The announcement that an equivalency agreement has been signed by representatives of the provincial and federal governments is likely the best possible news for Estevan when it comes to the future of two units at the Boundary Dam Power Station.
If nothing else, it should bring closure to the “will they or won’t they” question about the equivalency agreement that has been dogging this area for the past 10 months, ever since SaskPower announced that it wouldn’t retrofit Units 4 and 5 at Boundary Dam with carbon capture and storage capabilities.
As the months dragged on, people became more concerned about whether the two sides would ever reach such an agreement. A lot of people late last year likely would have told you that the agreement won’t happen.
There’s still one last hurdle to clear, and that’s for the federal government to sign an order in council, but provincial Environment Minister Dustin Duncan called that a formality.
An equivalency agreement not only brings a measure of certainty, but it also gives us a little more time. We now know that Unit 4 will come offline at the end of 2021, and Unit 5 will be finished by the end of 2024. Before the equivalency agreement was reached and signed, we didn’t know if we were going to get these reprieves, or if these units would be offline at the end of this year.
It was very difficult to plan for the future if you didn’t know how long Estevan would have these very important pieces of our community.
The process of planning for the future can begin in greater earnest.
As we’ve stated countless times before, it’s imperative to be planning for the future now. We can’t wait for 2021 to start planning for the day when these units are taken offline.
There are a lot of conversations that a lot of agencies and industries need to have. We can’t leave it up to just the City of Estevan and their economic development and transition committees. Conversations need to be happening for everyone, from law enforcement to supports and recreation groups, from health care to education, and from the retail and hospitality community to professional services.
If you think the retirement of Units 4 and 5 won’t affect you, then you’re either living in denial or you’re a fool.
And we’re starting to hear some interesting ideas emerge. One of them is for Estevan to be the site of small modular reactors that would supply nuclear power to the province.
When the province investigated the potential for nuclear power back in 2009, it didn’t go over very well. People were highly critical of the plan, as nuclear power is a very divisive issue. It remains the most divisive form of power generation.
You can be sure that a lot of people won’t be happy if the province starts investigating nuclear power of any kind, even if it’s in the form of smaller plants.
Much like geothermal power, which is moving forward in the Estevan area, there is potential associated with nuclear power.
Thanks to the presence of the transmission lines, we already have the infrastructure in place in Estevan.
Will other forms of electrical generation create as many jobs as coal-fired power? Probably not. But they would be an option for a community that is going to need a lot of options moving forward.
In a perfect world, we would be writing about how Units 4 and 5 will be remaining online for the long-term. We’d be talking about how the government decided last year to retrofit those two units with carbon capture and storage capabilities, and they would be operating long after the 2029 deadline for conventional coal-fired power.
But that didn’t happen. The province decided natural gas would be the best source of baseload power going forward. The equivalency agreement suddenly shifted to the front burner for discussion in the community.
Now we can shift our attention in other directions.
But there is still going to be a lot to be discussed in the next few years now that one of the biggest questions about the short-term future of the community has been answered.
