May be hope for BC Hydro..

[Smurf]

Yes isn't it a shame that because they are tied to the government BC Hydro can't play on an even field with the IPP's. They should have no more difficulty getting environmental approvals etc. than private IPP's. It is like I was saying about the government refusing to go after private contractors because it would look bad. Why should we pay a second time to have improper work corrected just because the government does not want to look bad. To much governing is done to look good in the eye's of the voters and supporters than for the good of the province, country, whatever.

[NAB]

Well, it appears that Hahn of BC Ferries BC Hydro Pres. Cobb has now headed for the gangplank off the ship into the private sector. It will be interesting to see who if anyone else follows, and how that may affect BC Hydro's plans and rates going forward. Inch by inch we hopefully see progress in unwinding the mess Campbell put us in LOL.

Nab

[flamingfingers]

Now THIS might be veerrryyy interesting:

Could Jimmy Pattison Have an Eye on BC Hydro? Rafe Speculates Wildly
Written by Rafe Mair

Jimmy Pattison recently plucked Dave Cobb from BC Hydro

How about a bit of totally nonsensical speculation of the order of “Hitler is alive and well living in Argentina”. Something utterly absurd. I bring to this speculation a very unique history – I’m the only person in captivity who’s been fired twice by Jimmy Pattison.

I rather like Jimmy – going out for dinner with Mary and him on his yacht, Nova Spirit, tells you a lot about the way Jimmy’s mind works, for the guests are from different genres and, as often as not, don’t speak with one another. It’s clear that Jimmy enjoys watching the way they interrelate or don’t interrelate at all. Certainly a big man in accomplishments, Jimmy carries with him, dare I mention it in this age of politically correctness, the usual symptoms of, shall we say, height challenge, which accounts for his need to be the big guy at all times, even as he is over 80, to succeed.

Stories about employees abound – the late Bill Sleeman, to whom he gave a new Rolls Royce on his retirement. Long term employees like Enzo (sorry, Enzo I’ve forgotten your surname), Bud Eberhart and Maureen Chant, to name a few, feel or felt a great loyalty to Jimmy who, when concentrating on his car company, routinely fired the month’s lowest salesman saying, “I do them no favour keeping them in a job they can’t succeed in” was his theory.

You know the saying, “When a husband sends his wife flowers for no reason, there’s a reason." Enter Dave Cobb, retiring from BC Hydro after 17 months as CEO; I have no trouble understanding why Cobb would leave. You will remember Cobb’s leaked conference call to employees, in which he slammed independent power projects (IPPs); his predecessor Bob Elton evidently bit the dust on the same subject.

In assessing this unfolding story we must know that the BC government is bankrupting BC Hydro, and in fact have already done so. As economist Erik Andersen has explained, if BC Hydro was in the private sector it would be in bankruptcy protection now! The reason they are not is that they can keep raising their rates.

From the outset, the government’s IPP policy has been to force Hydro to buy power it doesn’t need thus must either sell it at half to a quarter the price they paid for it or use it instead of their own power at a huge loss.

Why would a government do so silly a thing?

There are only two reasons: The Campbell/Clark government wants to bankrupt BC Hydro because of The Fraser Institute's embedded “values” in the right wing unassailable tenet that there should only be private corporations because they are better business people; or, I suppose, they’re dumb as a sack full of hammers and don’t know what the hell they’re doing (I suppose we must admit of the possibility of both being true!).

This is the point I take leave of my senses. Jimmy Pattison has bought the services of Dave Cobb, for whom he must be paying a pretty penny – I mean this guy’s in the million a year range. What reason is there for this? (NDP leader Adrian Dix got off a good one saying that perhaps Cobb has found a Premier Clark he can work with!)

What if Pattison has an eye on BC Hydro? Yes, that’s what I asked – what if Jimmy Pattison, an acquisitor par excellence, buys out the jewel of the BC Crown!

If Jimmy were planning that, he would need someone close to home that knew where the bodies were hidden and Cobb squarely meets that criterion.

