A Vancouver electric power company?
Question: New Westminster have their own electric power company.
I see that the City of Palo Alto Power company is offering Feed-In-Tariffs for photovolatic and other home and business power generators to the City grid.
Has this been discussed locally? New West has 28,000 residential and 3000 commercial power customers.
Could the City of Vancouver or others take over their own civic Hydro (See Toronto Hydro) and move wires and power junctions underground?
Answer: Hmm, this is a new one for me. I didn’t know New West had its own electric power company. Or maybe I did, but the switch was flipped off in my brain. Anyway, I passed this question through channels to the city’s chief engineer, Peter Judd, and here’s what he had to say.
I believe places that have their own power systems got that way because of historical situations. You should ask the BCUC or Hydro what it would take for the city to do that but basically I can’t see there being any advantage. We could underground the system now if we were willing to pay for it but it would be billions. Even if we could take it over we would still have to pay the same thing. I have no reason to believe there would be any cost advantage to us doing that. It isn’t our core business. As far as the feed in is concerned, I think Hydro already has that but you should check with Hydro.