Aboriginal partners sought for hydro plan; Run-of-river power project years away, but could replace coal-fired plants

Gordon Jaremko, May 8, 2008, The Edmonton Journal -- Aboriginal ownership partners will be sought for a mammoth hydroelectric development proposed on the Slave River, Canadian Utilities Ltd. president Nancy Southern said Wednesday.

Native participation is a top priority of the drive to revive the dormant megaproject left over from the last Alberta energy boom three decades ago, Southern said in an interview.

It will be five to seven years before CUL's Atco and industry partner TransCanada Corp. are ready to unveil construction plans for the site about 800 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, she told her firm's annual shareholder meeting.

But government greenhouse-gas emissions reduction targets will fuel the marathon attempt to build an environmental replacement for coal-fired Alberta power stations, Southern told The Journal.

Instead of generating exports, the reincarnated Slave River development is meant to fill a gap that planned retirements of aging thermal plants are projected to leave in Alberta supplies, she said. "We're going to need really big projects in order to hit those emissions targets," she predicted.

Electric service is still scrambling to catch up to economic and population growth sparked by accelerating oilsands development since the late 1990s.

Most of $3 billion in construction planned by CUL's Atco gas and power subsidiaries over the next three years will go into stringing new transmission wires in rapidly industrializing areas north of Edmonton, Southern said.

The commitments could grow.

The budget does not include a potential alternative route to replace a hotly contested AltaLink project with a line in Atco's thinly populated and less hostile service territory east of the Queen Elizabeth II Highway between Edmonton and Calgary.

The arid plains region is well suited for long-range development of a major new power and pipeline corridor as Alberta communities and industry keep growing, CUL chairman Ron Southern said.

Power from the proposed Slave River project would flow along the proposed eastern corridor and across spur lines to cities and industrial sites. Sales to other provinces, and eventually exports to the United States, are eventually possible, he indicated.

CUL-Atco agents are currently introducing the Slave River plan to northern Alberta communities. The community relations program and aboriginal partnership invitations will reach into the Northwest Territories, the Southerns said.

Detailed designs, cost estimates, employment forecasts and community benefit projections are not yet available, although TransCanada has forecast a price tag in the $5-billion range for a 1,000-1,500-megawatt installation.

The firms emphasize the Slave River project's reincarnation uses improved technology known as "run of the river." Instead of towering dams, lake-sized reservoirs and artificial cataracts into generators, the modern approach channels and amplifies natural flows with less intrusive submerged structures.

The original 1,800-MW dam proposal was shelved as too big and expensive for the smaller Alberta power grid of the early 1980s, said retired Atco Electric executive Dick Frey.

The province instead approved staged construction of the Genesee and Sheerness coal-fired plants west of Edmonton and northeast of Calgary, he recalled.

The first Slave River project would have increased total Alberta generating capacity by about 35 per cent in one jump. The multibillion-dollar cost would have caused an unacceptable bulge in consumers' electricity bills, Frey said.

The proposed new version is about a 15-per-cent addition to an Alberta grid that has more than doubled in capacity and will need new generators as aging coal plants approach scheduled retirements.

"It's a good project," Frey said.

Evolving national and provincial greenhouse gas emissions reduction policies make the Slave River waterpower scheme look better all the time, he added. "It wouldn't take much of a carbon tax to make this thing fly."