SaskPower: At Least 13 Years Out of Touch

I’m sorry Canada, and the world. I’ve tried to convince my province’s public utility that there are huge benefits from dialing down the reliance on coal burned electricity, but they won’t listen. They haven’t even removed or updated a shockingly out-dated “Solar” page on their website that lists information that became obsolete a decade ago. There are such great advances in research, and cost expectations of renewable power, I can’t easily accept that the business people at the utility company are so daft. (They don’t even recognize that Spain’s in the northern hemisphere, so I shouldn’t be so surprised.)

I hope others join me in asking for the tangible results the “clean energy research chair” has brought the UofR thus far, as the province’s leading clean energy research facility. Ask the UofR how many windmills, and how many solar panels it has in research or in production. The answer presently is 1 windmill and 0 solar panels. There are farmers in Saskatchewan with more of each. Is the SaskParty government funding our universities so they can get into this very important area of research? Not really.

I’m hoping another recent letter to my MLA will help prod them along, but unless more people start to put some pressure on the utility company to modernize, I don’t think we’re going to be able to collectively do our part to limit Saskatchewan’s gross impact on air pollution and climate change. I’m really very sorry for not being more effective at such a crucial point in human history.

UPDATE: It’s 2013, and SaskPower finally removed some of the incorrect information from their website, but they are still underselling solar power, and their President and CEO is writing Saskatoon’s newspaper to attempt to refute good ideas about investing heavily in renewable power sources. He’s defending coal power. He’s using the 13 year old excuses I listed here! SaskPower is behaving like a dinosaur.