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Everything Electric Podcast
Big 'Blue' Battery? How BC HYDRO is powering a province's energy & transport?
00:42:29
Imogen chats with the new President and CEO of BC Hydro, Charlotte Mitha, for an insightful conversation about the future of clean energy in British Columbia and beyond. BC Hydro delivers electricity to over five million customers across the province,...
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- [00:00]
Host
Foreign.
- [00:09]
Interviewer
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast, where today we're catching up with Charlotte Meter, the brand new CEO of BC Hydro. Now for those who've been listening to the show for a while, you'll know that we're huge fans of BC Hydro and with excellent reason because they provide their 5 million customers across British Columbia for with electricity that is 98% from clean energy, most notably from their 82 hydroelectric dams as well as the Western Interconnection which connects all the way from British Columbia all the way to California so they can trade solar power for their lovely hydroelectricity. Now the other reason that of course we love BC Hydro is because they are our main sponsor of our live show at the Vancouver Convention center, which just happens to be taking place this weekend on the 5th, 6th and 7th of September. So if you fancy an EV test drive or checking out some clean energy technologies, or maybe listening to some scintillating panel discussions with our various experts who will have on site, then we would love to see you there. And details of how to get tickets are of course in the description box below. Now in this conversation I wanted to chat to Charlotte about what are some of her hopes and ambitions, some of her challenges that are coming up in this new role as CEO. And she has such an interesting perspective, not least because she is a proper engineer, but background she has been with the business for a really long time. We've actually featured her on the show before in an episode that we did about the Western Interconnection and she just has such a fascinating perspective and this is a huge task because this demand for electricity is only going in one direction. It is of course increasing at an astronomical rate. They're having to build so much infrastructure as well as maintain their existing infrastructure and educate a lot of consumers on the way as to how to think about those glorious kilowatts and kilowatt hours. So all of that to come. But first a very quick advert break.
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Advertiser
Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and cleantech are funded by our fun packed test drivetastic events in Farnborough, London, the South west, the North, Melbourne and Sydney. And next up we're in Canada for Everything Electric, Vancouver and new for UK viewers. You can now buy a battery, EV and much more at EverythingElectric store.
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Interviewer
Charlotte, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It is such a delight to be chatting to you again, but this time in a slightly different context, in a slightly different role. So welcome.
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Charlotte Meter
Thank you. Glad to be here.
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Interviewer
So you have been. Well, you've recently stepped into the role of CEO of BC Hydro. And I guess my first question is, how does it feel? How have the first few months been?
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Charlotte Meter
I'm actually in my first couple weeks and it feels good. I mean I've been with a company for 20 years, mainly on the operations side of the business and yeah, just always very feel honored to be part of an organization like this. BC Hydro just, you know, its leadership in climate action, its role in serving British Columbia. So yeah, very excited, incredible team to work with and big mission in front of us. So yeah, happy to be here.
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Interviewer
And obviously you've had roles in leadership for a number of years. I think you were EVP of operations. I want to say.
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Charlotte Meter
Yes, yes.
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Interviewer
And so clearly you know the business inside out. You're obviously more than qualified for the job. But there must be a funny sensation of like, oh, I'm CEO, I'm quite important, I'm suddenly a grown up. I wonder if you've had that kind of realization moment yet.
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Charlotte Meter
Yeah, again, I think being in operations really gives you sort of a real sense of what it takes to be a modern utility. And I know firsthand how critical reliable, safe service is to British Columbians and just how important it is for their quality of life, their safety, their security, their aspirations, business, personal. And I know what it takes to get electrons flowing on the grid every day and what has to go right, all the things that need to go right in order for the grid to be reliable. So yeah, it's exciting to bring all of that enthusiasm. I mean operations gets in your blood, but that knowledge to a role like this where, yeah, you have a few more levers to pull in terms of your ability to sort of meet the demands of the day, meet what customers need and really be that clean power supply for the jurisdiction that I live in.
