Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
NDP Shadow Minister for Energy and Resources Sally Housser in Prince Albert. Facebook screengrab/nigel.maxwell.90/
PRINCE ALBERT – The Saskatchewan NDP have been taking their “Grid and Growth Plan 2026” on the road in recent days. Last Friday, April 17, several MLAs travelled to Prince Albert. On April 20, it was Yorkton.
And again, the NDP spoke of using liquefied natural gas as a bridge to nuclear power, despite the fact there is no liquefied natural gas available at scale on the prairies, and the closest LNG plant is on the BC coast, at Kitimat.
NDP Shadow Minister for Energy and Resources Sally Houser spoke in Prince Albert on April 17. There she said of the plan, “It’s a practical made in Saskatchewan approach to lowering power bills, creating good jobs and building a stronger, more self reliant electricity system for Prince Albert and for across Saskatchewan. We’ve been talking with families, with workers, with people running small businesses, and honestly, we’re hearing the same thing over and over again. People are doing everything right, working harder and harder and falling further behind. You hear it in the way people talk about their day to day, managing their grocery bills, trying to keep up with housing, making sure their kids have what they need. And then the power bill comes in, and it’s just one more blow to the household’s bottom line.
“And people are asking, ‘How is this all supposed to work?’ Because it’s not just one bill, it’s everything piled on together, and when power bills keep rising like that, there’s just no room left. That’s why we need a different approach. The Sask Party is spending billions of dollars to keep our coal plants on life support. That’s billions just to stand still, and it’s families who are expected to pick up the tab. The Sask Party’s power plan could saddle Saskatchewan taxpayers with $25 to $35 billion in SaskPower debt. At the same time, SaskPower says it will cost $2.6 billion just to keep aging coal plants running that’s nearly triple what they told us it was going to be just one short year ago.”
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The $900 billion Housser referred to was money planned until 2029. The $2.6 billion is the full plan, to refit the entire coal fleet, all seven units, by 2035. That number came out in recent weeks. That $2.6 billion is expected to maintain 1,500 megawatts of power generation, that would otherwise need to be replaced, until 2050.
Notably, the cost to build new natural gas plants, has dramatically ballooned in recent years. SaskPower is currently building its third of essentially cloned 370 megawatt combined cycle natural gas power stations. The first, Chinook at Swift Current, cost $605 million and went online in 2019. The second, Great Plains at Moose Jaw, cost $825 million and went online in 2024. The third, Aspen at Lanigan, is expected to cost $1.7 billion, nearly three times the first, and more than double the second.
On April 13, SaskPower announced it had officially topped out the new Aspen Power Station — placing the last steel beam and completing the main structural build. SaskPower
It would take an additional four stations of this size, at 370 megawatts each and $1.7 billion per plant, to replace the coal-fired generation fleet. That does not account for growth in the grid, just replacement of the coal fleet.
And since Saskatchewan has only drilled five natural gas wells in the last decade, and Alberta averages that many in four hours during busy drilling seasons, Saskatchewan would need to import from Alberta nearly all the gas necessary to power additional natural gas-fired power stations.
“NDP is grid and growth plan offers a different path,” Housser said. “It offers reliable natural gas. It offers expanded, lower cost renewables now and far into the future, and it makes us it shows that we’re going to build the grid for growing communities like Prince Albert and keep nuclear on the table for when it makes sense. It starts with a simple idea, let’s respect the people paying power bills. It focuses on lowering costs, building more energy here at home, creating jobs and strengthening the electricity grid for growing communities like this one. It’s about using the strengths we already have in this province, our resources, our work force, our expertise, and putting them all together to work for people. And I’ll say this about Prince Albert, this is a community where people want to build something, they want opportunity, they want to grow, and they want to see their community succeed, and they deserve an approach that supports that. It’s time for a new approach.”
Houser said while developing their plan, “In addition to talking to industry, talking to the crowns, talking to individuals, obviously paying higher bills, one thing we know is to in order to develop the full potential we have in this province in terms of our industry. That’s our oil and gas, our uranium nuclear mining, critical and rare earth minerals, going back to forestry, even. We know that these large industries are the largest rate payers, the largest users of electricity, and so in order to be able to develop all that we can here in the province, we need those power rates to be reasonable and affordable and sustainable long into the future.
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“In addition to the power bills for the larger industries as well as the household, we know we need to develop our building trades, labour, work force. We know that we need the basic infrastructure like roads and bridges in order to be able to develop the North. If we’re going to have a lot more critical minerals and mining in northern Saskatchewan, we’re probably going to need more than a gravel road or two up north.”
Asked what their plans were for coal, Housser said, “We took an independent modeling, and we went into it very agnostic about what was this going to look like. The company we worked with has done these type of energy and electricity projections for people all over the country, in North America. And we were agnostic about if you know, it came back and said, coal makes sense, well, that’s something we’re going to consider. What came back was that this was not the best option. In fact, far from it.
“What the Sask. Party is doing right now is, in fact, the most expensive option that would see our electricity rates and our power bills double into the future. I mean, the cost of $2.6 billion to refurbish end-of-life coal plants simply does not make sense for the sustainability, the reliability and the affordability of our electricity grid.”
As for nuclear, she said, “We know that we need a bridge for when nuclear makes sense. Obviously, we have so much of the world’s uranium here, and SMRs, there’s potential to come online. I mean, unfortunately, I would have liked to have seen the Sask. Party get serious about that 10 years ago, instead of just continually kicking the can down the road with some MOUs and things like that.
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“But it makes sense for us, here in Saskatchewan, to be taking serious look at nuclear, but we need that bridge to get there as well, and that will involve LNG. But also we have to look at renewables and developing that here, in the wind, we have to take an all of the above approach for having a reliable, sustainable and affordable grid well into the future.”
Housser concluded, “I think it was … well, over a year ago, when the Sask. Party first floated the idea of refurbishing the end of life coal plants. I think that was January of 2025, and by the way, that came as a surprise to everybody, including SaskPower, including SaskEnergy, including industry. This was not something that had been well canvassed with any of the people that it was going to affect.
“And so, we want to take this seriously. We want to take politics out of developing power. This is more. This is for the future of this province, and they can be several, you know, party changes in terms of who is governing over this period of time again. We can’t think about the importance of this in just four years, election cycles. We have to think about it in decades. So when that emerged that they made some of these decisions without any real serious. Consultation, the NDP, the Saskatchewan NDP said, ‘Well, we’re going to do the work of the government, then we’re going to take this seriously. We’re going to do the math and see what is the best option for the people of Saskatchewan.’”
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