Brian Zinchuk, talks Canadian Energy
We have Brian Zinchuk, PipelineOnline.ca, Saskatchewan’s Energy News, stopping by the Energy Realities Podcast, and we’re ready to dive deep into Canada’s evolving energy markets. It’s always a great time having Brian on the show as he brings sharp insights and real-world perspectives on the challenges and opportunities facing Canada’s energy future.
From the federal clean energy mandates to the realities of coal, gas, and nuclear development, this conversation explores how Saskatchewan is navigating the path to reliable, affordable power. Buckle up, some true energy realities are hitting the podcast as we uncover what’s shaping the future of Canadian energy.
This was a lot of fun, and Brian and I were able to catch up after the show and talk about his reporting and how we can help him out with more coverage.
Please follow Brian on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianzinchuk/
Check out his news site: Pipelineonline.ca
Highlights of the Podcast
00:00 – Introduction
01:42 – Saskatchewan’s Energy Reality
04:12 – Coal as a Bridge to Nuclear
10:26 – Challenges with Wind, Solar, and Gas
12:11 – Lessons from Europe and Maintenance Issues
22:18 – CO₂ Capture and Enhanced Oil Recovery
26:19 – Federal vs. Provincial Energy Conflict
29:09 – The Price of Unreliable Energy
35:51 – The Storage Mirage
39:33 – Saskatchewan Pushes Back
44:54 – Doubling the Grid is Unrealistic
53:25 – Nuclear’s Massive Future
55:56 – Preparing the Next Generation
58:31 – Closing Remarks
Brian Zinchuk, talks Canadian Energy
Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:12] Hello and welcome everybody to the Energy Realities podcast. I’m the moderator today, yay, I’m so lucky. I get to be the moderator for today’s program. Today we’ve got Irina Slav, who’s in Bulgaria. Hi Irina, how are you?
Irina Slav [00:00:28] I’m great, thank you Tammy.
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:31] And we also have David Blackman who’s in Texas, David, how’re you doing?
David Blackmon [00:00:37] Things are just beautiful here in the frigid state of Texas.
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:41] Frigid? Oh, is it that cold.
Brian Zinchuk [00:00:42] frigide, ha!
David Blackmon [00:00:44] Cold Canadian air actually made it to Texas in November. It’s awesome.
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:49] Oh my gosh, I hope there’s no snow because that would be devastating for your grid and everything else.
David Blackmon [00:00:54] Oh, no, wait, no chance of that here.
Tammy Nemeth [00:00:58] And we have Stu Turley. Stu, where are you today?
Stuart Turley [00:01:03] I’m in Abilene. You gotta love a good stargate right down the road. I can throw a rock and hit the data center now, so it’s kind of fun.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:09] Oh my gosh, so when it’s up and running, are you going to be able to feel the heat?
Stuart Turley [00:01:14] Oh, absolutely. And especially because it’s behind the meter, we don’t pay for the thing. So it just takes up a lot of gas.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:21] Well, that’s good.
Stuart Turley [00:01:22] Yeah, it’s called the Jerry Nadler effect.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:25] The Jerry Nadler effect, that’s a good one. And today we have a very special guest. It’s my pleasure to welcome Brian Zinchuk to the podcast. He’s the owner and editor of Pipeline Online News. Hi, Brian, how are you doing?
Brian Zinchuk [00:01:42] Good morning. It’s a lot colder here. I think it’s minus 10 Celsius. So I’m not sure what that is in Fahrenheit, but yeah, she’s pretty chilly here. So you guys down in Texas, Oklahoma, sorry.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:57] Well, I have to say Brian’s from Saskatchewan, where where my stomping grounds are as well. And it’s great to have Brian here on the show today to talk about Canadian energy and what’s happening in Saskatchewan in particular, because we could be facing a bit of a constitutional crisis with Saskatchewan’s new energy security plan and what was just announced last week in the Canadian budget. But just as we get started here, I want to say that Brian in my opinion, is the hardest-working reporter journalist I know. He’s the only one really reporting on what’s happening in Saskatchewan’s patch and its energy scene, so I’m really happy to have Brian here on the podcast to talk to us about Saskatchawan in Canada.
