We get letters…
SK Power is pushing wind power and I want farmers to know there can be problems with allowing the ass backward things on their land if they do not get good legal advice. US farmers and Ont. farmers are experiencing what happens when the bloody things crash and burn.
The story: “Huron East farmers hit with $32 million liens by wind turbine construction”.
Sask Power seems to be wanting to get this through ASAP but farmers need to be aware of what is happening and what the consequences can be. The bureaucrats don’t give a damn what happens and you are such a good voice for the oppressed maybe we can get SK Power to step back.
Wake up, SaskParty. Bring your crown corporation to heel. These are the sort of issues that build to break popular governments.
Spread the word.
This is the new “skyline” near Pincher Creek.
This should be an interesting test of how much “SDA gets results.”
We know SDA is effective at skewing inconsequential online polls, but can it actually shift a province’s energy policy?
When the names involved in stinky “clean energy” rent seeking initiatives
and other similar scams get disclosed to the public, you might be surprised
how quickly such pipe dreams can crash and burn.
John, as always, you go stupid, this is about CONTRACT LAW. The wind turbine owners knew that they were shifting legal responsibility to land owners, for the construction of these useless pieces of sh1t. We used to call these leans, mechanic leans.
Once again, the GREEN energy cabal demonstrates how much MORE intelligent they are than the rest of us … just like Al Gore said. This is such a BRILLIANT business negotiation that would make even Donald Trump blush.
You see, these WIND Energy Corp’s. temporarily suspend all payments to their lenders, and vendors, forcing them to place mechanics liens against the leaseholding property owners. The WIND Energy Corp’s. go to the landowners and say they will not, or cannot pay their obligations unless the landowners are willing to renegotiate the WIND leases to $ ZERO.00
Of course, the landowners have no choice. It is the ONLY way in which they can clear the liens against their property. So they end up allowing the WIND Corp’s. to USE their property for FREE as a negotiated settlement! Brilliant!! Suddenly, the WIND ENERGY balance sheets start to look much better … hey ! almost as profitable as fossil fuels now that they can ERASE the land cost from their books.
And the landowners can f-e-e-l good about helping the environment … for everyone.
Come to Ontario for an example of ass backwards, it’s gone with the wind, wind can be fickle and we the taxpayers will be left with the spoils of the massive monster bird killer eyesores for decades to come.
It’s apparently not a problem to kill wildlife and ruin the landscapes with these monstrosities.
I’m concerned that a lien can be placed on a farmer’s land against a wind turbine. In the oil industry you can only place a lien on the oil well and not the land. Those farmers should find a way of fighting back.
Just shut up. You all were so sure that all that was required was “my team wins”, and everything would be OK. Well, this is where all the slogans end up. So live with it and be happy that your side won. Winning was the only goal; you never thought about why they wanted to win, or what they wanted to do with the victory.
The only thing they think about is winning next time. There is no sacrifice or principle that is more important than “winning”.
You know what I hope? I hope that contractors who installed solar panels get the same idea, that’s what I hope.
Many landowners in the Pincher Creek area wanted turbines because of the royalty. They have little impact on grazing land. Where it got funny was when the acerage owning city, eco hipsters protested them being built against the eastern slopes because it destroyed the view.
Then there is the single turbine on the Piikani reserve. First of the huge ones in the area. Could have been millions for the community, but one of the stewards of the earth actually shot the turbine. The whole project collapsed and all the new construction went off reserve.
Wind energy just more proof of the stupidity of enviroemntalists and their rediculous ideologies Now they will illegaly seize private property to build their stupid windturbines even more birds and bats being chopped up by them to achieve the mindless dreams of stupid enviromentalists
It’s “Pincher” Creek and that’s been the skyline for at least thle last fifteen years.
I feel bad saying this as I do have a soft belief ini karma, but landowners who signed up for this stuff deserve to lose. They are literally rent seekers, willing to screw everyone who pays an electric utility bill for a monthly windfall.
