It’s time we stop sitting back as the polite, good-natured Canadian citizens we are known to be and speak up before it’s too late. Today’s topic the Seven Stars Energy Windmills project.
What is Saskatchewan known for? We have valuable minerals but we are better known as the breadbasket of Canada. However our farmland is being eaten up by expanding cities, wind turbines and solar farms.
Most of the new immigration (another topic for another day) is of course heading to the cities and other urban areas, which is natural but also unfortunate, when you see that the cities are expanding outward to accommodate the needs of the increased population. However, take a minute to think about where our ancestors originally settled. In the 1900’s they weren’t looking for a quick and easy commute to work, they were concerned with growing enough food to feed themselves. A lot of our best farmland around large urban areas such as Regina and Saskatoon has already been eaten up by their expansion, so that fertile land is now covered by houses, condos, apartment buildings, office buildings and shopping malls. (In 1903 Regina’s population was 3,000 and it is now over 226,000.).
Saskatchewan should be looking at preserving its farmland for the purpose of raising crops to feed people here and abroad, which is an issue for today and the future, but instead we are focussing on carbon emissions and replacing the use of carbon fuels when Canada is rated 93 out of 134 in the world for CO2 emissions. Priorities! Education, health care, Medicare just to mention a few. Satisfying questionable federal mandates should not be our priority.
So what are some sources of pollution? Can you explain to me why I now use a paper straw with a plastic cup? Or why I gave up using paper bags years ago to use plastic bags and am now back to using paper bags?
When I think of wind turbines the first thing that comes to my mind is not that I am using a cleaner source of power. I think pollution! They are a form of noise pollution, create shadow flicker and infrasound (which have health implications), they pollute the scenery and there is no way of disposing of them when the turbines have reached their life expectancy of 20-25 years (let’s not get off topic and think about electric car batteries which have similar disposal problems).
If the foundation/base parts are not being built on site, there will also be a need for better roads to accommodate the delivery of these parts to the various sites plus the huge propellers. Who is paying for this? Maintaining this?
Also consider the CO2 emissions used in making the concrete to build the base for the turbines. Cement plants are already a big concern for CO2 emissions. There’s a lot of technical stuff out there that you can read and probably understand better than me, but the US Department of Energy report I read said that in 2019 the USA produced 93 million metric tons (MT) of cement and reported 69 MT of CO2 equivalent and they expected production to increase to 150 MT. Why am I not able to find newer reports? (Interesting fact I learned, cement is the second most consumed material on a per capita basis after water.) So the turbines are a source of pollution when they are being built and an even bigger source of pollution when they are being decommissioned or cleaned up.
Cleanup does not mean what you or I would think of as cleanup, as in removal of everything from the site so it is left in the same pristine condition as it was before the windmill turbines were built. Cleanup apparently only goes to 48” deep and the foundations are much deeper than that, so they do not ever intend to remove the concrete bases in the ground that form the base for the turbines, which are full of cement and rebar and who knows what else. Anybody know what the long term effects of that might be?
In googling and trying to find out more about the cleanup process, I found that there is only one company in the USA that is breaking up the propellers and they can’t keep up to the demand, so the majority of the used propellers are just sitting in landfills or somewhere else (probably taking up more farmland) in what they call “turbine graveyards”. The use that one company has found for the broken up propellers? It’s such a green solution! They are being used to build the hotter fires that cement plants require to make klinker (a component of cement) and the making of cement as I said above is already a concern for CO2 emissions.
There’s also no legislation in place to ensure that anyone will take care of the cleanup or ensure that funds are even available to do the cleanup which will ultimately affect you and me as taxpayers. The SaskPower blog says the cost of building wind turbine farms is less because of federal tax incentives and we pay less carbon tax. I do not see that as a savings to me, because I know that as a taxpayer you and I fund the federal tax incentives and if we eliminate the carbon tax that would be an even bigger saving to me.
Think of Saskatchewan’s past history in abandoned oil well cleanup. Another article I read said that annual costs to maintain one wind turbine was about $45,000, and estimated costs would be about $532,000.00 for Xcel Energy to decommission each turbine ($71 million total for 135 turbines) at their Noble facility in Minnesota and those are 2019 figures and were for a lot smaller wind turbines than the 673’ turbines that are proposed for the Seven Stars project. I don’t know why there isn’t further information about what the actual cost was, so are those turbines just sitting out there still waiting to be decommissioned?
What I see is that the provincial government does not have a lot of law in place protecting us in the building of, or in the decommissioning of wind turbines. This should not be left to the RM’s who do not have access to the resources and information that the province does.
In my opinion, farmland is further being wasted by solar fields. Put your solar panels on an office building, on a mall or a parkade, you can even put them on my roof (and probably everybody’s roof) and SaskPower can take all the power for its use rather than ‘benefit’ me personally when I sell it back, all much better options than wasting valuable farmland.
In closing, which do you think is taking up more space in the landfill… my plastic straw or a propeller from a wind turbine? We are creating a bigger pollution problem which our children or grandchildren will need to deal with in 20 years. Let’s just say NO to any more wind turbine farms in Saskatchewan, not just the Seven Stars project and get some research done and legislation put in place to protect us from the next proposal.
Debbie J. Giroux