Brian Zinchuk [00:02:41] Well, thank you very much. I do like to use one of my taglines is, is I am the only journalist in Saskatchewan focused on energy. That’s not an exaggeration. I’ve been doing this for 17 years. And for the last, I guess, seven of those, or sorry, 10 of those. I have been the only person focused on Energy. So I write about primarily oil and gas, but when I launched my own business after COVID took my previous job, excuse me, I focused more on all the other things, power generation, wind, solar, nuclear. They’re gonna be building likely two reactors of either six or 15 miles from my house. That actually announcement was clarified here two weeks ago. I’ve been writing about all these different things and I really started realizing that this whole energy transition. You know, a lot of it really doesn’t work. I’ve written over a hundred stories about how wind and solar in Alberta in particular, but also in Saskatchewan are utterly useless and unreliable. And it turns out that the government of Saskatchewan and the minister told me this, took note. And as a result, instead of shutting down our coal fleet in four years, one month and 21 days, which is federal law, they’re supposed to do that. Instead, they’re going to rebuild our coal fleet of three power plants, two are six miles from my house. And we’re gonna do that as a path to going to coal. So when you’re ready, I can start going on kind of, you know, how we got to that.
Tammy Nemeth [00:04:12] Right, so I think what’s interesting is that as you mentioned a couple weeks ago there was the Sask Saskatchewan first energy security plan and in that plan as you say it confirmed that Saskatchewan was going to use coal power as a bridge to nuclear down the road by 2050 because Nuclear does have a long timeline. For setting up and getting financing and all these different kinds of stuff. And so this is the plan to use coal because Saskatchewan has a lot of coal, it also has a lots of uranium and it makes a lot sense to try to use what they have a lot. But last week we had Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled his climate competitiveness strategy within the 490 page budget. I find that just appalling. But in any event, they doubled down on the clean electricity regulations. And so what do you think this means for Saskatchewan and its commitment to coal when they said, well, we’re going to work with the provinces to get them off these polluting emissions intensive forms of energy?
Brian Zinchuk [00:05:21] Okay, so one thing to realize that Saskatchewan has hundreds of years of coal reserves, mostly along the U.S. Border, most around Estevan, a place called Coronac. The reality is, is that on a cold winter’s day, coal accounts for 44% of our grid. Now on a typical day, it might be 26%, but on the days you really need it, when wind doesn’t work at minus 30, so you have to shut down the wind turbines, that power plant where my son now works at, which is six miles south of my house. That and two other plants, that’s Boundary Dam, supplies 44% of the power. So if we do not have that, we are in serious problems. We’ve been building out gas plants. We’ve built two large ones, 370 megawatts each. We have a third one under construction. But the price on that went from the first one to the second one went up to 36%. From the second to third one went to over 100%. So gas plants are not cheap in Saskatchewan. And our domestic gas production has flatlined. We’ve drilled 10 gas wells in the last 10 years. Alberta had drilled that by noon today. So the reality is that gas is not a cheap option for us because we don’t have domestic gas, not much of it anyhow. So clean electricity regulations were brought in by a federal minister named Stephen Guybeau, who was a former Greenpeace activist. And the idea was is that originally we had to shut down all fossil fuel generation across Canada. By 2035. That is nine years, one month, and 21 days from now. Now, given Alberta, which got rid of its coal fleet last year, now on some days is 94% natural gas. And Saskatchewan, you combine natural gas and coal, it’s up to 88% on a cold day. That would basically be turning off the lights for the entire Western part of Canada. People will literally, this is not exaggeration, they will freeze in the dark. That is what the federal regulations said. Now they’ve slackened off on them a little bit most recent iteration, but it still means is that we’re supposed, other regulations brought in before that said we’re suppose to shut down our entire coal fleet by 2030. Now the thing is that if you bring up the reactors here, the small modular reactors that we’ve announced, which is the, keep going Eric, keep goin’. That’s got current capture. That’s the big one. We’ll come back to the other one here. The one says General Electric. So these ones here, this is a design that was chosen by Ontario Power Generation, Tennessee Valley Authority, Estonia, Czechia, a bunch of other countries. We were one of the first ones to choose this. We announced this choice back in 2022. We’ve been working on this since earlier than 2020. The first megawatt from one of these 300 megawatts reactors won’t hit the grid until 2035. Now, if we shut off coal in 2030, and we can’t turn these on until 2035, we all freeze. And the other factor on this is that we’re looking at building two of these initially. Well, that’s 600 megawatts. We have 1500 megawattes of coal. So that gives us a 900 megawatt shortage. So Minister Jeremy Harrison, who was one of the gentlemen he had the podium there, a year ago in December told me You know, Brian, based on the stuff you’ve written about, we are going to keep our coal going. We are going rebuild the coal fleet. So when you went through those slides, we saw one of the generators that’s Boundary Dam Unit 6 and it is gonna be one of seven units that’s gonna be refurbished and brought back. You know, maintain production for possibly up to 25 years because it’s going to take that long to build two small reactors. And now they’re talking very seriously about two large reactors. Those are the general, sorry, the Westinghouse EP 1000s. Yeah. What’s really important about that is that in the last two years, Saskatchewan based corporate darling called Cameco bought 49% of Westing house out of bankruptcy. And 51% was bought by a company called Brookfield Asset Management, whose previous CEO was a guy named Mark Carney. I know that’s a lot to take in, but you know, what it is that we are going to go nuclear. It’s going to be billions and billions of dollars. But the reality is, is that to get there, we have to burn coal, keep the lights on and the provincial government has said, we don’t give a care what the federal say and probably more stronger words begin with F start than that.