I have sympathy for anyone who has been forced to provide land for a turbine. I have sympathy for anyone who has seen their land devalued due to nearby turbines. I believe those people should have legal recourse for the harm done to them.
But I have no sympathy at all for anyone who willingly signed up for what they thought was free money. Hell, screw karma: I hope they lose their homes.
Maybe it’s this Windlectric Inc – Chaplin Wind Energy Project: “Windlectric is proposing to develop a 177 MW wind-power facility over 19,000 ha of land near Chaplin. The project is anticipated to include 79 wind turbine generators (WTGs), approximately 50-70 km of access roads, 10-25 hectares of laydown areas, 110 km of trenched transmission lines between WTGs, and office and maintenance buildings.” Wow. That will be incredibly unsightly, and what will it do to the migrating birds and bats in the region? This proposal was submitted in 2013 and the decision is “pending”. The poor people in Chaplin, if this goes through.
OMG! Saskatchewan has HILLS?!
More fodder for the Greenies. I thought Sask’s Carbon Capture Project would have appeased the climate gods.
I’m a dog person. I’ll always default to “pinscher”. (Thanks)
“Then there is the single turbine on the Piikani reserve. First of the huge ones in the area. Could have been millions for the community, but one of the stewards of the earth actually shot the turbine. The whole project collapsed and all the new construction went off reserve”.
“one of the stewards of the earth actually shot the turbine”. WOW! a live MAN in Canada that is not blindly following a corrupt Gov’t trend…. We have gender confusion, what do you call Canadians who wait….. for a sign, or consensus?
The experience from the Ont wind fiasco is that the only winners in the scam are the well connected Wind Energy outfits; and opportunistic politicians like Wynne who have convinced urban liberals they are “doing something” for the planet. Land owners think they got a good deal, money for nothing, but they sold their rights and heritage far too cheaply. They also failed to read the contracts carefully enough, for while the companies have batteries of lawyers to protect their interests, land owners are on their own for any libel claims. Farmers typically have not near enough insurance to cover future claims from irate neighbours or whoever. In the long term it will cost Ont taxpayers millions more to tear down these eyesores, than they paid to erect them. All for absolutely no gain in energy or anything else.
comments in the 1st link are unanimous. the farmers only have themselves to blame for allowing the 400 foot vegomatics on their land.
Taxpayers and customers need protection too. I’d like to see an independent auditor look at every major crown Corp deal as part of a regular, routine procedure. Saskpower building projects, regardless of the party in power, have always had rumours of shady tendering processes, corrupt land deals, kickbacks and other irregularities. The smart meter fiasco, CO2 CCS and the new wind projects are prime candidates for an in depth look.
Once a political party has been in power for any length of time they inevitably are tempted to engage self enriching agreements. SaskParty MLAs, crown Corp executives and their staff could be easily deterred if they fear getting caught by auditors. It’s better to prevent embarrassing and politically damaging revelations.
I know a farmer who was dead set against a high tension line going across his farm. He fought the power company and the government with everything he had including organizing an anti power line coalition to fight said power line. Guess what he has a power line across his farm. I knew another farmer, he has since died, that did not want a gas well and pipe line on his farm. He did everything he could to stop it. Guess what he had a gas well and pipe line on his farm. Trust me if the wind power people want to put a bird shredder on your property you won’t have much luck saying no to them. We don’t have property rights in Canada.
“We don’t have property rights in Canada.”
And never will as long as we have to pay taxes on our land.
While most of the media treatments on the Great Depression(books movies etc.) always make the banks the bad guy who took people’s land/homes, it was really the local governments who took people’s property from them for failing to pay the taxes levied on them.
Same thing in the U.S.
As long as people have to pay ongoing taxes on something they “own”, they don’t really own it.
Business as usual under a Kleptocracy.
THE GOVERNING BANDITS WILL ROB THE POOR.
The whole Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming meme is the biggest theft from the many to enrich the well connected few in human history, bigger than institutional religion.
