The BC Wind story

FLYING over the diverse, awe-inspiring British Columbia landscape in a small plane can be a mind-expanding experience. Four times the size of the United Kingdom and with a population of about 4.5 million, Canada's Pacific province contains vast stretches of land largely bereft of human habitation. Numerous flights over BC in 2004 as we prospected for wind with our vintage plane, the legendary Grumman Goose, drove this point home.

The Peace

Initially, we were drawn to BC's magnificent outer coast, where the windswept, wave-battered shorelines had us thinking that this part of the province would have the best wind regime for generating power. Although BC's outer coast is indeed a windy place, the wind is lumpy: furious at times, meek at others, particularly in summer. We ventured further afield, as far as northeastern BC (commonly known as "the Peace"), a region of prairie and mountains, and almost everything else in between. Here too, wilderness abounds. This is particularly true in the northern reaches of the Rockies, and the flat, sparsely vegetated ridges that parallel them for hundreds of kilometers. Flying over these ridges we found powerful, steady, smooth winds, even in summer—and began connecting the dots. We surmised that closer inspection would confirm that there is an opportunity in the Peace to generate an extraordinary amount of much-needed clean energy—in a province that imports about 15% of its electricity, primarily from greenhouse gas (GHG)-belching coal-fired thermal power plants.

Sparsely vegetated ridges parallel the Rockies for hundreds of kilometers.

How right we were. More detailed surveys of the Peace ridges on foot and by helicopter made it abundantly clear that the wind there is powerful, relentless, virtually unidirectional—and bitterly cold. Hostile to both man and beast, the ridges are textbook perfect for windmills. The high speed of the wind translates into exceptional energy values because the energy content of the wind varies with the cube of the average wind speed: two times as much wind delivers eight times as much energy. Its high frequency, day after day, season after season, means that it can be relied upon to generate electricity with relatively few interruptions. As for its unidirectionality—starkly expressed by the branches of the few scrubby trees tenacious enough to keep roots in the ground by only growing on the downwind side of the trunk—this allows turbines to be much more tightly spaced than usual, resulting in extraordinarily high energy yields per area.

The vision

Soon, a vision was born, a company was launched, and lease applications were filed. The subsequent in-house and third-party gathering of data made it abundantly clear that BC had one of the most phenomenal wind resources in the world—one that was completely untapped.

Rounding out the picture are Williston Lake and the WAC Bennett and Peace Canyon dams, which are also located in the Peace and provide some 40% of the almost 9,000MW of power-generating capacity of BC Hydro, the huge BC Government-owned electrical utility. The dams, of course, represent mile zero of an array of high-voltage transmission lines that deliver power to Vancouver and many other BC cities and towns. How fortuitous, one might think, to have this convergence of wind and hydro. True—the lake can function as a huge battery for wind-generated electricity, enabling Hydro to conserve water behind the dams and to transmit to its customers as much wind-generated electricity as possible whenever the wind is blowing.

Unfortunately, the capacity of the province's grid to transmit more power—as it is in most jurisdictions in North America—is very limited. Detailed estimates suggest that the Peace has well over 20,000MW of clean wind energy that could satisfy demand for electricity in the province and beyond. The grid can handle but a fraction of this power, and in the upcoming decades will not be expanded sufficiently to accommodate anywhere near this amount. We thus felt like the dog that, after giving vigorous chase, had caught the truck. Now what to do? Savage the truck? Walk away? After determined efforts at prospecting for wind, finding it in spades, and obtaining the right to convert it into electricity, BC Wind was in a similar quandary—no apparent means of realizing the fruits of the effort.

Necessity being the mother of invention, we came up with a plan—to create "liquid electricity" by converting the wind to a liquid fuel, a process that firms wind energy and makes it easy to transmit to markets with minimal upgrading of infrastructure, including the grid. Brilliantly simple, the idea prompted us to say, "Why didn't we think of that BEFORE? It's so obvious ... "

The fuel at hand is Blue Fuel—DiMethyl Ether (DME) produced using renewable sources of energy, including wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and ocean energy. A superb energy carrier, hydrogen-rich Blue Fuel is ultra-clean burning, environmentally benign, non-toxic, easy-to-produce and distribute, and can help wean us from petroleum-based fuels—without the advent of new technology. Blue Fuel is multipurpose and can be used for transportation, heating and cooking, and power generation. Further, it can be readily reformed into hydrogen, eliminating the high-pressure storage issues constraining the use of hydrogen and facilitating the adoption of fuel cells. It's no stretch to suggest that Blue Fuel is a stepping stone to the Hydrogen Age.

To those familiar with the properties of Blue Fuel, and understand how it can be produced in carbon-neutral fashion, supporting the adoption of Blue Fuel as a blendstock with, or substitute for, various hydro-carbon fuels, such as diesel, propane, and natural gas, has profound environmental and economic merits. At present, however, most people, including government and business leaders, know little or nothing about Blue Fuel. And many of those who do know about it do not fully comprehend that it can be—and should be—produced using wind and other renewables.

It's incumbent upon us to create awareness of the Wind to Fuel Opportunity, hence this website. Once people are apprised of this opportunity, we are confident that the desire to shift from petroleum-based fuels to carbon-neutral Blue Fuel will-catch fire.

BC Wind is now making the Wind to Fuel Opportunity the Wind to Fuel Reality. We are doing the preliminary work required to build wind farms on our Investigative Use Permit (IUP) sites in the Peace, and are working collaboratively with Blue Fuel Energy Corporation, which will use BC Wind-generated electricity, and that from other renewable sources to produce Blue Fuel and realize our shared vision of a future free of petroleum-based fuels.