B.C. is blessed with an abundance of both natural gas and clean electricity, and has not experienced the kinds of shocks that energy-poor Germany and energy-rich Texas have experienced in recent years as a result of failures on energy resilience.
Some warning lights have flashed with respect to energy security in B.C., however.
In recent years, B.C. has had to import electricity from the U.S., as a result of drought lowering hydro dam reservoir levels, and as part of decarbonization and energy transition policies, municipal and provincial governments have been making tentative moves to phase out the use of natural gas for heating in B.C.
And now president-elect Donald Trump is threatening a trade war that could fracture energy trade between Canada and the U.S.
All of which underscores the importance of a balanced approach to the energy trilemma – a topic that came up at a number of sessions earlier this week at the BC Natural Resources Forum.
For utilities, energy producers and governments, this trilemma is the challenge of providing reliable and affordable energy while also trying to respond to climate change policy imperatives of decarbonization.
“You cannot take your eye off of sustainability, but you cannot also promote one aspect of the trilemma at the expense of the other two,” FortisBC CEO Roger Dall’Antonia said during a BC Natural Resources Forum fireside chat Thursday.
He pointed to Texas as an example of what can happen when resilience is ignored.
Texas has abundant energy in the form of natural gas and wind power. But in 2021, an extreme weather event from a polar vortex caused massive power and other utility failures that lasted several days, left Texans shivering in the dark, killed an estimated 246 people, and cost Texans billions in economic costs – all because the Texas grid is not well integrated with other states and because the grid and utilities were not hardened for cold weather
“Resiliency is an area that we're getting, unfortunately, too familiar with, with extreme weather events,” Dall’Antonia said.
A decade ago, the investment climate for energy and utilities was one with low interest rates, affordable energy prices, and a heightened focus on climate change polices, which drove investments in decarbonization and energy transition, Dall’Antonia noted.
“Climate was driving … environmental policy, but it was also driving infrastructure decisions, to the exclusion of things like reliability, resiliency. You've seen what has happened in other jurisdictions where you've seen an under-investment in the resiliency and reliability of the energy systems to, unfortunately, very serious consequences."
In B.C., natural gas provides about 66 per cent of B.C.’s primary energy, with electricity supplying about 20 per cent. Natural gas is particularly important in the wintertime.
“Our system, on the gas side, on the coldest days of the year, delivers about two-thirds of the end-use energy in B.C.,” Dall’Antonia said. “Or said another way, we delivered about twice the amount of energy that the combined BC Hydro-FortisBC electric system reported.”
FortisBC is mainly a natural gas utility, but also provides electricity for the Southern Interior. While both natural gas and electricity can provide heating, they serve very different functions within the “energy stack,” Dall’Antonia said.
“The electric system runs at a higher annual average capacity, but the gas system has a much greater capacity to flex in cold weather events. And you really can't ignore the way the systems have been designed over the decades when you're thinking about how we're going to move forward as we're addressing this trilemma.”
The B.C. government and BC Hydro have been investing in an expansion of B.C.’s power generation and transmission capacity, including the new $16 billion Site C dam and new power transmission lines, and recently approved 10 new renewable energy projects – nine wind and one solar.
Dall’Antonia cautioned that investments are still needed for the natural gas system as well.
“You have to think about how you're continuing to invest in both systems, including the gas system, to be there for those times where it's needed to flex on those really severe weather events like we do.”
Energy security concerns could become heightened under the Trump administration. Even if the tariffs Trump has threatened end up exempting oil, natural gas and electricity exports from Canada, Canada could respond with its own bans and or excise taxes on exports.
Barry Penner, chairman of the Energy Futures Institute, said talk of retaliatory taxes or bans on energy exports makes him “nervous.” He noted that, in 2023 and 2024, about 20 per cent of B.C.'s electricity was imported from the U.S.
“So two years in a row we've been dependent mostly on the U.S. for the imported electricity,” he said at a Wednesday session on electrical grids.”With Donald Trump coming along and threatening to upend our trading relationship, it makes me nervous.
“Trade obviously benefits us, but it becomes a risky proposition when you have an unstable and unpredictable neighbour that you're dependent upon. And Premier (Doug) Ford came out and said, ‘we should threaten to withhold electricity sales to the United States.’ I immediately quivered from that comment, because the U.S. could play that card right back to us here in British Columbia.”
By focusing so heavily on electrification, and moving to phase out natural gas, the B.C. government may be putting all of its energy “eggs in the hydro basket,” Penner said. He urged a more diverse approach to energy security – one that includes natural gas for heating.
“Currently, the plan is to prohibit the use of natural gas for home and commercial space heating, starting in 2030, province-wide, including here in Prince George and further north, and force people to use electricity only through heat pumps,” said Penner, a former environment minister for the previous BC Liberal government.
“We do have policy levers to help insulate ourselves from President Trump to some extent, and we can do that by adjusting the Clean BC targets and requirements for phasing out the use of natural gas for commercial heating, and relaxing the EV mandates that say that, in British Columbia, 90 per cent of all vehicles sold by the 2030 model year have to be EVs.
“That alone is going to put more demand on the grid going forward. So there are a few things we could do to just take the pressure off, save ourselves some money collectively, and make ourselves less dependent upon our American neighbours.”