These wind mills are just a tiny aspect of the fraud.
The big lie marches on, “We are from the government corporation,we are here to help you.
Yep help you into poverty and into freedom from your property.
Next moronic meme, the wisdom of bureaucrats.
Perhaps the farmers should try to get deals like coal mines offered (or used to?). The mine would buy the property, lease it back to the farmer at a low rate until the mine needed it, they mined the property, restored it and gave the original farmer the first option to buy the property back. At least, that’s how it was explained to me.
This isn’t an endorsement of wind power which I think is an expensive, unnecessary political public relations exercise and crony capitalism rip off that creates more problems than it solves.
Liens….not “leans”. And as it is contract law, in the agreement the company could indemnify the landowner….although even that is a bit on the risky side. But if landowners didn’t look for or demand any kind of indemnification, they could be in for a world of hurt.
A great many of the bird choppers in the Pincher Creek area are on cultivated land. And they are monstrosities.
Is that a movie? Kind of looks like the still turbines when I drove thru the area some time back. I was bucking a hell of a wind at the time.
Yeah, actually we do have property rights. But they have to written into the law. And those rights are subject to the right of expropriation by the government (which can be handed over to private companies if the government deems the project to be in the public interest. And that is not at all uncommon throughout the world. Companies and the government must pay for the rights taken from the landowner.
“Libro Credit Union” is a defendant,you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
When you think government has your back – in reality they’re screwing you doggy-style.
“Yeah, actually we do have property rights. But they have to written into the law.”
Yes, we have Common Law rights.
Codifying Common Law doesn’t necessarily strengthen it, more often, codifying it limits and erases Common Law.(example Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms)
As I implied above, if government can tax a thing, they can take it away by simply raising the tax to an unpayable level.
Can government, under Common Law, tax just about anything they want to? Yes.
Do you therefore own it if they can *tax it? No.
*Here I am talking about an ongoing tax that actually amounts to ‘a license to possess’ that has to be renewed
or your right to possess is forfeit. This kind of tax is exactly like paying rent on the government’s property.
If you don’t pay the tax they will evict you.
there are no property rights enshrined in the constitution. Canadians have the right to pay taxes until the die, on property that any level of government can take from them for non-payment of said taxes. no one owns anything in Canada. we pay levies and fees and taxes on everything we have or do.
Joe: “if the wind power people want to put a bird shredder on your property you won’t have much luck saying no to them”
I don’t know the situation with Sask Power, but in Ont where the first story originates, that is not the case at all. The Wind outfits lease the land from the land owner for 20 tears or so, and erect the towers on the leased land. It is strictly a private business deal, the land owners are motivated only by greed, or short term desire for cash income. The government signs a separate deal with the Wind companies to take all the electricity they can generate, whether needed or not, (80 % of the time not), for an exorbitant price.
That is why it is so difficult to feel any sympathy for the land owners here, They signed on, while their neighbours did not, and no one forced them to do it. As I said above they agreed to way to little in rental fee.
Wind farms blight the landscape, destroy birds and bats, operate well below “capacity,” and are hideously costly by any measure of cost/benefit, along with solar and the rogue white elephant – offshore wind.
Even notwithstanding intermittency it can’t be realistically scaled to replace any significant busload requirement. But since it involves taxing air, and the power of taxation is infinite, we’re good to go.
I understand the new watermelon waste rage is Pumped-Hydro Energy Storage (PHES). It’s really very simple: partner a nuclear plant with a wind farm. Then the nuclear plant could plush millions of gallons uphill to be allowed to roll downhill across turbines to clean up the spikes, ebbs and flows of energy from wind turbines, and maybe a hail Mary’s chance of mitigating intermittency, at only 30-100 times the cost of nuclear.
BTW that’s assuming wind farms last as long as nuclear plants, which they don’t; more like half.
Aren’t you glad we’re all part of government; just look at those geniuses at work. Not so much?
No worries, just rape the poor with another carbon tax and say you’re making the polluter pay, which of course is them; it’s OK they’re tough – they’ve been getting screwed by SJWs for years.