- [04:42]
Interviewer
Well, I think this is a perfect leaping off point for us to get into this conversation because exactly as you describe, you know, you could just think of electricity as whatever, it's just something that we consume. But it is so critical to our livelihoods both in terms of the industries that it supports, the jobs that it creates and people just living a good quality of life at home. And of course in this particular day and age, there are many challenges that face that. There's a huge decarbonization challenge across the world. Something which of course BC Hydro is already leading on and there's a huge part that consumers are having to do to change their behavior as well. So quite a long list. I Imagine of a list of your priorities. So when you came into the role, what did you perceive or what are you currently perceiving to be your key priorities? I suspect there's kind of a list of a few things that you're like, okay, this has to be the focus for the first three months, first year, etc. Etc. What's on your list?
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Charlotte Meter
Yeah, so I recognize that we're in a pivot right now to what I would describe as a big build era. Like most jurisdictions, we're looking at some very aggressive load growth scenarios potentially. And so we're going from what is. We've always had a very big sort of capital build side, but now it's twice the size of what it historically has been. Big grid growth, energy supply projects on the book. So I felt, you know, one of the most important priorities for me is to enable the company to really meet the day in terms of this big build error, be able to deliver projects efficiently on time and enable just our incredibly talented employees to do that.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
So, you know, get some headwinds out of their way, make some processes simpler, get our company more comfortable with business risk, and just enable us to move a bit faster. And so that has been a priority. I mean, our priorities as a company are pretty clear. I mean, they are to foster economic development for British Columbia, grow our energy supply and build a resilient grid and also just innovate to meet what our customers need. And so those are the sort of the four priorities that I just, I always keep in my head and I'm always thinking about how I enable our people to deliver on that.
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Interviewer
And when you say big build era, what does that look like? Exactly? Because we recently visited Site C dam and there's been sort of various things that have been mentioned of perhaps this is the last big dam that's built within British Columbia. So, Big Bill, does that refer to generation itself or is that more the transmission side of the business?
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Charlotte Meter
Well, we're an integrated, vertically integrated utility. So we have generation, transmission and distribution, and we have a very aggressive build plan across all three of those areas. So what that shows up, but what that looks like is we are building, you know, dozens of new substations on our distribution system. We are reinvesting in our existing plants, doing big generator replacements to get more efficiency and more power out of them. We're adding, you've, I think one of your colleagues has been to our Revelstoke Dam, very large, one of our biggest generating stations in, in the province. And we're adding A six turbine generator to that facility. That's a very big investment. And, and we're, we're doing things like running power calls, procuring more energy from the private sector. So, and we're doing it all at the same time. So we used to do some of these things. But the key now is, yes, Site C, very excited, it's completed, but now we're working across transmission, distribution and generation and got big programs across all of them.
- [08:37]
Interviewer
And I will return to site C at some point in this podcast as well. But I think, you know, particularly here in the uk where we don't have huge hydroelectricity infrastructure, I kind of conceptually understand what a dam is. I've seen it in a physics textbook, I've studied it as an engineering student and I've seen pictures obviously on the Internet. But to be there and to appreciate the sheer scale, I don't even have the words, it was absolutely astronomical. And I think also to witness the pride of the people that had been behind it. And you know, this didn't make it into the episode, but there was a conversation of, oh, have you brought your parents here to come and see it yet? And I thought that's how significant being a part of these huge infrastructure projects is. And it totally blew me away. It was incredible. Really, really incredible.
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Charlotte Meter
Yeah, these are engineering marvels. And as anyone knows, to, to build a project of that size right now, the size of the team, the expertise of the team and the partners, you need to do that. But what, what's great when you work at, for BC Hydro is, I mean, we supply 95% of the province. It's a huge province, it's a million square kilometers. And yeah, you really feel like you're building it for your families next generation. These are, these are hundred year projects.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
And I always tell people, if you get asked to participate in any sort of project of that size and magnitude, say yes, because it's legacy building and an experience that very few people get in their careers. God, yeah.
