while BC Hydro has in recent years been importing power from the U.S. (about 20% of its needs last year), soaring power demands in the U.S. will make imports less easy to obtain. The U.S. Pacific Northwest expects a 30% rise in its own power demand over the next 10 years. And the North American Electric Reliability Corporation says that for B.C. “energy risks increase in 2026 as forecasted demand increases and natural-gas-fired generation retires.”
In a major report on B.C. power supply and demand, the B.C.-based Energy Futures Institute (EFI) notes: “The Quebec government has recently expressed the need to increase electrical generation capacity by 100% in the next 25 years to support their GHG reduction goals. Given that British Columbia has a similar GHG profile associated with its domestic electricity production, and has legislated decarbonization objectives that are at least as aggressive as Quebec, it is reasonable to assume British Columbia is facing a similarly daunting challenge in terms of generating more electricity, i.e., doubling existing generation capacity.”
What B.C. needs, says the EFI, is “a bold, forward-looking energy strategy” — and one that acknowledges that “less than 20% of the province’s total end-use energy demand is currently met through electricity, with the vast majority coming from fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and natural gas.”
B.C. is not alone in facing a power crunch. The federal government projects that grid demand across the country by 2050 will be twice what it is today. To meet that demand, the capacity of the grid will have to double in the next 21 years. Ontario forecasts a 60% increase in electricity demand over the next 25 years, with expected annual growth of 2% for the next couple of decades.
A study by the Power Workers’ Union finds Ontario faces a significant electricity supply shortage and reliability risks within the next four to eight years. It emphasizes “the urgent need for new low-emission nuclear generation to fill the expected supply gap, particularly with the planned closure of the Pickering nuclear power plant in 2025.”
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute reports: “Ontario is racing to safely build new nuclear plants to meet expected demand by 2029, while filling interim demand with new gas plants and a new call for renewables. . . . . Quebec is spending up to $185 billion to solidify provincial supply amidst rising demand both in- and out-of-province. . . . Even Manitoba, a province with abundant and previously boundless supplies of cheap hydroelectricity, is now projecting a deficit by 2029 and is being forced to restrict access for potential new businesses due to supply shortages.”
In the U.S., power use is forecast to reach record highs this year and next. Grid planners expect nationwide power demand to grow 4.7% over the next five years, compared to a previous estimate of 2.6%. Additionally, the U.S. will spend $2.2 billion to overhaul the national power grid.
Here in Canada, our entire electricity system indeed faces a crunch. If nothing else, stand by to pay more for your Canadian power, if not for occasional brownouts and blackouts.