Taxing air: no need to produce it, transport it, store it – nothing. Just pretend you know how many “emissions” there are, and kaching. No need for difficult math or logic; IOW a statist nirvana, so the “cost” is always acceptable, given the “risk” of always in the future climate calamity.
Nope; not even close in fact – but apparatchiks revere it. Notice though – the piece below is written by CAGW true believer:
“Four bottom lines up front:
•It would cost over $29 Trillion to generate America’s baseload electric power with a 50 / 50 mix of wind and solar farms, on parcels of land totaling the area of Indiana. Or:
•It would cost over $18 Trillion with Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) farms in the southwest deserts, on parcels of land totaling the area of West Virginia. Or:
•We could do it for less than $3 Trillion with AP-1000 Light Water Reactors, on parcels totaling a few square miles. Or:
•We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors, on the same amount of land, but with no water cooling, no risk of meltdowns, and the ability to use our stockpiles of nuclear “waste” as a secondary fuel.”
http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/
Well … here in America … Obama has lectured us that … “You didn’t build that !”. Of course he was referring to every successful business enterprise in America, however, his Marxist credo certainly extends to property “ownership”. He would caution you that you are only a tenant on the sacred lands of Gaia and her chosen First Peoples. And that you OWE all of society a massive FEE for hogging the land for yourself. For enjoying (and exploiting); the seasons, rainfall, fertile soil, streams, lakes, shale oil, and forest. The land belongs to “the people”, “the state”, for the good of the peoples need. You should be FORCED to share your property … because “You didn’t create that!”.
“Companies and the government must pay for the rights taken from the landowner.”
You’re wrong on that one, Joey. Every day in this country landowners experience loss of utility and devaluation of their lands because of legislative and regulatory restrictions. And there isn’t one red cent given as compensation. As a matter of fact, much of the environmental legislation contains provisions that clearly spell out that compensation is not owed, and no action can be taken against the bureaucrats or the government.
Martin: the farmers do get compensation for the use of their land they simply can not prevent someone like a power company or an oil and gas company from using their land. What it comes down to is since there will be such a development on your land whether you like it or not mr/ms farmer the best thing you can do is negotiate the highest price you can for such usage.
Agreed, Shamrock, and good link. Just one thing you were not correct about.
“I understand the new watermelon waste rage is Pumped-Hydro Energy Storage (PHES). It’s really very simple: partner a nuclear plant with a wind farm. Then the nuclear plant could plush millions of gallons uphill to be allowed to roll downhill across turbines to clean up the spikes, ebbs and flows of energy from wind turbines…”
No, what the watermelons have in mind is “NO nuclear”. Their wish is to overbuild wind turbines and use the surplus power to drive the pumped storage system. In short, the entire wind system would not feed into the grid, in their construct, but would only pump water. The grid in turn would be entirely fed only by the pumped storage system.
What is missed by the watermelons in all this is that the friction losses alone from the pumped storage are about 50% of the already dismal output of the wind fleet.
I am well aware of what the Constitution says. But you are quite wrong. You DO have the right to own property depending on how the legislation is written. There is a presumption in law that property which is expropriated must be paid for, provided that the statute that causes the expropriation is silent on the subject. And while the constitution or Charter of Rights do not guarantee property rights, the courts have incorporated this principle into the common law over the years, and the legislature is presumed to know the law, so if they forget to put something in the statute or regulation regarding compensation, you’re entitled to it.
Well no, actually, I am correct in what I said. I said it depends on the way the legislation is written. And the envirofascists have pushed governments into writing legislation which does that. But to say that we don’t have the “right to own property” is incorrect because compensation is paid in virtually every instance….notwithstanding the environmental nonsense that is going on. And it is THOSE kinds of laws that need to be pushed back on…and HARD. Unfortunately stupid people elect people to enact legislation like that.
