Games power supplier needs gold-medal performance

Nearly seven years after commencing its own preparations for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, BC Hydro's fondest hope is for an uneventful 17 days of world-class competition.

No windstorms, no blackouts, no service interruptions and the Crown corporation in the background well-prepared but essentially idle, with its best work behind it.

Hydro will serve all 17 Olympic venues including GM Place, the Richmond oval, and athletes' villages in Vancouver and Whistler. In a significant break from past Winter Games, most of the electricity will come off the domestic grid in lieu of autonomous diesel-fired portable "generator farms."

The International Olympic Committee expects infallible electrical service to support television broadcast as well as time and scoring clocks and Hydro has convinced the IOC that it's qualified to do the job with fewer noisy, exhaust-spewing backups than previous Winter Games.

The most energy-intense venue will be the International Broadcast Centre on the waterfront at Coal Harbour, where Hydro is providing 14 megawatts of electrical capacity. That's comparable to the requirements of a city of 8,000 people.

There are eight generating stations in the BC Hydro system that would individually be too small to support that amount of demand, which is coming primarily from television crews.

Hydro got to work in summer 2003, "right after" the International Olympic Committee awarded Vancouver the 2010 Games at the urging of former board chairman Larry Bell, Ann English, director for Hydro Olympic initiatives, said in an interview.

"We reached out and talked to other people that had been utility providers," English said. "The one that has been a big help to us is Utah Power from Salt Lake City. Early on we met with them to learn what they had done and learn what it really meant to be the host utility in an Olympic city.

"It's said that it's sort of like hosting the Super Bowl game 10 times a day for 17 days. We wanted to understand how we could cope with this and cope with maintaining [service] reliability for everybody."

At the Torino Games in 2006, organizers used more than 650 portable generators to deal with the requirements of its venues.

Hydro decided to raise the Olympic bar for environmental sustainability and create an international forum for the Crown corporation to demonstrate the reliability of its conventional service.

A team of engineers led by Hydro Olympic initiatives engineering manager Harold Nelson concluded that by twinning the high-voltage power supply cables feeding the venues, and installing special automatic circuit switches, they would add a layer of service reliability that would meet the IOC's standards. In most cases, Nelson said, that second power supply comes from a different substation than the primary.

Their work cut the total number of diesel generators for Games venues to about 125, and that number would have been lower if Hydro had been able to justify the expense of twinning existing high voltage lines to Olympic venues at Cypress Bowl and Callaghan Valley.