In the first place, Cobb is the only man in Hydro today who has admitted that these IPPs are going to wipe out Hydro’s assets. Knowing this and being the sort who can see the writing on the wall, saying, “Get the hell out before you’re tossed out”, he decided to do that.

Taking over Hydro is not a money-winner – at least not now – and won’t be as long as it has liabilities like $50 billion for money-losing (big time) IPPs. But what if Pattison could buy Hydro’s hardware and longstanding customers only, leaving the IPPs in the lurch with no legal rights against to the government (the IPP deals were, after all, made by Hydro), nor the new BC Hydro which has no legal connection to the original one.

I’m admittedly groping in the dark here – I’ve never seen these private contracts. But what if the government said, “We’re expropriating your companies. Here’s the deal - take it or leave it, thanks a lot and good-by”?

Who better than Dave Cobb to help the lawyers and bankers to sort all this out?

Probably simply fantasy, idiotic conjecture. Certainly it’s just guesswork. But there have been worse conjectures…I think!

This for the closer – Jimmy Pattison has never winced from taking on an unusual proposition.

And what was that about the husband and the flowers?

http://thecanadian.org/k2/item/1119-jim ... -rafe-mair

[steven lloyd]

The butchering of BC Hydro
BY JIM QUAIL

On one level, the B.C. government's new Review of BC Hydro marks an about-face by the Liberals under Christy Clark, calling quits to Gordon Campbell's fantasyland of a "green energy powerhouse." On a deeper level, however, it represents a deepening of the Campbell agenda to privatize the public utility. Campbell's fantasy was that we'd become massive exporters of clean electricity mined from our rivers and wind, sold at a premium into the power-hungry California market. This represented a major shift in the mandate of BC Hydro.

From its inception, BC Hydro's mission was to provide safe, reliable, low-cost electricity to British Columbians. Campbell changed this: Hydro was to become a booster and sales agent for private sector electrical generation corporations. This role was given such priority that the government was happy to sacrifice affordability. That's because Hydro's customers would be forced to underwrite the profitability of the private electrical industry.

The reality was that BC Hydro was forced to sign long-term contracts for high-cost, low-value power generated by Campbell's pals, the corporate "Independent Power Producers." IPPs are guaranteed revenue streams for decades to come, selling electricity at inflation-adjusted prices starting between around $70 per megawatt hour and $130 per megawatt hour. Because IPP run-of-river projects (which actually involve extensive damming, diverting and disruption of rivers) are environmentally damaging, they do not meet California standards for "clean." That means we have to dump the high-cost power on the spot market, where it competes with coal and natural gas generation, for prices ranging from near-zero to about $50 per megawatt hour (and most of the time, around $35 or so).

The result? Hydro customers pay through the nose for what is essentially junk power that we have to re-sell at a huge loss. IPPs provide only about 15 per cent of BC Hydro's electricity, but that little slice constitutes nearly one-half of the utility's entire cost of energy.

In short, Campbell's schemes transformed British Columbians into a vast feeding-trough for IPPs. Add to that a billion dollars they want us to waste on so-called smart meters, which achieve little except to enrich the corporate friends who are supplying them, and you have electricity bills rising about 50 per cent over the next 5 years.

Enter the Review. A committee of deputy ministers was thrown together in April, and issued its report to the cabinet in June. It was released to the public early this August. This whirlwind venture had only one real goal: to help the government survive the next election in the face of public furor about the surge in electric rates -- a surge that critics (including the undersigned) had warned of ever since the government adopted its buy high/sell low strategy (code-named "electricity self-sufficiency"). And a hasty job it was -- apparently working backward to try to end up with politically-palatable rates, identifying everything that might be thrown overboard to keep the Liberal ship afloat.

The report seeks to remove the government's head from the bulls-eye of public wrath by gently questioning the more extreme boundaries of the administration's misguided policies, but for the most part aims at short-term ways to save money that leave the main thrust of government's schemes for BC Hydro intact.

