Bill Andrews and Tom Hackney

13 February 2025

BCSEA is intervening in the BC Utilities Commission’s review of Creative Energy Vancouver Platforms Inc.’s (“Creative Energy’s”) 2024 long-term resource plan for the utility’s “Core Thermal Energy System” (Core TES). 

Creative Energy’s Core TES consists of a steam production plant at 720 Beatty Street and a piped steam distribution network serving some 208 customers (buildings) in downtown Vancouver. 

The Beatty Plant is currently powered by carbon-emitting natural gas, but Creative Energy is working hard to transition to clean electricity (see our May 30, 2022 article Decarbonizing Downtown Vancouver and our December 6, 2024 article Decarbonization Project Sideswiped by COVID.) 

Creative Energy’s basic long-term challenge is that the City of Vancouver’s climate policies will require increasingly more low-carbon energy but the growth rate for low carbon energy demand is not clear. While Creative Energy says having a small number of customers allows it to understand how each customer uses energy, the total energy demand from Creative Energy’s Core TES customers is falling over the long term. Still, Creative Energy maintains that the plan being examined by the BCUC is a strategy to meet customers’ energy needs over the next 25 years while transitioning to low-carbon energy services. 

Information requests and Creative Energy’s responses are due in February and March of this year. Further process is “to be determined.”