British Columbia is blessed with an abundant and varied supply of clean, affordable and renewable electricity. While often taken for granted, electricity is vital to the continued health of British Columbia’s economy, communities and resource industries. At the same time, electricity development to meet our growing power needs has impacts on the environment, and so must be carefully managed.
The availability of low-cost electricity was instrumental in building British Columbia and establishing our resource sectors such as mining, smelting, and forest products.
In today’s global economy, competitive power rates help to sustain industries and attract new firms and investment, including high-tech, knowledge-based businesses.
Besides supporting the economy, the electricity sector itself creates significant economic benefits. British Columbia’s electric utilities provide skilled, well-paid jobs as well as contribute substantial payments to provincial and local government.
Key Facts
- British Columbians enjoy some of the lowest electricity rates in North America, mainly because of the low historic costs of our hydroelectric generation assets.
- The low cost of heritage resources, electricity trading revenues, conservation and energy efficiency projects and competitive processes for acquiring new power supplies will help to preserve British Columbia’s competitive rate advantage.
- Our flexible hydroelectric system has generated significant electricity export revenues over the past decade.
- The BC electricity sector contributes revenues to the Provincial Treasury and property taxes, school taxes and grants-in-lieu to regional districts and local governments.
Achieving electricity self-sufficiency is fundamental to our future energy security. The policies and actions we put into place today will allow our province to achieve a reliable, clean and affordable supply of electricity for tomorrow. Government has committed to being electricity self-sufficient by 2016. Through the BC Energy Plan, government is setting policies to guide BC Hydro in producing and acquiring enough electricity for future need.
