A plow moves coal atop a giant pile of the combustible fuel outside SaskPower's Boundary Dam power station and carbon capture storage facility near Estevan, Sask.MARK TAYLOR/The Globe and Mail
Saskatchewan is looking to refurbish its fleet of coal-fired power stations, extending their lives well past a federal 2030 phase-out deadline and locking the province into decades of reliance on the fossil fuel.
Jeremy Harrison, the minister responsible for SaskPower, the Crown corporation that oversees electricity supply in the province, says the reliability and affordability of power are at the heart of the policy rethink.
About 30 per cent of Saskatchewan’s electricity comes from its three coal-fired power stations: Boundary Dam and Shand, both near the small city of Estevan, 200 kilometres southeast of Regina, and Poplar River Power Station near Coronach, about 200 km west of Estevan.
Roughly 100 years’ supply of coal is buried beneath the province, much of it close to the power plants in the southeast. That means Saskatchewan could take advantage of its own resources, avoiding imports of natural gas to feed power stations and circumventing price spikes for the fossil fuel, Mr. Harrison said in an interview this week.
“I know what the cost of coal is going to be in 30 years, because it will be the same cost it is today – which is zero, because we own it already,” he said.
The government had already committed to extending the life of the Shand power plant until 2042. Even though all three coal-fired stations have been in operation for between 30 and 50 years, Mr. Harrison said 80 to 90 per cent of the existing units are still operating at a healthy rate.
Preliminary numbers indicate that refurbishing them would cost billions of dollars less than building new power sources, he said. And it would avoid installing more transmission infrastructure – an expensive prospect in the large, sparsely populated province.
Federal regulations amended in December, 2018, accelerated the phase-out of all conventional coal-fired electricity in Canada to 2030. But the Saskatchewan Party government has said that those rules are unconstitutional, because power is under provincial jurisdiction.
Hermine Landry, press secretary to federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, said coal is already more expensive to operate than renewables, and will only become more so in the coming years.
“Despite what some may suggest, there is no future in coal,” she said in an e-mail. “Coal fired electricity costs more, and negatively impacts citizens’ air quality. The right thing to do is to phase it out like the rest of the world.”
Jason Wang, a senior analyst at the electricity program at the Pembina Institute, an environmental think tank, said it’s unclear how Saskatchewan could refurbish its coal fleet under the federal regulations aimed at protecting air quality, tackling climate change and attracting clean investment.
“These are all other reasons to be looking to decarbonize an electricity system, and doubling down on coal isn’t doing that,” he said in an interview. “It’s locking in a technology that is one of the dirtiest forms of producing electricity. It’s not in line with what modernized electricity systems look like, which are much more diverse, much more flexible.”
Saskatchewan has Canada’s third-most emissions-intensive electricity system; it generates 26 per cent of all of the country’s electricity emissions, despite only producing 4 per cent of the power, according to the National Inventory Report.
The province will make a final decision on the future of the coal-fired plants by July 1, though Mr. Harrison is vocally enthusiastic about the refurbishment and said “the direction is looking pretty clear.”
But that doesn’t mean abandoning other methods of generation. He said Saskatchewan requires an “all of the above” approach, including biomass, natural gas, hydro and, eventually, nuclear – though he acknowledged that SaskPower’s goal of adding 3,000 megawatts of wind and solar power by 2035 may change as part of the coal review.
“I’m not opposed to putting more renewables onto the grid. It has to make sense, though, from a reliability and affordability perspective,” he said.
The refurbished units could include carbon capture if it’s cost effective, he said. Boundary Dam became the first power station in the world to successfully use the technology in 2014. Although it was expensive, its effectiveness has been uneven over the years.
“It will really be driven by the economics,” Mr. Harrison said.
Estevan Mayor Tony Sernick called the potential refurbishment music to his ears, because it stands to preserve hundreds of jobs at the coal mine and power plants and bring a construction-fuelled economic boon to the area.
“Nuclear is the future, but we’re just not ready for it,” he said. “If we shut off our coal fleet in the next couple years and not replace it with anything, well, I’m more concerned about freezing in the dark than I am about the air quality right now.”
Westmoreland Mining LLC operates the coal mines that feed the SaskPower plants. It recently signed a contract to keep that going until the end of 2029, when it expected to close the mine and begin reclamation.
The government’s plan changes all that, said Jon Heroux, Westmoreland’s corporate counsel.
“That is a relief to us. It is a relief to our 550 employees and their families,” he said in an interview.