The story
BC Hydro was created in 1961 when the government of British Columbia, under Premier W. A. C. Bennett, passed the BC Hydro Act. This act led to the expropriation of the BC Electric Company and its merging with the BC Power Commission, to create the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority (BCHPA).
The BC Power Commission had been established with the Electric Power Act in 1945 by Premier John Hart. The mandate of the Power Commission was to amalgamate existing power and generating facilities across the province not served by BC Electric, and to extend service to the many smaller communities without power.
BC Electric Company began as the British Columbia Electric Railway (streetcar and lighting utility) in Victoria, Vancouver and New Westminster in 1897. Power was generated by coal-fired steam plants. Increasing demand in the Edwardian boom years meant BC Electric sought expansion through developing Hydro power at Buntzen Lake, and later at Stave Lake. Sensible growth and expansion of the power, streetcar and coal gas utilities meant that BC Electric was a major company in the region.
Also about this time, sawmills and factories converted to electricity, further increasing the demand for electric power. BC Electric developed more hydro stations in the province. Similarly, small towns also built and operated their own power stations. More power transmission lines were also built. Dams and hydro-electric generating stations were built on Vancouver Island on the Puntledge, Jordan, and Elk rivers in the 1920s.
By the time of the First World War, private cars and jitneys were beginning to affect streetcar traffic. New dams were planned, including the diversion from the Bridge River to Seton Lake, near Lillooet, but the economic depression of the 1930s halted this business expansion. Also with the depression came an increase in the ridership, and a decrease in the maintenance of the streetcar system. In 1947, the BC Power Commission completed the John Hart Generating Station at Campbell River. In the early 1950s the ageing streetcars and interurban trains were replaced by electric trolley buses, and diesel buses. BC Electric finally completed the Bridge River Generating Station in 1960.
In 1958, BC Electric began construction of the oil-fired (later converted to natural gas) Burrard Generating Station near Port Moody. It opened in 1961 and operated only intermittently when needed. In 2001, it represented over 9% of BC Hydro's gross metered generation. The gas fired boilers at the Burrard Generating Station were decommissioned in 2016 to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and the plant continues to be used as synchronous condenser facility.
On August 1, 1961, just days after company president Dal Grauer died, the BC government passed the legislation which changed BC Electric from a private company to a crown corporation known as BC Hydro.
The new corporation's responsibility including running the portions of the BC Electric Railway route still operating, for mass transit operation of the Vancouver trolley bus system (comprising a portion of the urban bus routes in Vancouver), as well as all the electric generation, transmission, and distribution operations.
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In 1988, BC Hydro sold its Gas Division which distributed natural gas in the Lower Mainland and Victoria to Inland Natural Gas. Inland changed its name to BC Gas, and was sold and changed name again to Terasen Gas in 2003. In 2007 Terasen sold the gas operation to FortisBC.
In 1988, BC Hydro's remaining railway operations were sold to the Southern Railway of British Columbia. BC Hydro continues to own the railbed of the former BC Electric Railway interurban route through Burnaby and New Westminster (on which a portion of the Skytrain Expo Line was built), as well as the railway from North Delta through Surrey, Langley, and Abbotsford all the way to Chilliwack (which continues to be operated by Southern Rail). A segment of the BC Hydro route through Langley is also leased to BC Rail to link the Canadian National Railway mainline, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, and the Roberts Bank Superport.
In 2003 the BC government passed several pieces of legislation to redefine and regulate power utilities in British Columbia. The Transmission Corporation Act created the British Columbia Transmission Corporation (BCTC) as an independent transmission provider, but which only lasted until 2010 until being re-merged back into BC Hydro.
Also in 2003, BC Hydro privatized and outsourced many of its support functions, including 1540 of its employees in its Customer Service, Westech IT Services, Network Computer Services, Human Resources, Financial Systems, Purchasing, and Building and Office Services groups. These services were first outsourced to Accenture, and later to Telus and Fujitsu.
In the final week of August, 2015, the company experienced what it then described as its largest blackout event after a windstorm hit the South Coast on August 29–30, 2015. It affected more than 710,000 residents living in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island regions of the Canadian province of British Columbia and lasted more than 72 hours for some neighbourhoods. This blackout was surpassed by an outage caused by a 2018 winter storm that left 750,000 without power.
From Wikipedia’s article on BC Hydro, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4