Cost of Electrifying BC's North Up $222 Million in Two Years

Call it the power line that won't stop growing. The estimated cost of BC Hydro's Northwest Transmission Line (NTL), which will extend the North American power grid into the mineral-rich northwest corner of the province, has jumped by more than 55 per cent in just two years, from $395 million to $617 million.

A month after this latest estimate appeared in the February 2013 budget, B.C. announced construction will begin this year to extend the same line even deeper north -- to the doorstep of the Red Chris mine (see map below in story), which is expected to be the NTL's first customer. The early cost estimate for this 93-kilometre extension is $130 million.

In true wild west fashion, grid power is coming to the northwest by 2014: across an area roughly the size of Oregon, there are at least 50 proposed industrial projects: about 20 proposed mines, 10 liquified natural gas (LNG) plants, multiple natural gas and oil pipelines, an oil refinery and more than a dozen hydro plants. Yet the future of this hinterland remains clouded, because it is impossible to know which of these projects are real and which will die on paper.

What is certain is that the costs are escalating, and will continue to grow as the province pushes the grid ever deeper north, potentially eroding the public benefit of new jobs and tax revenues from future development. That and no matter what the power line ends up costing, it's already too late to pull the plug.

"The problem with something like the NTL is that so much of the $617-million cost is already sunk, you couldn't recover that by shutting it down," says natural resource economist and SFU public policy professor Marvin Shaffer. "And if enough mines come, we will have to develop new sources of [energy] supply, and that's going to be very expensive."

Read the whole story here,

http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/04/29/Northwest-Transmission-Line/

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