Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
Bekevar Yotin Wind Facility near Kipling. The Seven Stars project would look very similar. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
Last week two things happened in the energy space that may seem unrelated, but they are not.
I drove 4.5 hours up to Saskatoon on Jan. 28 to attend a press conference where the provincial government said it was formally starting the process to choose the technology for future large-scale nuclear reactors. We’re talking 1,000+ megawatts per unit, and at least two, because you don’t build just one.
Right around that time, the Rural Municipality of Griffin put a snag in the path of the development of the Weyburn wind project known as the Seven Stars Energy Project.
After a public hearing was held a few weeks earlier, this is what the RM council put out in an Jan. 28 press release:
Council for the Rural Municipality of Griffin has completed an initial review of the Development Permit Application submitted in November, 2025 for the proposed Seven Stars Energy Project.
Council has determined that the application is incomplete, as it does not currently include the required environmental documentation. As a result, Council is not in a position to approve the application or proceed with further review at this time.
Council emphasizes that this decision is procedural in nature and does not represent a determination on the merits of the proposed project.
To be clear, that council heard a lot of people saying they didn’t want a wind farm in their area, and a few proponents that did. The proposed 200 megawatt wind farm would see 23 wind turbines in the RM of Weyburn, and another 23 in the RM of Griffin. There’s been fierce opposition to the over-half-billion-dollar project. It’s NIMBYism in its finest – Not In My Back Yard. You can throw in BANANA for good measure, too – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
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For the past two years, I’ve been taking numerous VIPs on what I call my “Energy Literacy Tour.” There’s over 14 points on the eight-hour tour, where I cram in 17 years of reporting on energy into one day. A partial list includes oil, gas, carbon capture, utilization and storage, CO2-enhanced oil recovery, nuclear siting, NIMBY issues, coal mining, coal-fired power generation, CO2 pipelines, water, wind, solar, interties, geothermal and lithium development. It’s a very full day.
The second point on that tour is driving through the Weyburn wind project area.
As we do, I point out the locations where most of those turbines will be positioned, stopping on occasion to say there will be three here, and four there. And do you know how many backyards we encounter? Extremely few.
The closest neighbour to most of these turbines will be creaking pumpjacks. The 1,500 metre setback Enbridge agreed to means they’re going to be a long ways from anyone.
The RM of Griffin’s stalling on this – when the RM of Weyburn recently allowed the development permit to go ahead, is clearly NIMBY related. They might succeed. The opponents might kill the project through delay.
And if they do, you can forget about the other announcement that day – nuclear power plants that will likely cost tens of billions of dollars and are key to the future of Saskatchewan, its power grid and industry.
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The next point on my tour is showing these VIPs exactly which pieces of land are under consideration for small modular reactors, and maybe even large ones. A key selling point to convince them to take the tour is, “If you’re in the decision-making matrix on where these reactors should go, maybe you should actually stand on the land being considered, first?”
This is the Rafferty site, one of two sites under consideration for Saskatchewan’s first nuclear reactors. The most likely location would be just over the valley edge, on the right side of the photo. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
So we drive 55 kilometres down the road from the wind project to the proposed Rafferty nuclear site, and everyone gets out and gets a good lay of the land.
Whether you like them or not, think they are economical or not, giant wind turbines are pretty benign. Yeah, there’s going to be reclamation down the road. But have you ever heard of a flare pit? Or well abandonments? Everything has to be reclaimed eventually. That doesn’t mean you simply stop doing things that make the economy run.
And if a few dozen people cheesed off about wind turbines could kill this project, what the hell do you think is going to happen when they break ground on nuclear reactors, both small and large? Some people literally think nuclear power is the end of the world, or will lead to it.
Let’s be very clear – Saskatchewan is going to nuclear power generation. Both the Saskatchewan Party government and New Democratic Party opposition are on that path. This is happening.
I’ve sometimes joked the reason the Estevan area is under consideration for these sites is because it’s just a little too far for University of Regina professors to head out there and protest during their lunch breaks. There’s actually some reality to that. A certain U of R professor used to go out to the Enbridge right-of-way passing through Regina and post pictures online of her protesting its existence.
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Monday evening someone sent me this via chat regarding the wind project: “Good. Need to cancel the project. Residents don’t want it.”
Well guess what, folks: There are going to be some residents who don’t want reactors, either, no matter where they are built. And they are going to fight tooth and nail in opposition.
Those reactors, especially large ones, will be the most transformative thing Saskatchewan will have done since the building of Gardiner and Qu’Appelle Dams to make Lake Diefenbaker. It will be the most expensive things we do in our lifetimes.
And they’re going to be necessary. Is it lost on anyone that the large nuclear reactors were announced two days before the announcement of a major alumina find in the Tisdale area?
Alumina is a precursor to aluminum – second only to steel as the most important metal in our society. Everything from airplanes to F-150s to pop cans to military weapons are made from it. And because so much electricity is required to make it, you wouldn’t be too far off in referring to aluminum as “electricity in solid form.”
That’s an exaggeration, of course. But if anything does come of this alumina development, and we end up actually processing it into aluminum here, in Saskatchewan, we are going to need every megawatt we can get. And we are really going to need large-scale reactors.
But none of that is going to happen if we can’t build a damned wind farm at Weyburn. How the hell are we going to build reactors 55 kilometres down the road if we can’t build these wind turbines?
There’s more at stake than these wind opponents realize. Get over it.
Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@pipelineonline.ca.
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- 0102 Lori Carr Coal Extended0102 Lori Carr Coal Extended
- 0100 Turnbull Project Manager0100 Turnbull Project Manager
- 0099 Mryglod Steel 1080p0099 Mryglod Steel 1080p
- 0097 Eagle Sky Ventures LTD0097 Eagle Sky Ventures LTD
- 0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it
- 0092 Turnbull projects big and small0092 Turnbull projects big and small
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- 0077 Caprice Resources Stand Up For Free Speech0077 Caprice Resources Stand Up For Free Speech
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- 0051 JML Hiring Pumpjack assembly0051 JML Hiring Pumpjack assembly
- 0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar
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- 0032 IWS Summer hiring rock trailer music
- 0022 Grimes winter hiring
- 0021 OSY Rentals S8 Promo
- 0018 IWS Hiring Royal Summer
- 0013 Panther Drilling PO ad 03 top drive rigs
- 0002 gilliss casing services0002 gilliss casing services
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