SaskPower’s net metering program, when it’s up and running, essentially allows Saskatchewan residents with the funds and motivation to outfit their homes with a renewable energy source like solar power, generate and sell energy back to SaskPower in exchange for a credit on their bill. (They still rely on SaskPower for baseline, or backup, power).

If more power is generated than is consumed by the home, a credit for the difference is applied to owner’s bill. SaskPower also offered rebates on some of the equipment and installation.

The program had been around for almost a decade, but uptake was slow. Some said that SaskPower didn’t do enough to promote the opportunity, while others pointed at the historically high cost of equipment like solar panels.

For years, there was hardly even a reference to the program in SaskPower’s annual report. That is until 2016-17, when it boasted that 195 net metering applications had been received that year, equalling a combined generating capacity of 1.69 megawatts (MW). SaskPower’s total generating capacity from its 17 power plants combined is over 3,500 MW.

In 2018-19, SaskPower relaunched net metering, increasing the time customers could use their power credits from one to three years and introducing 10- year power-sale contracts for customers, up from two years. The new and improved program was to be in effect until Nov. 30, 2021, or until it reached a generating capacity of 16MW. Given two years earlier the program was only generating 1.69MW, 16MW must have felt like an unattainable goal for everyone.

Except it wasn’t.

Just a few weeks ago, SaskPower abruptly announced the net metering program had been suspended. It had reached its cap of 16MW. The blowback was fast and furious, with Saskatchewan residents and businesses left feeling blindsided.

Consider Kyle Fisher of Saskatoon, who’s in the middle of building his dream home, complete with design details to support his plan of using and generating solar power. He built his house facing southwest and the roof was made as flat as possible to accommodate solar panels.

He bought electrical appliances instead of natural gas, and has wired in fixtures for an electric car, which now isn’t a viable option without solar power. His house is still under construction, which has progressed too far for him to reconfigure the design to exclude the costly solar components, which he planned on paying for with the savings on his power bills.

Additionally, an entire industry employing hundreds of Saskatchewan people was effectively wiped out. From solar co-ops to green energy companies, manufacturers and installers, the green technology industry was slowly beginning to flourish in the province, despite the government’s best efforts to suppress it over the last decade.

Regina company TruGreen Energy’s president Miguel Catellier described the cancellation as “ruthless” on SaskPower’s part.

Days after the program was axed, a visibly rattled minister responsible for SaskPower, Dustin Duncan, held a media availability, supposedly to reassure affected people and businesses by promising that the net metering program would return, retooled, within weeks, not months.

It wasn’t enough to appease the anger, however, and protests, led by the solar industry in Saskatchewan, went ahead as planned.

So, what’s really going on here? Why is SaskPower throttling renewable energy generation at 16MW, or 0.4 per cent of its total capacity?

There are two factors in play: coal and fear. And there’s lots of overlap.

Saskatchewan is blessed with an abundance of natural resources, including coal. Unfortunately, even with costly technology like carbon capture and storage available, the future of coal as an energy source is bleak.

The federal Liberal government has accelerated that process, but the decommissioning of coal plants began under the leadership of Stephen Harper. The Government of Saskatchewan has had over a decade to get ready for the transition away from coal, including mitigating the impact of its demise on communities like Estevan which rely on the coal mining and processing industry to survive. It had the time to get ready, but the Sask. Party government chose to stick their heads in the sand, refusing to believe that such a thing could come to fruition.

See, SaskPower is our province’s Blockbuster Video — its business model is rapidly becoming obsolete, and instead of adapting, it has both resisted and denied that fact. Fear tends to drive such behaviour; fear of change and the unknown. Just like Blockbuster Video refusing to proactively adapt to the digital age, SaskPower is doing the same with renewable energy. It doesn’t have to cap renewable energy at 16MW, no matter how many garbled explanations it provides to the contrary.

The truth is that solar power — selfgenerating power — combined with the transition away from coal threatens to send SaskPower the way of landline telephones and brick and mortar music stores. However, the Sask. Party was so hellbent on boosting its political fortunes by demonizing the federal government’s carbon price and subtly denying climate change that it didn’t notice the societal ground shifting underneath it on the environment.

Extreme weather events, climate rallies and increasing scientific evidence have finally permeated the global collective conscience, elevating climate change from a political talking point to a real issue that people care about, a lot.

Regardless of how SaskPower fixes the net metering mess it created for itself — some generously consider the program a victim of its own success — the Saskatchewan government should consider this a wakeup call on its partisan environmental (or nonenvironmental) strategy.

Saskatchewan people have begun, en masse, to recognize the personal, economic and environmental advantages of renewable energy and expect their government to do the same, because there is far, far more at stake than any Saskatchewan politician’s 2020 campaign.

-Tammy Robert