Shand Power Station. Photo by Christina Turnbull

 

There was a rhythm to my life inside a coal-fired power plant in southeast Saskatchewan.

I could hear it before I fully understood it: the steady hum of rotating equipment, the distant, sighing hiss of high-pressure steam, the smell of water treatment and the low mechanical heartbeat of a generating station producing electricity for the province.

The vibration lived in the floors, the pipes, and eventually, somewhere deep inside my own chest and bones.

Even from the chairs in the control room, the plant spoke a language I had learned to read. Sometimes a heavy thud would echo and shake through the concrete and steel. Other times, the high whine of the turbine would subtly change pitch.

Instinctively, my eyes would drift toward the trend screen and the ash conveyor camera to see what MAX was bringing us. Management could hear those same sounds, too. Heads would peek out of offices to check the “Happy Meter” mounted above the situation room.

The Happy Meter was a live digital readout showing how many megawatts the unit was generating at any given moment. When that number was sitting above 250 megawatts, you knew the unit was at full load, contributing reliable power to Saskatchewan’s electrical grid.

One glance could tell you a story.

For those of us who spent our careers there, that meter was more than instrumentation. It was reassurance. It was the pulse of the station.

And for a long time, I believed that pulse was permanent for me.

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We Built Our Lives Around It

Career movement inside the plant was slow.

Seniority carried enormous weight, and it could take years, sometimes a significant portion of a career, to reach the control room, the position, or the location you hoped for.

But most of us accepted that.

Why wouldn’t we?

We believed the plant would still be there.

We planned mortgages, vacations, retirements, and family lives around shift schedules and scheduled overhauls. People built careers measured not in years, but in decades.

I was one of them.

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As a single parent, I raised my two boys in that community while building my career in power generation. I volunteered with local organizations, participated on committees, and became part of a community that had given my family stability and a place to call home.

The power plant wasn’t simply where I went to work. My career, my family, and my community had grown together.

That experience wasn’t unique to me.

Entire communities developed around Saskatchewan’s power plants and coal mines.

Those facilities were not simply industrial sites on the outskirts of town. They were woven into the communities themselves. The companies supported food banks, youth sports, charities, and community organizations, but their impact went much further than corporate donations.

The people walking through those plant gates were the same people coaching minor hockey, volunteering at fundraisers, serving on local boards, and helping neighbours when someone fell on hard times.

There was a quiet but fierce pride in being part of it.

We also understood the responsibility that came with producing electricity. When Saskatchewan dropped into the depths of a brutal January cold snap and families turned up their furnaces, people were counting on generating stations like ours.

We knew that.

Keeping the lights on wasn’t an abstract corporate slogan when you worked inside a power plant.

It was our job.

Shand Power Station. Photo by Christina Turnbull

 

 

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Then the Conversation Changed

For years, the idea of moving away from conventional coal generation seemed distant.

There were conversations about emissions, natural gas, renewables, and changing federal requirements, but initially those discussions felt like strategic issues happening somewhere far away from the shop floor.

Then the timelines began getting closer.

Suddenly, the questions weren’t theoretical anymore.

What happens to the people working in fuel and ash?

What happens to operations?

Will younger employees still have the opportunity to build a 30-plus-year career here?

What happens to the mines?

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And perhaps the largest question of all: What happens to the communities built around them?

Those of us working in generation could also see another reality.

Different forms of generation require different workforces. Natural-gas facilities did not require the same size or type of workforce as a coal-fired generating station with its fuel handling, ash systems, operations, maintenance, and supporting infrastructure.

A transition from coal, therefore, wasn’t simply a question of replacing one source of electricity with another.

For workers, it raised a much more immediate question: How many of the jobs surrounding the existing plants would still exist in whatever came next?

Uncertainty had entered a workplace where certainty had existed for generations.

A turbine doesn’t turn slowly. At full speed, it spins at 3,600 rpm with incredible precision.

The cultural change surrounding us was different.

It happened gradually enough that you could almost become accustomed to it, but it was powerful enough to change the direction of people’s lives.