Stuart Turley [00:10:04] Brian, let me ask you this, I interviewed JU and the CEO of Nano Nuclear and they’ve got a Canadian authorized plant that’s going in to build micro-reactors and they got one in the US as well. Are you familiar with them? Are you aware where that is?
Brian Zinchuk [00:10:26] What’s happening is that on the Eastern side, in New Brunswick, they’re looking at two small and micro-reactor designs. That might be one of the ones that’s not being considered in Western Canada. The term small is really a misnomer. I mean, this plant here we’re looking at is equivalent in power to the one at the Shan Power Station, which is a coal plant, which has one unit. So it is, small is, really, it was a marketing term. They’re not small. That my micro are small. Anyway, there was actually there was a big thing about that is that the first microreactor from Westinghouse is called the E-Vincey and Saskatchewan Research Council was going to build the first one. We had signed on for that and then just as this conference took place on starting October 20th is Canadian Nuclear Association West, first conference they ever had in West Canada. Westing house pulled the project from Saskatchewan Research Council because it turns out Donald Trump’s Department of War has more money than the government of Saskatchewan. They want to use those micro-reactors for military use. Military and aerospace, which I think means the moon. And I’m not exaggerating on that. They might want to put one of those on the moon, maybe on a starship.
Tammy Nemeth [00:11:46] Yeah, my understanding is that they want to use these micro-reactors and they have a lot on the nuclear submarines already and the aircraft carriers, but that they wanna use it for powering bases and whatnot within the…
Stuart Turley [00:11:59] The U.S. Has 10 bases that have got 18 micro-reactors already starting to roll through on a major project.
Brian Zinchuk [00:12:11] Anything confirmed on that, so I’d love to get to that, Stu.
Tammy Nemeth [00:12:14] Well, Irina, I mean, what do you think about having the extension of coal and what is, you know, will Europe look to what Saskatchewan is doing and say, hey, you know what, they’re keeping coal and China’s keeping coal, maybe we should keep coal too.
Irina Slav [00:12:32] Well, I don’t know about Europe, but I just went to the website of the Bulgarian system operator. I’d like to share my screen, if possible. Go ahead. Let me see if I can do this. Can you see my screen? No?
Stuart Turley [00:12:59] Let me add it to the stage
Irina Slav [00:13:03] So this is current generation, OK? It’s not cold. It’s about 15 degrees Celsius. It’s cloudy in my part of the country, but I expect somewhere else it’s sunny. And yet we have coal power plants supplying 37% of our electricity right now. The nuclear power plant is supplying 27.51%. Which is already more than 50 percent.
David Blackmon [00:13:35] Sixty-five, yeah.
Irina Slav [00:13:37] Wind is a little bit below 7% and PV, apparently. It must be really sunny somewhere. But yeah, I think these figures, let me just, shall I stop sharing?
Stuart Turley [00:13:54] It’s up to you.
Irina Slav [00:13:57] Okay, I think it’s clear that more than 50% of the country’s electricity comes from coal and nuclear and the colder it gets the bigger this portion will become and this happens every single year. Germany has been burning more gas than the last four years or five years because of low wind speeds. I mean, it’s a no-brainer, but we’re dealing with people with no brains in European countries. These people want to close all our coal power plants. We have local coal. We don’t have to import coal.
Brian Zinchuk [00:14:39] So that’s kind of what happened here is that, you know, in the last four years, the Alberta government, so Alberta is basically the province of the state next right next to us to the west. We get all their weather a day after they have it. And what happened there is that they had a socialist government in for four years and they said, we’re going to accelerate the closure of Alberta’s I think six coal plants, which they did. Some were converted to natural gas and if some were just shut down. And they accelerated the construction of wind and solar in particular. And I started writing about that stuff in late 2021. And in those four years, uh, they doubled both wind and solar such that there’s now over 1800 megawatts of solar. And they went from 2,700 megawatths to 5,700 megawattes of, uh wind. And I’ve written pretty much once a month, every month of the year. That that wind goes to 1% or less. And on occasion, it goes to zero. So they, I wrote some stories when it was 4,700 megawatts of capacity and it went to zero for like hours at a time. How do you power a grid? How do keep hospitals? How do he keep schools, factories, refineries, pump tracks? How do we keep the entire economy going with a power source that goes completely to zero? Just as solar does every single night.
