It has been estimated by the Royal Bank of Canada that the electrification bill needed to support a net-zero Canada by 2050 will cost $5.4 billion a year over the next three decades.
Canada’s grid—its electrical generation, transmission and distribution—will essentially need to double in size in order to replace fossil fuels with clean electricity.
In B.C., BC Hydro is planning to spend billions over the next few years to increase generation transmission capacity and meet the provincial government’s CleanBC goals of decarbonizing the economy through electrification.
This electrification push promises to be a bonanza for engineering and construction companies, including electrical, mechanical, civil, geotechnical and environmental engineering firms. When BC Hydro builds a new dam or transmission line, it typically contracts out the design work to private firms.
“It’s a super exciting time for anyone in engineering,” said Colleen Giroux-Schmidt, vice-president of corporate relations at Innergex, one of Canada’s largest renewable energy companies. “The electricity sector uses more than just electrical engineers. It’s mechanical, it’s civil, it’s geotechnical.”
In B.C., the $16 billion Site C dam is still about a year away from completion. Major engineering firms employed on that project have included Acciona and Klohn Crippen Berger.
Despite the additional 5,100 gigawatt hours (GWh) of new clean power the dam is expected to produce, there are fears that the B.C. government’s sweeping electrification plans could push the province into a power deficit.
The demand for additional clean power is expected to come from electric vehicles, general population growth and industry, and B.C.’s nascent LNG industry alone will require huge amounts of power.
There could also be demand for massive amounts of public power from green hydrogen proponents. A single green hydrogen plant pitched by Fortescue in Prince George would require 1,000 megawatts of power—90 per cent of the Site C dam’s generating capacity.
BC Hydro will soon issue a new power call to obtain another 3,000 GWh of electricity from private power producers, and the Crown corporation recently updated its 10-year capital plan to include an additional $10 billion in spending in three main areas: A new 500 kilovolt (kV) transmission line from Prince George to Terrace, expanding or building new substations and transit electrification infrastructure, and upgrading dams and generators.
Whereas run-of-river hydro power dominated previous power calls in B.C., wind is expected to dominate the 2024 power call.
Solar power is most productive in the summer, for obvious reasons, and run-of-river hydro is most productive in the spring, when streams and rivers are in full freshet.
But winter is when BC Hydro needs to address seasonal peak demand, Giroux-Schmidt explained, and winter is when wind power is most productive.
“When you look at the energy profile that BC Hydro is requesting in this call, wind is the resource that aligns with that the best,” Giroux-Schmidt said. “The energy profile that BC Hydro has requested is looking for winter-heavy energy. They absolutely do not want freshet energy with this procurement, so the pricing they put on that energy is quite low, which tells us that they don’t want run-of-river this time.”
Given the cost escalations of the Site C dam project, there may be little appetite for additional large hydro projects in B.C. in the near-term. But given how much clean power the province is going to need if it is to meet its net-zero ambitions, the B.C. government and BC Hydro may have to consider more large-scale hydro projects at some point in the future, as well as other “non-emitting” generating sources, including nuclear power and offshore wind, Giroux-Schmidt said.
“There’s not likely to be more [large hydro dams], but I think, as we move into the magnitude of the amount energy that we need, it will be interesting to see what choices the province explores,” she said.
“Nuclear is not allowed in the province, but it comes up in conversation. Offshore wind, we haven’t seen much of yet in the province, but again … we need a lot more non-emitting energy. We might start looking at things differently.
“Projects like wind and solar are deployable today and cost effective, so they’ll definitely dominate in the near-term. But some of these other things we may see come back later.”
As for transmission, the next big powerline BC Hydro plans to build is a 500-kV line from Prince George to Terrace. This involves building 445 kilometres of new high-voltage transmission lines.
“Someone’s going to have to do the actual engineering and then the construction,” said Barry Penner, a former B.C. environment minister who now chairs the Energy Futures Initiative. “That’s going to be a major, multi-year project.”
Electrical engineering and construction firms like Westpark Electric and Lex Engineering are hoping to benefit from increased spending on clean power generation and transmission. In the past, Westpark won contracts worth up to $40 million for private run-of-river projects like the Upper Lillooet Hydro Project.
“We built a couple of substations and about 75 kilometres of high-voltage lines through the mountains there,” said Westpark president D’Arcy Soutar.
From 2000 to 2017, Westpark worked almost exclusively with independent power producers (IPPs).
“For the last five years, there’s been essentially none,” Soutar said. “We’ve had to re-shift our focus away from directly supporting IPPs and to supporting other private clients, like mines, for example. I’d like to anticipate an opportunity to get back into that.”
Wind farms require collector systems, substations and transmission lines to connect to the grid. Lex Engineering—a Quanta Services company headquartered in Burnaby—does engineering for substations and transmission lines. The Dokie wind farm (owned by Innergex) is one of the wind energy projects the company has worked on in the past.
“For engineering firms like ourselves, that’s where the opportunities are,” said Lex Engineering vice-president of engineering Paul Fuoco.
There are also opportunities for engineering and construction firms to provide heavy industry with the electrical distribution needed to connect them to the grid. Lex Engineering has been involved, for example, in doing the engineering work for switching natural gas processing plants in B.C. from natural gas turbines to electric drive.
“We’ve been involved in getting them the utility connections, engineering the transmission lines, engineering the substations, and then, once that’s built, transferring them off the local generation and putting them onto the grid,” Fuoco said.
Concerns have been raised recently that B.C.’s power system is too dependent on large hydro. In 2023, the province ended the year as a net importer of electricity, and could again this year, due to drought lowering reservoir levels.
Jose Marti, a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of British Columbia, doesn’t think that’s a major concern, especially since BC Hydro will soon have another hydro-electric reservoir in the Site C dam. A bigger electrical engineering challenge, he said, is distribution.
Moving electricity from the dam to the home or office building requires stepping the electricity up and down, which involves transformers, distribution lines, circuit breakers and substations. Distribution is the last mile, and includes the interconnections that take power from high-voltage transmission lines, step it down and bring it to the home, office building, mine or pulp mill.
The increased deployment of electric vehicles, EV charging stations and electric heat pumps will place strain on the local distribution systems, Marti warns.
“What is going to be a problem, and for which we will need other solutions, is the electrical vehicle deployment in the cities,” Marti said.
“Right now, the distribution system is at its limit,” he added. “At the moment that EVs are deployed en masse — then they will have real problems.”
