Power plant destructive: City of Powell River council acted wisely in opposing the Goat Island pumped storage hydropower project [“Council opposes power project,” December 23].
I’m still hoping this is a hoax, but if it is a serious proposal then we are faced with unbelievably sloppy or recklessly nonchalant government agencies that give tentative approval to the investigative stage of a project with a hugely destructive environmental footprint.
I can understand how 2,000 megawatts may escape the notice of the average layperson, but I’d be surprised if some savvy bureaucrats weren’t fully aware of how insane this figure is.
As a means of comparison, all of Powell Lake generates 46 megawatts and the huge Peace River Site C dam expansion is expected to generate only 1,100 megawatts.
A pumped-storage hydroelectric project may make sense under certain circumstances as a power stabilizer between low- and high-peak energy demand, even though considerably more energy is required to pump the water uphill than what is generated by gravity afterwards. But the claimed 2,000-megawatt figure is such an outlandish amount of regenerative energy (to be derived by a relatively tiny reservoir) as to rival some of the largest pumped-storage projects in the world, such as the Guangdong station in China.
You might conceivably be able to generate it by emptying the amount of water of an olympic-sized swimming pool every 10 seconds, or draining all of Frogpond Lake in 30 minutes, assuming you could build a penstock large enough for such a volume of water.
To live up to the 2,000 megawatt claim in a closed-loop system they would have to hugely expand the reservoir capacity of Frogpond by building a large dam at each end and do the same with Clover Lake, flooding a huge section of Goat Island in the process.
This would obliterate these two lakes as recreational sites due to the daily rise and fall of the water level of both reservoirs, remove a huge swath of forest land in perpetuity, cause incalculable damage to the island’s flora and fauna and, not least, require a humongous power-line corridor that would make the present hydro line from Saltery Bay pale in comparison.
While such a huge undertaking might benefit BC Hydro, Powell River would derive practically no benefit from it, except perhaps in the short period of construction.
What it would leave us with is permanent, ugly land scars and potentially huge costs in the wake of a cataclysmic disaster such as an earthquake.
Tony Culos
Manson Avenue
