Vaughn Palmer: Can B.C. Hydro get up to speed?

VICTORIA — While Premier David Eby touts B.C. as a potential “clean energy superpower,” he’s also admitted that the province’s regulatory regime is a major obstacle to making it happen.

“We have a massive hydroelectric resource in our province that supports us being able to generate electricity for all kinds of different industries and to add to it with sustainable renewable sources of energy like wind and solar,” Eby told reporters recently.

But the premier said he was “not at all confident” that B.C. Hydro will be able to deliver the power necessary to exploit investment opportunities.

“Hydro is not keeping up,” Eby conceded. “It takes eight to nine years to fulfil a request from industry for the kind of electricity that they’re looking for. It takes about the same time to go through the call for power all the way through to generation and transmission. We have to speed that up.”

Enter a B.C. Hydro task force, appointed by Eby to find ways to expedite approvals for generating stations and transmission lines.