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Interviewer
Because I suppose like even when buildings are constructed in this day and age, there's nothing. I mean, obviously the intention would be that they'd last for 100 years, but it's not necessarily thinking in that kind of legacy infrastructure. So it's almost more akin to building a cathedral or something. Maybe I'm getting a bit too carried away and a bit too nerdy here. Okay, so I guess in all of this then the big build part of this is sort of pointing to the fact that there's a huge demand of Electricity or huge increase in demand for electricity that is coming. What do you perceive to be the biggest drivers of that over the next, say 10 years or so?
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
Yeah, we have professional load forecasters who spend a lot of time doing load forecasts for many scenarios. You know, 20 years out right now. I mean there's a very, there's a lot of contributors to load growth. There's industrial development in a jurisdiction, there's electrification where people are converting off traditional fuels like gas or oil and being supplied by electricity. There's population growth, housing growth and of course EVs and transitions like transportation to electricity. In BC right now, I mean, our growth has been very flat over the last 10 years mainly due to just declining industrial load in the wood sector. It's kind of masked some of the growth in other areas like our electrification and our population and housing residential growth. But right now the biggest growth is going to come from industry. And BC Hydro is really seen as sort of powering the potential of the economy in B.C. and Canada. So the growth will come from LNG, from oil and gas sector mining, critical minerals and port expansion. And so we'll be serving those, those industries through our, through our grid.
- [12:11]
Interviewer
The other thing that you mentioned on your sort of list of priorities was getting the business used to perhaps taking bigger risks. And what strikes me is that on the one hand There is this 20 to 25 year forecast and predicting what the load may be in 20, 25 years. But there's also a tremendous amount of things that are happening on an almost daily basis. You know, for ex, the tariffs on EVs changing or the incentives changing for EVs or all of these different mechanisms that must make it incredibly difficult to ban between this long term outlook and adapting for the short term change. And I wonder how an organization of your size has to band between those two different outlooks.
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Charlotte Meter
You are so right. This is our biggest challenge right now is the scenarios are so wide. The uncertainty of where this load could go has never been bigger. And we also have some what I would call mega loads that could show up that have a huge influence on the load forecast.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
We are a, a utility that has about an 11,000 megawatt peak capacity in winter. And yeah, if you have a, you know, a 300 megawatt industrial load that may or may not show up, this is, this is hard to plan for. And, and like you said, many, many other macro economic geopolitical factors on that. So we are really looking at scenarios now. We plan with scenarios and we have an integrated resource plan that looks at sort of the 20 year potential scenarios of loads and how we would supply those and when we would pull the trigger on certain actions based on what we're seeing around us. So what scenario looks like it's actually panning out here and then we have actions that we pull that would give us more supply, maybe more transmission build out. And you're right, tying the business risk into this, it's when I say we'll take more risks, never more safety risk. We're a high hazard industry and safety is number one. But if you're going to move faster on some business decisions, you have to be a bit more comfortable with a bit more business risk because you're kind of placing bets.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
And then you're going to need to probably pivot because the world will change before you. So yeah, we're really pushing that sort of scenario planning plans that we can pull off the shelf if things don't pan out as expected.
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Interviewer
So plan A, A, plan B, a plan C, a plan D. Yeah.
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Charlotte Meter
And plan A is to not be cautious on overbuilding a little bit if we have to.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
It's an asymmetric risk if we're not there with our supply to meet the industrial needs. That's, that's a bigger impact than maybe having a, a little bit too much supply for a couple of years and some comfort that we can meet, you know, changing load forecasts.
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Interviewer
So clearly there are some huge, there's a huge amount of thought that has to go on to generation, transmission, distribution and those kind of big meaty, top down level challenges, especially in the light of having to create loads and loads of different scenarios. But we're also entering a world in which consumers or homeowners can actually have quite a lot more power in terms of how they can contribute to the grid and help balance it as well. And I wonder if you could speak to some of the things that BC Hydro are doing to really work with customers to understand, you know, what do kilowatts actually mean and how can they help balance the grid.
