Uncomfortable Questions re: Bill 50

Last week, Albertans learned that a massive new multi-billion dollar north-south transmission line will be run west of the QE2 before crossing to the east just north of Crossfield. These lines are absolutely massive – as in roughly 20 stories high (you won’t be able to miss them – and neither will our local area landowners).

Now, as someone who believes in promoting business and economic growth, I understand the need for more electricity for our growing province. However, that doesn’t mean that in the interests of promoting growth we need to trample on the property rights of landowners, gouge ratepayers on their electric bills, and build ugly, skyscraper-sized power lines across our pristine Alberta landscape when there are possibly better alternatives.

So how did we get here?

In 2009, the PC Government rammed through a piece of legislation innocuously entitled, Bill 50 – the Electric Statues Amendment Act. At the time, several experts pointead out many problems with the legislation, however, the Bill was rammed through so quickly that there wasn’t time for the general public to fully digest how the Bill would affect them. It didn’t help that Albertans were, at the time, primarily fixated on reversing a massive tax hike that was crippling our energy industry, digesting record new provincial deficits and trying to cope with an economy stuck in reverse.

Well, time has passed, and Albertans are now coming to realize just how misguided and damaging this new legislation actually is – and even worse, are learning of the disturbing chain of events that have led to its passage.

As a quick review, in 2007, AltaLink applied to the then Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) to build a 500 KV north-south transmission line. In order to move forward with the project, AltaLink had to show that Alberta electricity consumers needed the new mega-lines (as it was Albertans who would have to pay for them in their electricity bills). This ‘needs assessment’ hearing was riddled with controversy before it was finally scrapped in 2007 after it was alleged that the EUB had hired private investigators to spy on landowners opposed to the project. The EUB was subsequently overhauled and its security team dismissed as a result.

Fast forward to 2009. The PC Government decided they didn’t want to bother with the legislated requirement for an objective ‘needs assessment’ so they rammed through Bill 50 which allowed them to ignore that requirement. The PCs themselves say it was to expedite the process of beefing up our province’s power grid (aka. they didn’t want to deal with angry landowners and ratepayers during a ‘needs assessment’ hearing). This reasoning in itself is wrong; hearing the concerns and ideas of ratepayers and landowners should be paramount in a process which will almost certainly harm both.

However, here is where things get murky. After the passage of Bill 50, these billion-dollar transmission contracts were handed to AltaLink and ATCO (2 consistently large donors of the PC Party as per the Elections Alberta website), without any kind of open bidding process. In fact, one of AltaLink’s senior VPs also happens to be VP of the PC Party. Now, to be clear, I am not alleging any wrongdoing on the part of either AltaLink or ATCO (or the VP I just referred to), I simply don’t know; however, given these indisputable relationships and given my role as an opposition MLA, I think my questions are legitimate ones. If the PC Government was concerned about the wellbeing of Alberta ratepayers, why would they simply hand these massive contracts to these companies without competitive bidding? How can we all be sure we aren’t getting gouged as ratepayers?

Which brings me to another ‘hmmm’ moment. As is now general knowledge, the price of natural gas electricity generation plants has dropped dramatically over the past several years due to new technologies and natural gas plays that will almost certainly result in low natural gas prices for the foreseeable future (this is different from where we were back in 2007 during the first ‘needs assessment’ process which ended in the aforementioned alleged ‘spy scandal’). As has been pointed out by several electricity producers, it is now entirely possible that locally generated electricity from natural gas power plants could reduce or eliminate the need for a large amount of these new and grossly expensive transmission lines carrying coal generated electricity from central Alberta.

Now I’m not an expert on whether the need for redundancy and other factors still make the proposed transmission lines necessary, however, neither is the brain trust in the Premier’s office nor his Cabinet. This is precisely why politicians shouldn’t be making such ‘needs assessments’, and why an impartial needs assessment hearing should be completed before potentially spending billions of dollars on needless transmission lines that we are all going to pay for as ratepayers. Furthermore, it begs the question - could it be that the ‘needs assessment’ process was intentionally skipped precisely because the Government knew the new transmission lines might not pass muster in current market conditions? Were they worried there would be no juicy transmission contracts to pass out at the end of the day?

And that leads to yet another uncomfortable question. Why would a Government that is willing to burn $2 billion on the altar of carbon capture and storage (for the purposes of decreasing Alberta’s emissions of CO2), so willingly forge ahead with a transmission line build between Edmonton and Calgary that will essentially enshrine CO2 intensive coal-generated electricity producers for a generation instead of promoting the local generation of electricity from natural gas? Is the Government favoring coal-generated electricity producers over other energy producers – and if so why? A quick look at the Elections Alberta disclosure of contributions page leaves one with some serious questions on his mind in this regard.

There are many things wrong with Bill 50, but the bottom line is this. You and your businesses will be paying significantly higher costs for electricity because of transmission lines that were not competitively tendered and maybe unnecessary or excessive.

How’s that for lump of coal in your stocking?