The reason for that is that the landowner in almost all cases does NOT own the resources below the surface. They belong to the Crown. And surface rights holders cannot withhold the right to extract those resources as the resources belong to the province. The operator must pay the landowner for the taking of the land, the disturbance to the land and any losses to the landowner that might result. In other words, the landowner is made whole for the taking…..and in the vast majority of cases, they are paid handsomely. In fact, if you look at farmland property listings, you will often see the notation about well site lease payments, etc.
Re: Wind generators in Pincher Creek.
Many of those are mere toys as compared to what Sask power has already installed West and SE of Swift Current. I’ve had Sask Power employees tell me straight out that the whole project was a total waste of money. And while they do generate a certain amount of electricity, they only add to the cost of using coal and water.
Joey, I agree with all your comments here. I believe that a landowner can go and file for the mineral rights under his property, can he not?
Saskatchewan’s greatest blessing is the rest of Canada’s ignorance about Saskatchewan.
I understand the new watermelon waste rage is Pumped-Hydro Energy Storage (PHES)
Not very ‘new’ at all.
Pumped storage is the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of March 2012, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) reports that PSH accounts for more than 99% of bulk production capacity worldwide, representing around 127 GW,[1] with storage capacity at 740 TWh.[citation needed] Typically, the round-trip energy efficiency of PSH varies in practice between 70% and 80%,[1][2][3][4] with some claiming up to 87%.[5]
The first use of pumped storage was in the 1890s in Italy and Switzerland. In the 1930s reversible hydroelectric turbines became available. These turbines could operate as both turbine-generators and in reverse as electric motor driven pumps. The latest in large-scale engineering technology are variable speed machines for greater efficiency. These machines generate in synchronization with the network frequency, but operate asynchronously (independent of the network frequency) as motor-pumps.
The first use of pumped-storage in the United States was in 1930 by the Connecticut Electric and Power Company, using a large reservoir located near New Milford, Connecticut, pumping water from the Housatonic River to the storage reservoir 230 feet above.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Joey,
In Ontario the oil and gas is owned by the land owner, not the Crown. Surface land owners can and do say no to oil & gas extraction. In Alberta the government owns the oil & gas rights, which explains why Alberta is a socialist province only now embracing its true colours (orange).
Mineral rights are different in Ontario. They are owned mostly by the Crown, excluding patented land and land granted to settlers that included the mineral rights. But the right to stake is limited (I believe to north of the French River). You can’t stake a mineral claim in Toronto or on most Ontario farms.
The Liberal government of Ontario has been changing the mineral claim system. It used to be free entry, if you staked a claim you had the right to enter the claim and conduct work. Now, for almost any exploration work you need an exploration permit and prior consultation with First Nations.
Cgh,
No, a landowner cannot go and apply for the mineral rights to their property. They would have to stake a claim over their property (400 m by 400 m or larger), register it with the government and then conduct exploration on that property within 2 years that meets the professional standards and minimum expenditure requirements set by the government.
Just to be clear what this is all about: The global average concentration of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere is currently about 0.0400%, or 400 parts per million by volume (ppm).
Steve, fair points, but none of that says that the landowner cannot have title to his mineral rights. It simply indicates that there are conditions that have to be met.
Cgh,
No. The only way the owner has title to his mineral rights is to open a mine. If you stake a mineral claim you must spend a minimum amount of money each year to keep the claim. The cost per year only increases. After 10 years (I believe) you must have a mineable resource and then convert your mineral claim into a mining claim. Otherwise the claim reverts back to the crown.
Saskatchewan has both Crown owned and Freehold mineral rights. Petroleum an Natural Gas are a separate category, as is coal. During the settlement phase, the CPR and Hudson’s Bay and other entities were granted thousands of acres in a patchwork to entice settlers. They granted surface rights, but retained mineral rights. The government of Canada through the NWT granted both surface and mineral rights to settlers who proved their claims.
After 1905, the province retained mineral rights when they granted homesteads, if I recall correctly. You can buy Freehold mineral rights, but only lease Crown rights.