- [15:32]
Host
Yeah, you're right.
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Charlotte Meter
So BC Hydro has a long history on what we call power smart and the customer's role in, in managing demand, managing energy usage. And back to 2008, you know, we had efficiency programs called PowerSmart and it is still for customers to conserve and save some energy is still for us a cheaper option than building some very expensive infrastructure. And it's such a win win.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
Because customers are controlling their own bills, their own energy management, their own climate footprint. If we give them the tools to be able to do that. So yeah, we started from a real efficiency drive, incenting customers, including industrial customers, to look at options where they can use less electricity for their process and their facilities, to really looking at a lot more options like rate structures. Like we have Peak Saver, which encourages customers to take advantage of savings if they move their EV charging or their house's electrical load off our peak times. When our grid is more stressed than other times, we are offering customers more options like sort of to just manage their own energy and see their energy profile. And I think this is just such an important area of development, you know, the future of sort of virtual power plants where customers come together and either decide that they take optional load off our grid when the call comes, or even a future where they give us some control to turn down thermostats one or two degrees to save some energy. I mean, this is the future, right? And I love the concept of a virtual power plant because you're actually not building more infrastructure. You're just combining the behavioral efforts, efforts and capabilities of your customers.
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Interviewer
I suppose it sort of welcomes in the Internet of Energy where we start to think of it less as sort of something that flows and more like data that can exist. And I don't know, I do think that's extremely cool. And I think, I don't know, from a personal perspective, I think having a more tangible relationship with your kilowatts and kilowatt hours can only be a good thing and almost see them like a currency that you can trade and move around. And Yeah, I agree. VPPs I think are extremely exciting as a, as a mechanism to unlock that way of thinking.
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Charlotte Meter
Yeah, we're putting, we're being more aggressive than ever on the demand side, management side. And we're putting $700 million in over the next three years to our energy efficiency and our demand side management program. And we have some great examples. We have. We're going in this jurisdiction from more of a single family home to a multiplex residence, type of housing portfolio or demographics. And we're putting in things like, we're trialing things like smart panels. Our customer can avoid a whole expensive, you know, big electrical service by just managing the loads behind their meter better. And I mean that's. And it helps us and it helps them. So yeah, we're incenting lots of really unique pilots that way.
- [18:55]
Interviewer
One of the things that's interesting and I was chatting to my husband just before I did this and he was like, isn't it crazy? That BC Hydro has such a huge brand presence when really you don't have any competitors within the province. And I was like, I'd not really stopped to think about that and sort of just taken it as fact that you know, BC Hydro is so such a core part of obviously British Columbia. And I wonder what you see the role of that brand presence in terms of the consumer education piece.
- [19:25]
Host
Right?
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Charlotte Meter
Yeah. It's so important that people trust us. Like we talked about earlier, electricity is so defined to quality of life and like I said, aspirations of people's prosperity and why they want to live. In British Columbia we have some of the lowest cost rates of electricity in North America, like second or third lowest. And yet obviously we're a big infrastructure company and we have a very strong environmental sentiment in bc. People really care about the multi generation impacts if, if the environment isn't handled well. So they need to trust us. And especially on that balance between development and environment and social impacts. And so as a crown corporation where our shareholder is the government and the taxpayers of British Columbia, we hold that responsibility. It's very important in how we think ourselves as a service company. And I just think we're in a really good position if we deliver how our customers and how the residents of B.C. want us to deliver. You know, we're going to end up with a better system, a better quality of product for them and ultimately, you know, keep that, you know, 98% clean energy that we're so proud of in terms of what we deliver. But brand is so important. Trust, it's just about trust.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
And social license to do what we need to do.