For example, it calls for Hydro to shelve some capital projects, but leaves the really big ones -- Smart Meters, the Smart Grid, the Northwest Transmission line (a huge subsidy of a mining development) and the Dawson Creek-Chetwynd Transmission Project (a huge subsidy of shale gas extraction). It calls for the sacking of 20 per cent of Hydro's workforce -- 1,000 employees -- but gives no clue how this would be done while still leaving behind an electrical utility which is capable of functioning.

Hydro's employees did not cause the problem. But as usual, the people who pay the price for the crisis were not the ones who caused it. Critically, the report leaves intact the lucrative power purchase agreements the government forced on Hydro and its customers. The Review lobbed a gentle rebuff toward the government's policy of so-called "self-sufficiency" -- but by now the damage has been done. We've already been committed to more power than we can use from the IPPs at overpriced rates for many decades to come. That horse left the barn a while ago.

Not only does the Review leave the Smart Meter program intact, but it confirms that BC Hydro is moving toward the adoption of "time-of-use" rates, where customers pay higher rates for peak-time consumption (like during supper-hour). Both Hydro and the Minister have been steadfastly denying any such intention, but in fact time-of-use is what Smart Meters are for: they measure and transmit how much energy is consumed at intervals through the day.

The government had an opportunity to shift gears and hold back the pressures on Hydro rates in a truly meaningful way last year, when Campbell announced his resignation as premier. Remember how they cancelled his promise of a 15 per cent tax cut, to take effect on New Year's Day? I was sure they would make a similar move to can the Smart Meter program, but instead they ordered BC Hydro to sign the meter contracts in December 2010. Similarly, they could have called a halt to new IPP contracts last autumn. Instead, BC Hydro has been proceeding as instructed by its political masters to sign up for more and more overpriced surplus power.

So let's take a few steps back and look at the overall picture. First, the government creates a large niche for its corporate friends to profit enormously at the expense of Hydro customers. Then when the resultant huge rate hikes start to hit consumers, the government responds to the public outcry by eviscerating the publicly-owned utility, but leaves the private encroachments intact. I'd say that Christy Clark is not reversing Campbell's policies for BC Hydro. Instead, she's finishing off the butchering job.

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/jim-qua ... g-bc-hydro

[flamingfingers]

^^Why did you not append your famous quote: "We get the government we deserve." ??

Are you finally changing your mind, SL? Do we REALLY DESERVE this kind of government, regardless?

I say NOT!! While I for sure did not vote for these criminals last election, even those who DID vote for the Liebs were coerced and lied to. THEY still did not know what Gordo's actual agenda was. Now we are getting the sh*t rubbed into our faces after the fact. Sure, Gordo is gone but his treachery is being carried on by the bubble brain we have as an unelected 'premier'. 'Tis a shame our hands seem to be tied for the next 16 months. What else is going to surface in the meantime? Totally frightening!
Edited to add:
And you voted to retain the HST so it would put another 8 million per year in the pockets of these bandits so when they added the HST to the 'profit' from BC Hydro and the 'profit' from ICBC (meaning 'steal') going into general revenue, it would look much better according to their bastardized accounting system that has NO relationship to GAAP! That the Auditor Doyle has expressed his disgust with - every year since this government was elected in 2001..

[steven lloyd]

^^Why did you not append your famous quote: "We get the government we deserve." ??

Are you finally changing your mind, SL? Do we REALLY DESERVE this kind of government, regardless?

I say NOT!! While I for sure did not vote for these criminals last election, even those who DID vote for the Liebs were coerced and lied to. THEY still did not know what Gordo's actual agenda was. Now we are getting the sh*t rubbed into our faces after the fact. Sure, Gordo is gone but his treachery is being carried on by the bubble brain we have as an unelected 'premier'. 'Tis a shame our hands seem to be tied for the next 16 months. What else is going to surface in the meantime? Totally frightening!

The Liberals have been doing nothing but lying to and scamming this electorate since before their first election win, and this electorate has continued to re-elect them. Now we have some more insight into the degree of collusion that's been engaged in and the actual numbers in dollars (multiple billions) being siphoned away into or committed to private coffers - and still the excuses and justifications from the lapdpogs. No, I haven't changed my mind. We have the government we deserve.

