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Government of Saskatchewan says coal has a future. SaskPower is to look at running Poplar River and Boundary Dam Units 4,5 and 6 for decades to come, considering rebuilding them and ignoring federal coal mandate to shut down by 2030. Minister Jeremy Harrison was in Coronach and Estevan telling coal workers that coal has a future.
Here’s the op-ed he submitted exclusively to Pipeline Online, explaining what was going on. I just had a detailed interview with him which will be published Monday.
This is an enormous turnaround that cannot be understated. Saskatchewan is not giving up on coal. Estevan and especially Coronach get a huge reprieve.
And it’s a giant up yours to the feds. I’m sure Guilbeault will have a canary, and a cow. But he won’t eat the cow because my get is he’s a vegan.
Hopefully my 100+ stories talking about the unreliability of wind and solar, and imploring we shouldn’t throw away what works for what we know absolutely doesn’t work had some impact on this.
I’ll have more to write about this in the coming days. There are lots of implications. For instance, since we own the coal, we charge ourselves basically nothing for it. We do pay for the mining, however. But for natural gas, since our domestic production has dropped like a stone, most of our gas comes from Alberta. So every dollar we spend on their gas is a dollar leaving the province, never to come back (sound like Trump?) And here’s the kicker – when LNG Canada goes online, what do you think is going to happen to gas prices? Does anyone think it’ll stay around $2/gigajoule another 10 years? Or will it go up – maybe to $4, or even $6? All of a sudden, gas won’t be so cheap anymore, nor will the electrical power derived from it. But our nearly free coal will be. And once the carbon tax is gone – smooth sailing!
Also, this just happened (gradually, then suddenly…)
BREAKING: With “second carbon tax” in jeopardy, FCL and AGT pause renewable diesel and crush plant projects. The carbon pendulum is swinging, hard.