Quote:
Originally Posted by Kutenay
On the issue of electrical power from BC to AB, two points I am not sure of and the first is that there is a powerline "owned" by Calgary Power from Sparwood, BC, up the Elk Valley over the Kananaskis Summit into AB. Is this a "tie line" and if so, there must be more than one.
In 1965 and 1967, I was stationed at Fernie with the BCFS and in '67, I lived for two months in the BCFS cabin at Britt Creek in the Elk Valley and we repaired bridges, culverts, etc. on this road, known as the Calgary Power Road. I spent my 21st birthday swinging a "Pulaski" on that summit, when I would rather have been home in Nelson, drinking beer!
In 2005, I went back for the first time and much was changed, but, that huge, ugly powerline was still there as was the old log cabin at Tobermory. Most of these have been burned by the BCFS since the '70s, too bad, as they are a piece of our heritage.
BC now imports power due to over-use and rapid population growth, so, I doubt that much will be sold to AB; the power we generate is needed here and even more will be necessary. I would prefer to send BC power to AB instead of the USA, but, the terms of the Columbia River Treaty may affect this situation, to Canada's detriment.
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Kute:
I'll repost what Blarney found for all of us to read;
And here's a tid bit from the link Dick provided.
Import/Export Overview
Transmission access is required for parties wishing to arrange for electricity imports or exports to or from adjacent jurisdictions. The Alberta Interconnected Electric System (AIES) has transmission interconnections or inter-ties with both British Columbia (0 to 750 megawatts) and Saskatchewan (0 to 150 megawatts). Typical interconnection transfer capabilities vary within the ranges above depending on system load and real-time operating conditions.
This power line is a steel tower transmission line operating at 500,000 Volts.
As stated it has a maximum capacity of 750 Mega Watts. To put this in perspective it takes roughly 100 Mega Watts to provide power for 55,000 residential homes.
It also might be worth noting that the BC tie line is'nt very old something in the order of maybe 10 years, probably more like 7 but I cant find a refrence of the date of commisioning. So I suspect the line you talk of was not the BC tie line, probably a feeder line from one of the Hydro plants TransAlta(formerly Calgary Power) has close to the BC border.
At any rate a common theme resounds in this whole argument. That being the lack of hard and verifieable statistics and facts. Also misconceptions as to how the whole scheme of the electrical grid and how it operates.
Fact is Alberta needs more genersation really fast in the order of at least 1000 Mega Watts in the next 10 years. This is exasperated by the fact that a lot of the current coal and gas fired generation in Alberta is going to be heavily penalized beacuse there is no way much of it has any hope of making the emmision standards as layed out by the Province.
The demand for the electricity is growning and with the demands on generation being almost peaked out right now, guess what?
I think we are going to see some real hard ships hit us in a lot of ways. Brown/black outs like California saw a few years back may become reality, large capital projects may get cancelled, which will result in job losses.( my opinion)
So I beg to ask.
What sort of hard ships are Albertans willing to endure to see these emission targets be met?
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