REGINA – SaskPower has decided the province’s greatest natural resource is too expensive to harness.
And that has taken the wind from the sails of companies that invested thousands of dollars putting proposals together.
“What I really can’t stand is them blatantly lying to us,” said windmill manufacturer Izaak Cruson, about the Saskatchewan government and the provincial power utility deciding to cancel an experimental wind power trial. “Why would they waste our time?”
SaskPower called for bids to produce a 10-megawatt wind-powered plant in 1991. The idea was to set up a test plant to see if the generally brisk winds of southwestern Saskatchewan could be harnessed to provide an alternate, environmentally friendly form of power.
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A number of companies put together proposals and did design work hoping to win the commission.
As late as May 1995, just before the provincial election, energy minister Eldon Lautermilch was telling interested manufacturers SaskPower was “fully committed” to the wind power project, although by that time it had been reduced to a three megawatt size.
On Aug. 15, SaskPower president Jack Messer announced the project would be dropped, saying the cost could not be justified.
That reasoning enraged Cruson, who said his company, Dutch Industries, spent about $50,000 putting together its proposal. He said he and other bidders specifically asked SaskPower if there was a ceiling to the cost of the power the windmills could produce.
They asked this because “if you look at it from a small project point of view, it doesn’t make economic sense,” Cruson said. To make it cost-effective, the project would have had to be much larger, he said.
The answer from SaskPower was that there wasn’t a “threshold” price, Cruson said. Because of this, the companies continued their design work, he said.
Tony Harras, a SaskPower vice-president whose department co-ordinated the project, insists SaskPower was serious about wind power. He said the company knew it would be expensive, but when the final bids came in SaskPower, the Crown Investments Corporation and the energy minister’s office decided “the cost of the premium was higher than was supportable.”
Too small to be efficient
Cruson argued the costs were high because SaskPower had cut the size of the project to where it could not be expected to efficiently produce power.
But Harras said the company and government were not put off by the cost per unit of power, but by the project’s final estimated cost. Making it smaller made it cheaper, if not more energy efficient, he said.
He said private companies are not the only ones who have money invested in wind power. SaskPower had employees who spent a great deal of time on it and the company paid half of an approximately $100,000 study on the issue, he said.
