There are major projects happening in Saskatchewan that will have a profound impact on the Saskatchewan economy but also on national unity.
We are rapidly coming to a point where an irresistible force – federal greenhouse gas emissions efforts, are meeting an immovable object – Saskatchewan’s need to keep the lights on, and its economy rolling.
Justin Trudeau’s planet-saving efforts are coming into conflict with Scott Moe’s efforts to save Saskatchewan.
I watched an extraordinary legislative committee meeting on May 3. NDP Energy and SaskPower Critic, Aleana Young, asked hard-hitting, but reasonable, questions. And in response, she got very reasonable answers from both Crown Investments Minister Don Morgan and SaskPower executives.
A substantial portion of the answers was dedicated to the planned Aspen Power Station, to be built 17 kilometres west of Lanigan. That’s really close to an existing potash mine, but more importantly, it’s roughly 30 minutes from the BHP Jansen potash mine which will soon be going into production. This mine will be the crown jewel in the Saskatchewan economic crown.
The new powerplant will be similar to the combined cycle gas turbine plants built by SaskPower in recent years at Swift Current and Moose Jaw. It will have a 370 megawatt capacity, and Jansen is expected to require over 200 megawatts.
In other words, you want the biggest potash mine in the world, you’ve got to provide the juice to power it. And wind and solar simply won’t cut it. Morgan said as much in the committee.
Governments like mantras. And Premier Scott Moe’s mantra he inserts into every speech is how Saskatchewan has the food, fertilizer, and the fuel the world needs.
This power plant will run on natural gas which will provide the power to produce the fertilizer to grow the food.
But there’s a huge roadblock coming in the proposed federal Clean Electricity Standard. We’ve already got regulations saying coal fired-power generation must be phased out by 2030. So SaskPower has been dutifully moving to replace its coal-fired plants with gas-fired plants. If you include the two gas power stations at North Battleford built around 2013, by the time Aspen is complete, we’ll have largely done that. And in so doing, every megawatt produced by natural gas produces about half the greenhouse gasses as a megawatt produced by unabated coal.
But the proposed Clean Electricity Standard, trumpeted by federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change, say that’s not good enough. The federal government is now saying that natural gas-fired power plants, except for exceptional circumstances, must also shut down by 2035. That means the new Aspen Power Station would need to shut down after only seven years of operation, the definition of a “stranded asset.”
Immovable object
On any given day coal and natural gas combine to produce up to 84 per cent of Saskatchewan’s power (and around 90 per cent in Alberta, at night, when the wind isn’t blowing). Saskatchewan has been putting its eggs into the natural gas-fired basket (until we can build nuclear), only to have Minister Guilbeault swipe that basket away.
So on May 2, Moe said it’s impossible for us to meet the Clean Electricity Standard. “We will not attempt the impossible when it comes to power production,” he said.
And this is where the national unity issue will raise. What if the federal government persists imposing this impossible standard and the province cannot meet it? What if the Supreme Court backs the feds, as it did with the carbon tax?
As Young said, “I hope there’s not going to be a federal government who like marches in and turns off the power plants or anything like that.” These are words I’ve been saying for a while now. What are the feds going to do? Send in the Canadian Army and turn off the power, for the sake of stopping climate change?
No matter the noble intentions (like saving the earth), when a law imposed on a people become impossible to follow, is it a just law?
What are the people’s options?
These are the very real and looming issues Scott Moe is dealing with. He must keep the lights on for his province. We don’t have options other than coal and natural gas. We don’t have much hydro capacity left. It’s going to take at least a decade to get the first nuclear power plant online. None of that takes into consideration that Saskatchewan needs enormous additional power to deal with the electric vehicles the Biden and Trudeau administrations are forcing automakers to build.
Wind and solar are simply not an option. They may be supplementary. But they can not be relied upon. On the morning of May 10th, Alberta’s 3,618 megawatts of wind power dropped to 6. You can’t run a potash mine that needs 200 megawatts on 6. And Alberta already has a lot more wind and solar than Saskatchewan wants to build.
No, it’s natural gas or nothing. All of this has been a strong motivating factor behind the Saskatchewan First Act.
If the federal government persists with these Clean Electricity Standards, if no allowance is made for Saskatchewan, and if the courts back the feds, Saskatchewan will have to question its place in Canada.
Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online, and occasional contributor to the Frontier Centre for
Public Policy. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@pipelineonline.ca.