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I Chose to Leave

I wasn’t looking for another job.

I liked my work. I liked the people I worked with, and I had built a life around both the plant and the community.

But my own life was changing, too.

My boys were growing up and moving into lives of their own. University, Graduations, and weddings are going to replace the milestones of childhood. Somewhere farther down the road, retirement is beginning to come into view.

At that stage of my life, uncertainty carried a different weight.

I still had a mortgage and a home in a community whose economic future was closely connected to the power plants and coal mines around it. Like many people, I had to think not only about whether my job would exist, but about what a major industrial transition could mean for the community where I had invested so much of my life.

The writing on the wall was becoming difficult for me to ignore.

If coal generation disappeared, there was no guarantee that every job built around it would simply transfer to whatever came next. There was no guarantee that the economic impact would stop at the plant gates, either.

I didn’t want to leave.

But eventually, I had to ask myself how much uncertainty I was willing to carry into the next chapter of my life.

There comes a point in a career when you have to look beyond loyalty and ask yourself a difficult question:

Do I wait and see what happens, or do I leave while the decision is still mine to make?

I chose to leave on my own terms.

That decision meant leaving more than an employer.

I left behind routines, friendships, knowledge, identity, and a place where people spoke a language outsiders rarely understood.

Most of all, I was leaving a place that, for many years, I thought I would retire from.

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Shand Power Station. Photo by Christina Turnbull

Then Saskatchewan Changed Direction Again

Today, Saskatchewan’s coal story looks very different.

The province has decided to extend the life of its existing coal fleet rather than allow conventional coal generation to disappear at the end of this decade. Plans are underway to refurbish generating units and extend their operating lives as Saskatchewan builds toward its future electricity system.

For the workers, families, and communities still connected to those plants and mines, that change in direction has brought something that had been missing for years:

Hope.

And I am genuinely happy for them but not convinced that the culture bounced back.

Watching it unfold from the outside has also made me think about what years of uncertainty can do to a workforce.

Governments can change policy. Regulations can change. Corporate plans can change. Timelines can move forward and backward.

But workers still have to make decisions in real time.

We decide whether to buy the house.

Whether to apply for another position.

Whether to encourage our children to build careers in the same community.

Whether to stay.

Or, as I did, whether it is time to leave.

Those decisions can’t always be reversed when government policy changes years later.

That is one part of the energy transition that is difficult to capture in policy documents, political speeches, or economic forecasts.

Behind every megawatt are people: culture, morel, community.

Behind every generating station are families.

And behind every debate about the future of an industry are workers trying to decide what that future means for them.

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More Than Megawatts

Energy discussions naturally focus on numbers: megawatts, emissions, capital costs, electricity rates, and timelines.

Those things matter.

Having spent much of my working life inside power generation, I believe we also need to remember what exists behind those numbers.

A power plant is not just infrastructure.

It is people.

It is routine.

It is identity.

It is the operator watching a gauge at two in the morning.

It is the tradesperson answering a callout in January.

It is the employee missing Christmas dinner because the unit doesn’t care what day it is.

It is generations of knowledge passed from one worker to another.

And it is an entire community that sleeps a little easier because somewhere nearby, people are keeping that turbine turning.

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What We Couldn’t Measure

Even now, years after leaving that plant behind, I can still hear its low mechanical heartbeat.

I remember how quickly we could read the health of the unit. A change in sound, a glance at a trend, a number on a screen. Those small signals could tell us whether things were steady.

What none of us had was an instrument that could tell us whether the lives we had built around that plant were just as steady, or how much stress and anxiety the uncertainty was causing workers.

Saskatchewan’s coal plants may now have a future that looked increasingly unlikely when I made the decision to leave. I hope that future brings the lasting certainty this workforce and these communities have been waiting for.

The men and women who keep those stations and mines operating are more than numbers in an energy debate. They are part of Saskatchewan’s history, its communities, and its future.

For decades, their work has powered homes, farms, hospitals, and businesses across this province.

For those of us who lived it, it powered something else, too.

It powered a way of life.

 

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