By Katie Ryan
The future of Saskatchewan’s power is up for debate.
On Tuesday Lloydminster MLA Tim McMillan, chair of the Crown and Central Agencies (CCA) inquiry, conducted a public meeting in the Border City to discuss the province’s future energy needs for a booming population.
The meeting is one in a series, where the public, industry players and others offered their take on the prairie province’s power options to the committee.
Not among the list of energy options is nuclear power, instead renewable energies and other technologies were the topic of discussion.
“We do have an excellent coal resource here in Saskatchewan as well as natural gas, we have one of the strongest wind resources in the province and we have some of the most hours of daylight and sunshine in the country too,” said McMillan. “Saskatchewan is really poised to be a very good energy centre with a lot of options, which is a good position to be in.”
McMillan acknowledged, however, that with a provincial population at it’s all time high and likely to continue to grow, in order to satiate Saskatchewan’s power needs alternatives are needed sooner than later.
“We are one of the heaviest relying provinces on coal and I think the writing is on the wall that burning coal as we always have isn’t the way that we can move forward,” he said.
“We are one of the strongest wind resources and late last year we announced that we are going to double our wind generating capacity by 200 to 400 megawatts. That’s one major step forward for us.”
According to Warren McCall, NDP MLA and CCA committee member, increasing the province’s wind generating capacity is a step the Sask. Party should have taken earlier.
“They spent two years being very fixated and very obsessed on the question of nuclear reactors. If they had made that announcement two years ago, that power would have been on screen now,” McCall said following Tuesday’s meeting.
For the rest of this article pick up a copy of Thursday's Source.