Missing letter from the online news

Found this letter from Guy Dauncey in my travels... but not travelling through newspaper cyberspace, strangely enough. For some peculiar reason it made the print edition but not the online edition. Was that a minor oversight or intentional? Hhhhhmmmm.....

Times Colonist letters

Thursday May 6th, 2010

Sir, re: “We need power; Site C offers it”, May 2.

In your editorial you dismissed wind energy by saying that “because wind farms are entirely weather-dependent, they need five times the generating capacity of a hydro system to produce the same amount of power.”

A typical new wind farm has 35% generating capacity – it produces power 35% of the time. Site C dam’s generating capacity – if it’s built – will be 58%, so a wind farm needs 65% more capacity, not 500% more.

Site C will cost $6.6 billion for 900 MW of capacity, assuming no cost overruns. At current prices, wind farms in BC cost around $3 million per MW. For the same $6.6 billion investment, we could buy 2200 MW of wind power, and use the existing dams to firm it up.

Site C will produce 4,600 GWh a year of electricity. For the same investment, a wind farm could produce 6,700 GWh a year, without flooding any farmland. The area involved would be similar, but the actual land impacted would be 20 times less – around 220 hectares.

A wind farm could also be built more quickly, and produce power earlier than Site C. By these reckonings, Site C makes neither economic nor environmental sense.

Guy Dauncey

President, BC Sustainable Energy Association