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Interviewer
Yeah, well, I think you mentioned there about sort of social responsibility and environmental responsibility. And I want to return to site C because as I said it was, it was just a mind boggling piece of infrastructure. And we also went upstream and we also had a look at the WAC Bennett Dam and again just astronomical in scale like nothing I've ever seen before. And in being there, you look at the environment and you just think, wow, these reservoirs are so beautiful. But then you have to take yourself and remind yourself that it didn't used to look like that. And there are these huge pieces of generating infrastructure which is so vital for the prosperity of the province, but also the landscape has been changed and that will have impacts socially or environmentally as the case may be. And that is true of any piece of infrastructure and it's certainly true of any piece of, of energy generating infrastructure. But I wonder when you look back at the that project over the past 10 years in which lots of things have happened in the world in that 10 years. I wonder if there's any lessons learned or reflections during that period.
- [22:09]
Charlotte Meter
Yeah, I mean you have to have reverence for the impacts that any infrastructure has. And, and I think, you know, BC Hydrohyde a past, you know, in the 50s and 60s things were done differently and we do things very, very differently now. And one of the things really proud of on the environment on the siteseaside is we're being held to a very high account on the ongoing environmental monitoring and, and operation of that facility. So I think, you know, like I said, we, we take that environmental social responsibility really, really seriously. And one of the things that I would say, you know, anybody starting a mega project like this, have reverence for the individual community impacts and staff up your, your project early. I think that's the lesson. You always need more people on these projects and a lot of it is so that you can communicate what you're doing and, and have that time in order to assess the impacts. And, and then like we do, we tried to do an enormous amount of mitigation of those in our design and operations of the facility.
- [23:22]
Interviewer
I think reverence, that's such an interesting word because it's, it implies more than respect or sort of, you know, acknowledgement. It is, it is, yeah. That's a really interesting choice of word and it has been circled and boxed on my piece of paper here. So anyway, trade offs are hard.
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Charlotte Meter
Trade offs are really, really hard. You know, we, and when we have hard trade offs, we try and go back to our values as a company.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
Which is integrity. You know, we care about our, our customers. But yeah, you get into some pretty big values based decisions when you're building these, these big projects.
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Interviewer
Yeah, and, and I, when I studied engineering, I so loved the courses that we did that were looking at how do you make, how do you make decisions. And some of those decisions are, well, you're trading off quality versus time or whatever it might be and they're quite objective. And then other things do have that social component that or environmental component that warrant a much deeper discussion. And it just, it was so interesting to me to see this, to reflect on that. And I think also as we did an episode where we were marveling at this huge piece of infrastructure and everything that's gone into it, also being mindful of some people who were maybe, you know, not so happy about it, about it being there and how those things were managed. And yeah, I just think it's, it's an interesting discussion to lean into because so often when it comes to energy infrastructure, we kind of play one thing off another and actually it's always more complicated than that. It's such a nuanced discussion. And that is, you know, the nature of the business, I suppose.
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Charlotte Meter
Yeah. And you started asking me earlier just about, you know, what, what the new CEO, what did I find when I started the CEO role? And you know, I, I just got a bigger and bigger appreciation for how much partnership is what it takes to build infrastructure and to run a modern utility. And I, you know, I can't speak enough about the first nations involvement as partners as well. They really do hold us account to account in terms of our environmental footprint and. Yeah, just what it takes. You just need to listen to all the perspectives out there. Like you said, you have to respect them and you learn and you're smarter in your decision making because of it. And then transparency. Transparency and decision making. So like you said, not everybody will agree with everything you're doing, but they'll understand how you made the decision and they'll have the trust that you're not hiding anything. So, yeah, I think partnerships is the way the world is going to work, especially given how much we have to build back to the big build era. It's going to take partnerships and I.
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Interviewer
Mean, probably just a good lesson for life that it's going to take partnerships.
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Charlotte Meter
Exactly.
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Interviewer
I also want to ask you about the call for power that happened in 2024 and I think a little bit of 2025 and how, what role that plays in building resiliency and different types of supply of energy in the province.
