EN18 Initiatives to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions
BC Hydro consistently has some of the lowest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the North American electricity industry. BC Hydro emits GHG emissions from a range of sources, including natural gas and diesel-fired generating stations, fugitive SF6 losses from electrical equipment, our fleet of almost 2,400 service and light-duty vehicles, building energy use, and paper consumption.
BC Hydro continues to identify options to reduce emissions to meet our targets and regulatory requirements. We are accommodating new customer demand through an ambitious conservation and efficiency program that avoids new sources of GHG emissions, and further reducing our reliance on fossil fuel-fired electricity generation by acquiring new sources of clean and renewable power and upgrading our heritage hydro assets.
Fugitive SF6 emissions are being minimized through a circuit breaker replacement program to replace SF6-leaking circuit breakers with new, state-of-the-art breakers that have guaranteed minimal fugitive loss performance rates as well as reduced SF6 usage overall.
We have many initiatives to reduce emissions from corporate operations regulated under the B.C. Carbon Neutral Government Regulation. These include actions covered under our Carbon Neutral Program to avoid, minimize and offset emissions from vehicles, building energy use and paper consumption and reported under Carbon Neutral Program Emissions, page 93 [PDF, 200 KB].