Site C announcement expected today; expert says geothermal should have been explored further

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – An announcement is expected on the Site C dam this afternoon.

An expert says more should have been done to explore geothermal options.

Building the dam would submerge 5,000 hectares of land and more than 100 kilometres of river valley by the Peace River. So, Werner Antweiler with UBC’s Sauder of School of Business says less-impactful alternatives could have been examined.

“This is a proven technology at a proven cost. And it scales up because essentially, once you have the resource… why not build bigger turbines? It’s something that scales up quite nicely, once you have the resource,” he explains.

“It’s a 24/7 source. It’s not like wind energy, which is intermittent. Geothermal is baseload. In that sense, it’s… the nicest systems you can find because it’s not too far away from the Lower Mainland,” he adds.

Antweiler says there’s also a price argument, given the start-up costs are much cheaper for geothermal energy. He argues creating a number of smaller geothermal energy sites would be more affordable and less disruptive.

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