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Then it was a trade with Alberta: buy our clean, green Site C power, B.C. hinted, and we might allow you to build an oil pipeline to the sea.

If the Alberta gambit played out — costing hundreds of millions more in new transmission facilities — the price Albertans would be willing to pay for the power would not be more than the cost of generation using their own natural gas and renewable resources. Enmax recently built an 800-megawatt plant at Calgary for $1.4 billion, with a delivered cost estimated at $60-$70/MWh.

But the delivered cost of Site C power in Alberta would be $140 to $160/MWh, depending on its ultimate destination, or double the cost of local production. Sounds like the old story: What we lose on each sale, we’ll make up in quantity.

The Alberta market is not for real, even if that province were to set a high price for greenhouse gases through some form of carbon tax. Realistically, all B.C. Hydro will be able to do with Site C power is sell it to the US, at spot market prices of $25 to $35/MWh. Under reasonable assumptions, the present value of twenty years of such sales would be about $1.6 billion, or 18 percent of the currently estimated $8.8 billion cost of the project. This leaves ratepayers with a stranded debt of $7.2 billion, for which they will get nothing.

Normally, when prices rise, consumers use less of a commodity. They buy LED lamps, insulate their homes, use gas for cooking and heating, and turn off the lights when they’re not using them. After 40 years of low real prices — so low that many consumers don’t even think about the price — we are now in a period of smartly increasing prices. So maybe B.C. consumers are unlike everyone else, and buy more as the price rises. That’s Hydro’s bet.