UPDATE: Kamloops City Council voted to approve Fortis’ request despite having received approximately 100 letters urging them to say no, and before giving the many members of the public who made time to attend the Council meeting a chance to speak. (The only dissenters were Councillors Bass, Bepple and Neustaeter).
Our next step is to encourage folks to send letters directly to the BC Utilities Commission. Send your letters to the BC Utilities Commission before the October 12 deadline. The name of the proceeding is FEI BERC Rate Methodology and Review of Revised RNG Program. You can check out what has already been submitted here.
Original post:
FortisBC is trying to pull a fast one. We get it—getting new homes hooked on gas is a big deal for the company. But we all know we can’t keep burning gas when there are better alternatives available.
Natural gas is a fossil fuel, mostly extracted by fracking. FortisBC is a fossil fuel company that is trying to grow its business as much as possible before local and provincial clean energy regulations come into effect (e.g. CleanBC’s 40% GHG emission reductions by 2030, net zero by 2050).
As municipalities across BC are beginning to ban new gas connections in order to meet these targets, Fortis has begun a lobbying campaign to convince municipalities to drop these bans and related parts of codes and bylaws that they consider to be anti-gas.
Under the guise of a low carbon resiliency plan centred on “renewable natural gas” (RNG, more below), Fortis is trying to greenwash what will be a net increase in conventional fossil gas use and overall GHG emissions that will delay the inevitable and essential transition away from fossil fuels.
Fortis has applied to the BC Utilities Commission (BCUC) to supply 100% RNG to all new residential gas customers, for the life of the building, with the extra cost of RNG (compared to fossil natural gas) being covered by all Fortis customers. So new residential customers would get a great deal: they’d pay only the price of fossil gas. Meanwhile, pre-existing customers would have to subsidize the new ones—forever. If existing customers wanted to burn RNG too, they’d have to pay the actual, much higher cost of it.
RNG comes from sources like landfills and livestock operations. It’s more expensive than fracked gas because there’s hardly any of it around: Fortis plans to buy it from as far away as Pennsylvania! The problem is that, chemically, biomethane is basically identical to fossil gas—the atmosphere can’t tell the difference. Regardless of source, methane acts like a blanket around the earth—and it has over 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after it hits the atmosphere.
Fortis’ proposal will increase the overall number of homes using gas rather than encouraging the use of electricity. It will divert customers away from using clean, efficient heat pumps.
This Tuesday, September 26, Fortis is asking Kamloops City Council for a letter of support for the application to the BC Utilities Commission.
For the past year, Fortis has been lobbying municipal governments, asking for their support. Several other municipalities are opposing Fortis’ request, and we hope Kamloops will do the same.
Will you send a letter to our Council members, asking them to turn down Fortis’ request? It’s urgent: the meeting is Tuesday (tomorrow!) at 1:30 pm in Council Chambers at City Hall.
If you’re unsure what to say, check out this webpage from our Okanagan allies or this resource.
We’re trying out this new tool to make it easy for folks to send letters to all the Councillors. Please take the time to personalize your letter as much as you can.
The platform is set up to ask for a donation at the end—please feel free to skip that step.
Thanks for your support for climate action!
NOTE: The tool is still being tested, so if the link isn’t working, please just send an email the normal way from your own email program.
Gisela,
I got this in an email from BCUC. It’s a long doc from Greater Vancouver giving all the arguments against the Fortis Snake Oil (aka RNG) proposals that should have been stated by the City of Kamloops. I hope it will be a point of discussion at this week’s Adult Learners Society “News & Views” round table.
https://docs.bcuc.com/Documents/Arguments/2023/DOC_74971_2023-11-17-Local-Government-Interveners-FinalArgument-Stage2.pdf
Thanks, John. I hope the discussion goes well!
You know that RNG stands for Renewable natural Gas right? It is Methane that is emitted from landfill sites and destroys the atmosphere. The process plants that Fortis and Waga Energy construct process and eliminate toxic waste to the atmosphere, producing clean gas (99%methane-natural gas) back into the pipeline e to heat your cold little home in the wi red! Fuck people need to be educated on this! This is not a FOSSIL fuel! Also just for a side note… look Into WHY IT WAS CALLED FOSSIL FUEL! OIL IS NOT rNG idiots!
We try to avoid calling folks names around here, even if we disagree with them – please try harder next time!
First of all, you are correct that RNG is not a fossil fuel – we never called it that. RNG (biomethane) is indeed very rare and expensive to produce, so it should be reserved for applications that are particularly difficult to decarbonize (which home heating and cooking are not). In fact, it’s such a precious commodity and in such high demand that there were major problems with where Fortis was proposing to purchase its supply.
BCUC rejected Fortis’ proposal because it would have led to an unfair subsidy of RNG by existing gas consumers. Existing customers (you and me) should not have to pay the high costs of providing RNG to … other people. The decision did however, grant Fortis permission to sell RNG to new and existing customers through an optional program where gas users can pay an extra fee — $7 per gigajoule — to pay the actual cost of providing RNG. It also approved the company’s request to blend RNG into the fossil-based gas sold to all consumers, reducing the GHG emissions for all of us. You might want to click through the links and read the BCUC decision in its entirety. https://docs.bcuc.com/documents/other/2024/doc_76410_g-77-24-fei-berc-stage2-review-decision.pdf