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Charlotte Meter
Yeah. So back to our, our kind of resiliency that we have our hydroelectric system and we have some very, very large projects with huge storage. Like we optimize the water behind some of these dams for three years.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
We have, we have three years to, to, to use this water, which is a tremendous value and just provides huge sort of inertia on the system that you can integrate all these intermittent and renewables much more easily.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
Because you have that backbone. And so the role of the power calls is we need more energy. And we've got a call that was in 2024 and we awarded 10 electricity purchase agreements out of that call, mainly wind. Nine of them were wind, one was solar, all with like very large First nations equity position in them. And then we ran a second call and we're just in the middle of that right now. But both calls we're hoping to bring in about 5,000 gigawatt hours of energy. That's about an 8% of our, our current energy usage in a year or energy supply in a year to our customers. So that's huge, right? Two calls, 16% more energy again will give us way more flexibility about how we serve and all clean. And then of course, following that, we're going to have to look at how we firm up that energy. You hear a lot right now in Europe about the level of intermittence, the penetration of intermittent energy, renewable energy, and where like any utility, we also have to look at capacity and whether we can hit that peak day, that peak load. And so we're also looking at capacity projects and we have a request for expressions of interest on what again the private sector could supply us or partner with us on big firm dispatchable energy projects.
- [28:36]
Interviewer
One of the other things that we hear in Europe all the time is that the grid is old and it's an aging piece of infrastructure and that these were transmissions, line, transmission lines that could have been built decades ago, ago. And how can they cope with what's happening in today's demands for electricity? How is BC Hydro thinking about some of those things and what are some of the ways that you can ensure that infrastructure is maintained adequately?
- [29:02]
Charlotte Meter
Yeah, so when I keep talking about big build and it's for growth, but it's also for reinvestment in our existing system. And you're so right, investing in the health of the existing system is vital for reliable grid going forward and for the growth. And so we have a very extensive asset health program that reviews the health of all our equipment, all our systems, and we build our capital plan off that. And I think 60% of our capital investment over the next 10 years is reinvesting in the existing system. And we were just talking about reliability of the grid in terms of all these intermittent energy coming in. And like I said, we, we have very low penetration of wind and solar compared to Spain or Portugal. We have. Most of our intermittence is actually run of river hydroelectric. It's different, it's, it's still intermittent, it's not dispatchable. They run when the, when it's raining and, and when there's lots of inflows and they don't run when there's, you know, dry periods and they don't store energy. But, you know, we're investing in a grid that's going to be more resilient to that. And, you know, you'll hear a lot in the sort of technical circles around the ability to maintain voltage and frequency under all sorts of contingent scenarios, whether you lose load or your generation supply. And we have quite a sophisticated system in the sense we have what we call remedial action scale schemes that, that keep the grid going under all sorts of contingent events. And it's actually very cost effective because they enable us not to have to build layers and layers of redundancy and for this contingency. So that's how we keep you know, our kind of rates affordable, our investment in, in the system reasonable and, and you know, a lot of our reinvestment is in our generation facilities, our dam safety facilities and that is order to get the most we can out of these existing assets.
- [31:11]
Interviewer
The other thing that I really wanted to ask was around how, how BC Hydro is having to adapt for the changing climate as well because there are risks to the dams themselves which of course historically reliable, dependable, dispatchable power. But droughts and reduced snowpacks are potentially a problem. And at the same time these transmission lines need to go across huge geographies which are vulnerable again to droughts and wildfires. And so I wonder how you need to think about that component of the puzzle.