Stuart Turley [00:16:06] Let me ask this of you, uh, yesterday when I was driving in from one house to the other house, I go through a bazillion wind farms and when I started looking at the wind farms, I’m noticing as I travel between the houses that there is a major maintenance issue in Texas and I, I started looking at there’s entire wind farms that are not even gender yesterday, the wind was blowing so hard. High wind day and both of my hairs were moving in the car. And I mean, it was absolutely an amazing thing to see an entire wind farm not moving and not working. The wind farms that were working, 20% of them looked like they were not working, you’d see one windmill missing a blade or you’d say, and it’s getting steadily, steadily worse as I drive back and forth between the houses. This is not a, a new thing. Maintenance is being, um, a real issue with the inflation reduction act going away or the porculous bill is Dan Bongino calls it. How is the maintenance in Canada for all these things? Cause it’s cannot be any better than in, in Texas.
Brian Zinchuk [00:17:30] Well, remember I said that. They doubled Alberta’s wind generation in the space of three years. So most of that stuff is pretty new. So it’s not worn out yet. One of the brand new plants that was supposed to go online a year ago, I was online for four days and one of the turbines fell over and it hasn’t produced a megawatt since November of last year. So that was 122 megawatts facility, I think it’s called Hawkerk too. So, but the other ones I would guess because. Texas is an open market, very similar to Alberta’s, where Saskatchewan is a closed integrated market, which independent power producers that produce wind and solar sell into the Saskatchewan grid at a fixed price as opposed to variable price. But I would guess that what’s happened, what you saw there, Stu, was probably the, there was a surplus of wind on the grid, surplus of power on the grade, and they shut down because they couldn’t take anymore. That if it was windy, that’s a very good bet. And even the 20% that were shut down was probably not necessarily due to maintenance. Some of them surely would be, but they may have been shut down because of simply of circles.
Irina Slav [00:18:40] Curtailment Stu, curtailmen-
Stuart Turley [00:18:43] Well, when you, when you see some oil drip, you know, people forget that these turbines have hundreds of gallons of oil in each one of those turbines. And when you see oil dripping down that thing, it ain’t really clean energy.
Brian Zinchuk [00:18:58] Well, while you mentioned oil, I do have to talk about the other side of my business, which is that, you know, we see the pump jack behind me here on the green screen. The reality is that Saskatchewan is not a minor player. We produce about 450,000 barrels a day, which should be equal to some of the smaller OPEC producers. We are one tenth of the production of Alberta, but that still makes us the second largest in Canada, and as I said, the size of some small OPECs producers. As we produce. I’m fairly certain a lot more than Romania does, for instance. Uh, Irina, do you remember how much Iranian Romania produces these days?
Irina Slav [00:19:34] I’ll check. I think they mostly have gas, natural gas. They’re a bigger player in gas.
Brian Zinchuk [00:19:44] So, I mean, the reality is, compared to most European nations, except for perhaps Norway, we out, we scatch and out produce almost every European nation except for Norway. And and uh…
Tammy Nemeth [00:19:59] Well, to be fair, Europe doesn’t really have that much oil except for Norway and maybe Romania, Azerbaijan.
