Plutonic plans postponed

DAN MACLENNAN, Courier-Islander, Wednesday, January 27, 2010

It's going to take much longer than first thought for Plutonic Power to submit an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for its massive Bute Inlet Hydroelectric Project.

Plutonic must submit an EIS to the federal and provincial environmental review agencies laying out anticipated impacts and mitigation requirements stemming from the 1,027 megawatt project proposing to use 17 run-of-river generating plants on the Homathco, Southgate and Orford rivers feeding Bute Inlet.

Plutonic had originally suggested the EIS would be ready by the fall, but that timeline changed to early 2010 back in August. Now Plutonic says the EIS might not be ready until next year.

"Possibly later this year, maybe even into 2011," spokesperson Elisha McCallum told the Courier-Islander. "We won't know until we get more concrete information about the data that we're collecting. What's going to guide it is the data that we're collecting. Do we have enough? We're going to turn to experts that we use right now that know when that data's going to be enough."

McCallum said more work needs to be done to establish baseline information and determine possible environmental impacts of the huge project.

"We need to study more fisheries patterns," she said. "We need to study more of the grizzly bear habitant. We need to study more vegetation and riparian areas habitat.

"We just need to have a better grouping of data that will be solid for us to take forward to a federal panel review. Also, because we want to build the best project. We don't want to get into a situation where we have to face a panel review, or even questions from the general public for that matter, where we don't have the data to back up why we think this project is going to be a good project moving forward.

"You have your existing data and you want to compliment that with other years of data. Different nesting seasons for different birds, different spawning seasons for different fish. Where are they spawning? How are they spawning? Is that consistent year over year or are the locations changing? How many salmon come back to different areas? We need to have all that data and we need to have it over multiple years so that we can say definitively we've done the studies in the right way."

Meanwhile, Plutonic Power and the proponents of other projects are eagerly awaiting decisions from BC Hydro regarding Hydro's call for "clean power" proposals.

"We're in negotiation on both projects (Upper Toba Valley and Bute Inlet) right now with them, and we'll know hopefully by the end of March as to whether or not they're going to be successful," McCallum said. "Knowing the outcome of that will also give us more guidance about how much more data we need to collect.

"From what I know about Bute and the data we've collected to date, I think it's still a very feasible, very viable project. But Hydro needs to give us the thumbs up or the thumbs down and then we also need to collect more data. There may be situations where we find out there may be fish coming back to areas we didn't know there were fish coming back to. That's important for us to know."

© Courier-Islander (Campbell River) 2010

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