[flamingfingers]

Incredibly, the Vancouver Sun is finally taking some notice. But why this is not on the front page, above the fold, is shameful!

Hydro ploy may hike costs for users

Vancouver Sun October 29, 2011

Let's be clear - B.C. Auditor-General John Doyle's latest report on BC Hydro is not about a dispute over arcane accounting rules.

It's about how the provincial government is manipulating the utility's bottom line so it can skim off billions of dollars that a future generation of British Columbians will have to repay, either as taxpayers or in the form of higher electricity rates.
It's done so by instructing the BC Utilities Commission to allow BC Hydro to greatly expand the use of deferred expense accounts. These accounts allow money spent today to be booked in future years.

The result, Doyle says, is that the utility can appear to be making a profit when it is actually losing money.

That benefits its customers today because it doesn't have to raise rates now to cover the expenses.

The benefit for the government is that when the Crown corporation makes a profit, it can collect a dividend. So while Hydro racked up deferred expenses that now total $2.2 billion and is expected to increase to $5 billion, the provincial government collected $3.2 billion over the past dozen years from the utility to enhance its own bottom line.

As it has with ICBC, the provincial government has chosen to put its own narrowly defined interests ahead of the interests of the customers who are served by BC Hydro. In both cases, rates could be lower for current customers and in the future if the province skimmed less of the profits. What makes the Hydro case worse is that what is being milked is not a true profit, but the illusion of profit created by an accounting manoeuvre. The point of a deferred account is to protect against unnecessary jumps in rates by accounting for extraordinary expenses over a series of years. But Doyle found that there appears to be no plan to reduce the amounts in the deferred accounts.

The auditor-general says the equity in BC Hydro is being depleted to the point where under the GAAP Canadian accounting standard it would have negative equity. Canada is changing to the International Financial Reporting Standards, which do not allow deferred accounts.

The government, however, wants to exempt BC Hydro from those standards. That will only prolong this problem.

Unless the government plans at some future date to bail out Hydro as the New Democratic Party government did with BC Ferries when it took $1 billion in debt off the Crown corporation's bottom line and onto its own, Hydro's customers will eventually have to pay for the deferred expenses. This intergenerational transfer is unacceptable.

It should be unacceptable to the politicians in the government and it should be unacceptable to Hydro's board of directors, who have allowed these accounts to grow under their watch.

Premier Christy Clark's government needs to deal with this issue before deferred accounts grow any larger. That may require some pain now, either for taxpayers or Hydro customers. That's unfortunate, but deferring the costs to the next generation should never have been considered a solution in the first place.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Hy ... z1cH9Mxvil

[NAB]

comment from: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nat ... /comments/

BC Hydro already produces low carbon dependable electricity, as well as returning a sizable dividend to public coffers. The move towards IPPs was about deregulation of electricity markets which was all the rage in the late 1990's and early 2000's. The BC government was actively lobbying against the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol when they introduced the 2002 Energy Plan which paved the way for IPPs - it had nothing to do with "green power". It was only several years later that it became convenient to pretend that a privatization and deregulation initiative was about tackling climate change.

Lack of planning, abysmally low environmental standards and forcing BC Hydro to purchase undependable intermittent electricity at inflated prices sounded the death knoll for this initiative. Remember, although the IPP industry is bleating about their power being for BC that was never the intent. The power was destined for California, except California said they didn't consider run-of-river power, also known as ruin-of-river power, to be green and they weren't going to pay a premium for it.

BC Hydro is now on the hook for over $30 billion in energy purchase agreements for energy that is excess to the needs of British Columbians and that will be sold at a loss south of the border - especially run-of-river power because that typically comes during spring freshet when we need it the least.

If you wanted a blueprint for how to do green energy the wrong way this would be it. The public was scre*ed all the way to the bank, environmental standards were trashed and BC Hydro was pushed to the edge of bankruptcy.