- [31:42]
Charlotte Meter
It's a huge component of our goal on resiliency and security. So we have all sorts of what I'd call climate mitigation plans and climate adaptation plans. And they like you said, range from what we do around wildfire risk now and the resiliency of our transmission and distribution lines to that, to yeah, what do you do when, when you have droughts and low water scenarios? So maybe I'll just pick those two apart here. So as you probably know, we're into the third year of drought in B.C. being a hydroelectric utility. Lots of, lots of questions on whether we're going to have enough power. We do, like I talked about earlier, our ability to store water behind our dams is just a huge benefit in managing through very low water periods. We, we are an importer of energy, you know, half the time, an exporter half the time. So you know, in the last 15 years, seven of them we were an exporter, eight of them we, sorry, seven of them we were an importer of some sort, you know, and then eight, eight years we were in it, we were exporting energy. And the fact that we've just gone through three years of drought and been fine really shows the resilience of our system and the way neighboring jurisdictions have to work together.
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Host
Right.
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Charlotte Meter
Or we overbuild infrastructure. So we're lucky that we're winter peaking in area and south of Us, we've got summer peaking, so lots of energy to share at different times of the year. So we're pretty resilient on, on the water side given the nature of our infrastructure on wildfires and heat domes. And we had a cyclone bomb this year. I'd never heard of a cyclone bomb. It's, it's just a, a big windstorm event that just doesn't move. It was just off Vancouver Island. Really, really high winds and like I said, just sits there. You can see it like on, on all the, the weather maps and we had one of those this year. So always a new extreme weather event in front of us. But we are doing all sorts of things. Like for wildfires, we put fire retardant all over lines that are exposed to wildfires. We're looking at new composite materials for poles. Huge emphasis on vegetation practices. So yeah, lots on that front.
- [34:14]
Interviewer
Well, I've been surprised and maybe I shouldn't be surprised given how big the forestry industry is within British Columbia. But many B.C. employees, BC Hydro employees that I've met have previously worked in the forestry industry. And so clearly there's a huge overlap of skills there as well or skills that are absolutely vital for the work that BC Hydro is doing.
- [34:34]
Charlotte Meter
Yeah, we spend hundreds of millions a year on vegetation management. It is just there are so many trees in British Columbia and like you said, we have 80,000 kilometers of line. So. And that includes transmission with big right of ways but distribution.
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Host
Right.
- [34:48]
Charlotte Meter
Which obviously doesn't have the same with the right of way. So vegetation management, you hear it across all North American utilities. Just a really big area of development and lots of new tools there as well. Like in terms of wildfire monitoring, weather monitoring and our emergency response in terms of all of these kinds of events just keeps evolving and we have a really good track record. I'm very proud of it. At BC Hydro we usually even in the most we have hundreds of thousands of customers out and we get like 90%, 95% back on in 24 hours and through some pretty rough terrain and some pretty complicated restoration scenarios. And so yeah, we're, we're like a machine on that now because any season there's, there's some potential extreme weather events that we have to be ready for.
- [35:43]
Interviewer
Yeah, you also mentioned there that you're a winter peaking province and your neighbor is a summer peaking province or area. And that neighbor of course is California and connected by the western interconnection. And that was where we originally spoke around. How do you trade power between California and. Well, it goes as south as California, I should say, and the province of British Columbia. Now of course that relationship has worked really, really well. But in light of tariffs and perhaps a slightly politically uncertain time, I wonder if importing 20% of that power through the Western interconnection takes on a slightly different flavor or represents a slightly different risk in this political climate.
- [36:28]
Charlotte Meter
Yeah, well, just to clarify, the 20% was the most extreme scenario we've ever seen in terms of critical water. I mean, this year we're importing way, way, way less than that even though there's still an official drought going on and, and we can be a high importer in a year just because energy prices are cheap and we're storing the water. So it's not even a physical need, it's just an economic good decision.
- [36:55]
Host
Right.
- [36:57]
Charlotte Meter
So you know, our importing levels can be a bit misleading around whether we need to import or whether it's prudent to import. And I guess what I'd say is, I think the economics and the reliability of, as you had called it, the biggest machine in the world linking all these jurisdictions is just so important for all the jurisdictions involved that I have confidence that we'll be continuing to move power back and forth as needed, mainly for the resilience of our jurisdictions.
