Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
At the Dec. 11 open house for the Seven Stars Energy Project, proponent Enbridge laid out updates for its planned 200 megawatt wind farm to be located just east of Weyburn. You can read Part 1 about the open house here.
Enbridge representatives said “apology” or “apologize” five times, and “sorry” twice during the presentation – not the typical sort of thing one usually hears from the developer planning on bringing a project worth in the range of a third of a billion dollars to a community.
Sam Munckhof-Swain, Director, Community Partnerships with Enbridge, led the Enbridge side of the discussion, taking most of the questions and offering the opening comment. Tim Robillard of consulting firm WSP acted as the moderator of the evening.
Munckhof-Swain said, “Enbridge acquired this project back in June of this year, and then, what happened from then is there was a public announcement around that pretty quickly after that.
“Now, what I want to do up here is just acknowledge that a lot of people in this room and in the community, the first time they heard about this project was in the newspaper, okay? And we acknowledge that. That’s not how we want to show up. And so, Enbridge, we do apologize for that. That certainly wasn’t the intention. We recognize that when that came out, it looked like this project was fait accompli, we were going to move forward with it. We had everything designed ready to go. It’s absolutely not the intention that we wanted to show up with.”
He noted they quickly had that open house in July to share a bit more project information. “Really it’s an evolution, okay, to get the feedback. We come out with a proposal, a design of a project, and then we get feedback, and then we refine that project based on feedback. And that was at that first open house in July. Many of you were at that one as well. We got a lot of really good feedback, both at that open house, but then also, we spent a lot of time in the community, not only talking with landowners, adjacent landowners, the RM, the province, hearing feedback and hearing questions around how we could improve this project and what were some of the key concerns for us?
Sam Munckhof-Swain of Enbridge. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
“And one of the things that we’re here to talk a bit about tonight is some of those improvements that we have made. And hopefully, if you’ve had a chance to go around and look at the some of the posterboards here tonight, you would have seen that.
“But there’s really three key improvements that we’ve that we’ve made, based on feedback from the community. The first one being the time, right? It came across that our timeline that was proposed back in July, was very rushed, okay? It felt like Enbridge was just rushing through this project and we were going to move ahead. So one of the key decisions that we made based on that feedback was to pause, okay, and we stretched the timeline out about eight to 10 months, to give us time to have more of these type of conversations, to make sure that we get it right. So that was the first one.
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This is the revised layout, as of Dec. 11, of the Seven Stars Energy project near Weyburn. There’s a substantial shift of the turbine layout to the east. The circles represent setbacks from residences. Enbridge
Revised setbacks
“The second one was around that the setbacks to community, to residences and property lines. We heard a lot of feedback, both at that open house and throughout our conversations, that where we place these turbines is just too close. And so, when Enbridge came out and proposed that, the distance and setbacks was very similar to other projects, particularly here in Saskatchewan, just by Kipling. That’s where that initial design came from. But we heard in this area, that is just too close. And so the updated project design that we have worked on has pushed those turbine locations further back to 1500 meters. Okay, and so both in the RM of Weyburn and the RM of Griffin, that is within the by law that says that these turbines need to be outside 1500 meters. And that’s what the updated project design, if you had some time to go and take a look at the map, that’s what our updated project design has done, and that is purely based on feedback from residents and land owners around here.”
Munckhof-Swain continued, “The third one here was around a concern around the night lighting. We heard the concern that that the lights on top of the towers at night is going to create an impact for the community.
“And so if you had a chance to take a look at the board, we’ve committed to introduce what’s called an aircraft detection lighting system. And effectively that’s just a radar, and these guys will talk a bit more about that, but that effectively means that at night, that the lights won’t be on there, unless an aircraft comes into the vicinity, that radar will pick it up, and then it will turn that light on for safety reasons like that.
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“So those are three key things that we’ve made to improve to get to today. But the other point that I want to stress is we’re not here presenting you a final project design. What we’re here to do is continue that conversation. We’ve pushed that timeline out, to make sure that we continue to hear that feedback, update our project design and ultimately get it right. So today, you know, there are going to be some questions for us, and hopefully we’ve got a lot of feedback already through this. This is part of that continuing conversation for us before we decide to move forward with that or not,” Munckhof-Swain said.
On Sept. 20, 2013, STARS air ambulance held its first open house at Weyburn Airport. Notably, Enbridge’s logo can be seen just below the rotor hub. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
Nighttime lighting
To reduce the nighttime flashing red lights atop 46 turbines, Enbridge now plans on installing an “aircraft detection lighting system,” pending Transport Canada approval. Such a system uses radar and would only turn on lighting when aircraft are detected in the area. This would require the installation of a 30 metre tall radar tower.
As Pipeline Online has observed the nighttime lights of the wind farm near Noonan, North Dakota, (south of Estevan) are only visible from time to time, it’s likely they have a similar setup.
The nearest Seven Stars turbine would be 8.9 kilometres from the Weyburn Airport.
And that led to the first question – would these turbines cause difficulties for STARS air ambulance to attend an emergency scene such as a farm in the project area?
Munckhof-Swain said Enbridge has been a long-time supporter of STARS and they had heard about those concerns, so the project manager spoke to STARS and they did not express concerns about where the tower locations are.
NEXT: Getting deep into questions and concerns
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