VANCOUVER — The numbers inside the CleanBC plan never added up to what was coming. That is the blunt conclusion of a new analysis that says British Columbia’s energy strategy was built on demand forecasts that now look like wishful thinking. The province is hunting for new hydroelectric dams.
It is also talking about bringing back natural gas generation. Neither option was supposed to be on the table.
CleanBC, the government’s flagship climate plan, assumed a different future — one where existing hydro capacity would be enough. It is not enough. The gap between what the plan predicted and what actual policy choices are creating is wide.
And it is getting wider. Consider what is driving the pressure.
The analysis points to domestic decisions, not liquefied natural gas exports, as the main cause. Electrification mandates. Industrial policy.
Clean-energy targets. They all push demand upward. Together, they produce a load requirement that outstrips what BC’s existing hydro system can reliably serve.
New dams take years. Permitting alone can stretch into a decade or more.
Natural gas is faster. It is also politically difficult for a government that built its brand on phasing out fossil fuels. But the physics of electricity supply does not care about political branding.
The core problem is a mismatch between aspiration and physical reality. CleanBC baked in assumptions that now look flawed.
Those assumptions underestimated the electricity demand that the province’s own policies would create. The result is a scramble. The province needs supply.
The infrastructure pipeline cannot deliver it quickly enough. BC’s electricity system has long been the envy of other provinces. Cheap hydro power.
Abundant supply. That abundance is no longer a given.
The province faces a hard set of choices. Build new dams. Return to natural gas.
Or revise the policy framework that created the shortfall in the first place. The analysis does not name individual cabinet ministers or single out specific programs.
It does not need to. The numbers do the work. The CleanBC plan projected a future that now appears inconsistent with actual electricity demand.
That is not a minor forecasting error. It is a fundamental miss. This is not a course correction.
It is a course change. The province is looking at new dams and a return to natural gas because the original plan did not account for the load its own policies would generate.
The technical reality is straightforward. Policy choices, more than LNG, are driving the search for new generation capacity. The question now is what happens next.
BC can build. It can burn gas.
Or it can rethink the assumptions that got it here. Each option carries costs. Each carries political risk.
The one thing the province cannot do is pretend the old plan still works.
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