The latest snowpack data in British Columbia is raising concerns about yet another potential season of drought.
The BC River Forecast Centre’s latest Snow Survey and Water Supply Bulletin says the provincial snowpack was at just 73 per cent of normal for March 1.
“It’s less likely to be a dramatic season for flooding,” forecast centre hydrologist Jonathan Boyd said.
“When we do have lower snowpack like this year it does increase the hazard for drought, and associated with drought is wildfire.”
Extremely dry conditions in the first half of February were offset by stormy weather later in the month, which pushed the provincewide snowpack up by about one per cent, Boyd added.
While snowpack levels are below where officials would like to see them, they are fortunately up from this time last year when provincewide B.C. was at just 66 per cent of normal.
That has been driven largely by snow levels 30 per cent higher on the South Coast than in 2024.
By region, the Chilcotin had the weakest snowpack, sitting at just 16 per cent of normal. The Liard District had the most snow, sitting at 98 per cent of normal.
Get daily National news
Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.
Boyd said a wet start to March, however, is good news and could help the province beef up snowpack heading into April — typically the month by which B.C. has received its peak snow accumulation.
“But so much is dependent on the spring conditions,” he said.
“The most ideal situation would be to be fairly wet and cool through the spring … the most risky would be an extreme period of time of warm, hot dry weather where the snowpack would melt rapidly.”
Meanwhile, the prospect of another dry year is again raising concerns about the province’s electricity supply.
B.C. draws about 90 per cent of its power from hydroelectric dams, but successive years of drought have led the province to import more than a fifth of its power from the U.S. for the past two years.
“We are doing that so that BC Hydro can save water behind the dams because they are looking at the same snowpack surveys as we are and they know there won’t be as much runoff coming into the dams most likely that you would have in a typical year,” said Barry Penner, chair of the Energy Futures Institute.
BC Hydro spokesperson Kevin Aquino, however, snowpack in the two basins in the Columbia and Peace regions that feed its largest generation facilities have seen ample snow to get the Crown corporation through the yar.
“As a result of the snowpack forecasts we don’t have any concerns with electricity generation, as our largest hydroelectric facilities are well above average,” Aquino said.
“While the past two years have seen very low summer precipitation and snowpack, this is not an indication of continued weather conditions or long-term drying B.C.”
But Penner maintained a cautious note. Power imports cost B.C. $1.4 billion for the 2024 fiscal year, and he warned that as Canada’s trade war with the U.S. ramps up, the province’s reliance on American power imports could put it at risk of even higher prices.
He said B.C.’s aggressive moves towards electrification, including electric vehicle sales quotas that are already kicking in on 2026 models hitting the lot this year, could exacerbate the problem.
“Now we have been several years into a dry cycle, and you can see the vulnerability when you put all your legs in the hydroelectric basket, you’ve got a problem if you don’t have enough water,” he said.
Penner argued the province may want to look at pausing its phase-out of natural gas generating plants, which he said can contribute up to 460 megawatt hours to the grid.
Aquino said BC Hydro is already into a multi-year call for new power projects seeking large-scale wind and solar projects.
In December, it announced deals with nine wind projects that aim to generate 5,000 gigawatt hours of electricity, nearly equivalent to the Site-C dam.
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.