Big 'Blue' Battery? How BC HYDRO is powering a province's energy & transport?

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1:25Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast, where today we're catching up with Charlotte Meater, 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 with electricity that is 98 % from clean energy, most notably from their 82 hydroelectric dams as well as the Western Ind Connection which connects all the way from British Columbia all the way to California so they can trade solar power for their lovely hydroelectricity.

2:02Now 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 Centre 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 we'll 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 by background she has been with the business for a really long time.

2:46We'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. Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean tech 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.

3:36And new for UK viewers. You can now buy a battery EV and much more at everythingelectric.store. 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. Thank you. Glad to be here. 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? Well, I'm actually in my first couple of weeks and it feels good. I mean, I've been with the company for 20 years, mainly on the operations side of the business.

4:17And yeah, just a very, 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 a big mission in front of us. So yeah, happy to be here. And obviously, you've had roles in leadership for a number of years. I think you were EVP of operations, I want to say. Yes. Yes. 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, quite important.

4:58I'm suddenly a grown up. I wonder if you've had that kind of realization moment yet. 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.

5:42I 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. 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.

6:18And 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, et cetera, et cetera.

6:54What's on your list? 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, right?

7:41So, 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 you know 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.

8:23And 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 build does that refer to generation itself or is that more the transmission side of the Well, we're an integrated, vertically integrated utility. So we have a generation, transmission and distribution, and we have a very aggressive build plan across all three of those areas. So what that shows up, what that looks like is we are building dozens of new substations on our distribution system.

9:05We are reinvesting in our existing plants, doing big generator replacements to get more efficiency and more power out of them. We're adding, I think one of your colleagues has been to our Revelstoke Dam, very large, one of our biggest generating stations in the province. and we're adding a six turbine generator to that facility. That's a very big investment. And we're doing things like running power calls, procuring more energy from the private sector. 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.

9:54And I will return to sightsee 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 um you know this was 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 um and it totally blew me away it was incredible really really incredible yeah these are engineering marvels.

10:46And as anyone knows, 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's great when you work 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, is the next generation. These are 100-year projects, right? 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.

11:28God, yeah, because I suppose like even when buildings are constructed in this day and age, there's not, 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. You're right. 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?

12:06Right. 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 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.

12:51It'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 BC 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 industries through our grid. 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 to 25 years but there's also a tremendous amount of things that are happening on an almost daily basis um you know for example the tariffs on on evs changing or the incentives changing for evs or all of these different mechanisms that must make it incredibly difficult to band between this long-term outlook and adapting for the short-term change.

14:02And I wonder how an organization of your size has to band between those two different outlooks. 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, you know, some what I would call mega loads that could show up that have a huge influence on the load forecast, right? We are a utility that has about an 11 ,000 megawatt peak capacity in winter. And yeah, if you have a 300 megawatt industrial load that may or may not show up, this is hard to plan for. And like you said, many, many other macro economic geopolitical factors on that.

14:45So 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.

15:26But 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, right? 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. So plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D. Yeah. And plan A is to not be cautious on overbuilding a little bit if we have to. Right. It's an asymmetric risk. If we're not there with our supply to meet the industrial needs, that's a bigger impact than maybe having a little bit too much supply for a couple of years and some comfort that we can meet, you know, changing load forecasts.

16:15So clearly, 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, you know, 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?

16:49Yeah, you're right. So BC Hydro has a long history on what we call PowerSmart and the customer's role 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 so, and it's such a win-win, right? 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, you know, incenting customers, including industrial customers, to look at options where they can use less electricity for their processes and their facilities, to really looking at a lot more options like rate structures.

17:48We 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, you know, 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.

18:38This 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 and capabilities of your customers. 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.

19:19And yeah, I agree. VPPs, I think, are extremely exciting as a mechanism to unlock that way of thinking. 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 where a 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 we are we're incenting lots of really unique pilots that way.

20:12One 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 taking 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 right yeah it's it's it's so important that people trust us. Like we talked about earlier, electricity is so defined to quality of life.

20:52And 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, you know, 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 the environment isn't handled well. So they need to trust us, 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.

21:44It'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 BC 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, right? and social license to do what we need to do. Yeah. Well, I think you mentioned there about sort of social responsibility and environmental responsibility.

22:26And I want to return to Site C because, as I said, 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 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 energy generating infrastructure.

23:11But I wonder when you look back at 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. Yeah, I mean, you have to have reverence for the impacts that any infrastructure has. And I think, you know, BC Hydro had 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 Site C side is we're being held to a very high account on the ongoing environmental monitoring and operation of that facility.

23:54So I think, you know, like I said, 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 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 have that time in order to assess the impacts and then we like we do we try to do an enormous amount of mitigation of those in our design and operations of the facility.

24:38I 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 trade-offs are really really hard um you know we and when we have hard trade-offs we try and go back to our values as a company right which is is integrity um you know um we care about our our customers but um yeah we you get into some pretty big values-based decisions when you're building these these big projects yeah and then 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 um 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.

26:18Yeah 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 just got a bigger and bigger appreciation for how much partnership is what it takes to build infrastructure 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 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.

27:02And then transparency, transparency and decision making so like you said not everybody will agree with everything you're doing but they but you're but they'll understand how you made the decision and they um and they'll have the trust that you're you're not um hiding anything so yeah I think it's uh partnerships is the way the world is going to work especially um given how much we have to build back to the big build era it's going to take partnerships I mean probably just a good lesson for life that it's going to take partnerships So I also want to ask you about the call for power that happened in 2024.

27:40And 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. 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, right? We have three years 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, right? Because you have that backbone.

28:25And 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 a 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 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, it will give us way more flexibility about how we serve and all clean.

29:17And then, of course, following that, we're going to have to look at how we firm up that energy, right? You hear a lot right now in Europe about the level of intermittence, the penetration of intermittent energy, renewable energy. And we're 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. 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 and how can they cope with what's happening in today's you know demands of 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 is maintained adequately 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 a 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.