- [37:34]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [37:34]
Charlotte Meter
In terms of though, what you're seeing in Canada and our province is a real nation building sentiment which is about ensuring that we have resiliency and security in our own ability to manufacture things. Just economic resiliency and security. And so what that means is there's a huge economic development mandate across the, the nation and it's all about energy to supply that economic mandate. And so yeah, we're being asked what are you doing about energy supply grid build out? We have a very large transmission project that we're trying to, to get off the ground in the, in the northern part of the province. It's, it's, it's literally running across the whole top of our province. It's a, it's a 500 kilometer transmission build and across some, you know, interesting terrain. And you know, those projects, transmission projects as you know are 10 year projects and billion dollars, billions of dollars. So there is a push to build more energy infrastructure in B.C. and in this country as a result of the political stuff you're seeing.
- [38:49]
Interviewer
Do you know, I had never stopped to think about it just could be economically prudent to you know, when energy prices dictate that oh there's lots of solar in California, use that in British Columbia, save the storage, of course that makes sense. And I think that is just the sort of the beauty of that kind of machine. It is this constant seesaw activity of balancing supply, demand, but of course also what that means from a cost perspective as well. So we are coming towards the end of this conversation and I know that you're just a few weeks into the role and but I wonder if even in those first few weeks you've identified perhaps a few things that you're like, do you know what? If I could just have insert name of wish it would just make life so much easier. It would really do away with some of my headaches. I wonder if any of those things have cropped up.
- [39:41]
Charlotte Meter
Well, yes, it would be wonderful. I'm a big technology optimist. I think technology, it's not, not it takes people to solve the world's problems, but technology developed by people is really going to help. And I guess one of my wishes would be just technology acceleration in terms of cost effective firm energy supply. You're seeing nuclear, you're seeing geothermal and some real advancements in sort of the scalability of those technologies and the price point. And my wish would be, you know, can we get sort of an acceleration of grid scale options for firm clean energy supply and then you know, likewise on the customer side just this keep this technology kind of revolution going on. It's, it's, it's the biggest part of any energy transition to get off fossil fuels is you need this technology. And then maybe the last kind of way out there. Wishes. I just wish I. People often go what, what superpower would you like? Or and I'm always like, I'd love to control the weather because we have this beautiful hydroelectric system that you know, if you had the right amount of precipitation and the right amount of inflows, you just could optimize it beautifully.
- [40:58]
Host
Right?
- [40:58]
Charlotte Meter
And you'd have the security, you'd have the affordability.
- [41:02]
Host
Right?
- [41:02]
Charlotte Meter
Because you just. And yeah, we being a hydroelectric jurisdiction controlling, controlling the weather would be a really nice.
- [41:13]
Interviewer
God, that is such a good answer. And I'm actually sure that, you know, people from a business perspective from an, from an energy perspective would really appreciate that. But also just I think people generally who from I always say it's now impossible to know whether you could have a wedding in the UK in the summer because you just could not ever rely on the weather. You know what you're going to get, you just have to accept it. And you can go from winter to summer within the space of about 24 hours. So I think that's a wish that many people would like to aid predictability, I suppose.
- [41:45]
Charlotte Meter
Yes. Yeah, that's, that's what it is.
- [41:47]
Interviewer
Yeah. Well, honestly, this has been such a fascinating conversation and I so appreciate you giving up the time to chat with us. And thank you so much.
- [41:58]
Charlotte Meter
Thank you, Regen.
- [41:59]
Interviewer
That was an absolute delight to catch up with Charlotte. And she used the word reverence, and I think that is such an important word to keep in mind when we think about our impact on the environment, on communities and the solutions that need to make sense. With that in mind, certainly something that I'm going to be sprinkling in to future episodes, but that is, of course, all that we have time for. Please do let us know what you think in the comments. Please do share with a friend, but that's it. If you have been, thank you for listening and watching.