Brian Zinchuk [00:20:05] But that’s that’s entirely my point though, is that, you know, most people don’t think of Saskatchewan as a major producer, but we are. And we were surpassed by North Dakota when it hit the balkan boom. They were producing 90,000 barrels a day up until about 2006. And then by 2012, they were producing 1.2 million barrels. We’ve stayed relatively flat, Almost consistent for about 24 years now at around 450,000 barrels. But what’s interesting is that both the governor of Saskatchewan and the premier Scott Moe, who was the premier who made the decision to keep coal going, as well as the Alberta premier, Daniel Smith, who you may have heard of, might want to join a Montana one of these days, both said on stage in, I’ve seen this together, they both want to double their respective oil production. So for Alberta, it’s about 4 and 1 half million barrels. So you wanna double that, scatch and. Wants to hit about a million barrels, a goal of additionally hitting 600,000 barrels and then eventually going towards a million. So how do you do that? I actually, I did a speech back in Calgary in April, months ago, laying out a five point plan that we’re already working on some of these, two programs the government has brought in, a multilateral well program, which is the biggest change in oil patch in I’ve seen 17 years writing about this with these giant multilaterals have like. Up to 15 legs on one well. You can replace, in some cases, between four to eight to 24 well pads with one well, so that’s one of the programs. Another one is CO2. And, you know, I know you, I’ve listened to you guys in recent weeks talking about, well, CO2 and I don’t really like it so much. If you go to that slide that showed the Boundary Dam Power Station on the left-hand side of it, You’ll see. But that’s carbon capture plant that was built in 2014 and it’s been now capturing CO2 for 11 years. Now, it’s not perfect. It hasn’t worked perfectly for the first several years, but they’ve got after 11 years, there you go on the left-hand side, let’s see that.
Tammy Nemeth [00:22:18] Yeah.
Brian Zinchuk [00:22:18] Yeah, they let the bugs figure it out. So I took Tammy on a tour of this place here about two years ago. And so what’s coming out of the left-hand side there, that is not smoke. That is steam, okay? So that’s mostly the steam that’s left over from the coal and it captures about 800,000 tons per year. Now that CO2 is piped down a pipeline, which goes down the left side of the screen, which you can’t see to an oil field 70 kilometers away. About 40 miles where they use it for enhanced oil recovery and it’s recycled there over and over and over again and when you pump CO2 into an oil reservoir that’s deeper than a kilometer as a supercritical fluid what happens is that the CO2 acts as a solvent and basically washes the oil out of the gas or out of rock. It causes the oil to swell a little bit and it makes it flow much, much easier. The difference is that when you put a pump jack. On a, well, you might get 20%. You put a water flood, re-inject water into the formation. You might get 40% of the oil. You add CO2 and we’re already in excess of 50% for that oil field. And by putting CO2 on one unit here out of the four that are still operating, we’ve extended the life of that field. And now the province is considering putting CO two capture possibly on the other units of this plant or at least the biggest one. As well as the other two plants that are under consideration. If they put it across the entire fleet, we could capture 8 million tons a year, which frankly, I don’t care about saving the plant. I care about producing more oil. And there are people in government say the same thing. So what it means is that we could add an incremental 73,000 barrels per day of additional oil production just from capturing the CO2. It’s not, yes, you’ll hear people say, oh yeah, look, we reduced emissions, took this many cars up, blah, blah blah blah. No, no, no. It’s all about producing more oil and getting the royalties for the province that pays bills. So that’s why CO2 is significant in Saskatchewan. And we’ve been the leader on this front for well over a decade.
Tammy Nemeth [00:24:29] Yeah and part of that plant also, it stores it underground to see what the long-term consequences are of of the underground storage and it’s been this international project with you know people monitoring it and seeing what’s happening and so on.
Brian Zinchuk [00:24:44] That’s exactly right. So just a few miles to the left there, you’ll see that, you can’t see it on here, but there’s two wells. It’s called the AquaStore project and that’s a deep geological storage. And, you know, they’ve been doing this test, as Tammy said, for a long time. The thing about that is that it’s just simple geological store, you’re not doing anything with it. And while this may be an option for people who really want to get rid of CO2, it doesn’t make any money.
Tammy Nemeth [00:25:10] Right, but I think that the problem with the federal government run by the Liberals and NDP, whatever, is that they have a tax credit for carbon capture, but if it’s being used for enhanced oil recovery, you don’t get it. And if the power stations, if the coal wants to stay in production in Canada, they won’t be able to get credit for whatever CO2 they capture if it’s being used for enhanced oil recovery. So this, I think, is setting up a bit of a confrontation between the province and the federal government with respect to, number one, keeping the coal and, number two, using the CO2 capture for enhanced soil recovery. Because even though Saskatchewan wants to increase its oil production, where is it going to go? Is it for internal use? Is is for export? And if it is for export. Is it possible to increase the amount of pipeline capacity going to the United States and how will the federal government sort of address those issues? And so I think there’s a bit of a confrontation lining up there.
Brian Zinchuk [00:26:19] Yeah, it’s absolutely, it is a case of ideological blinders. There’s no reason to give an investment credit just to put it in the ground and leave it there when you use it for CO2 enhanced oil recovery, or CO2 EOR as it’s called and produce more oil, which is greener and nicer and lower emissions and all that. And Premier likes to say that White Cap Resources is a net zero oil company. The reality is that if you’re gonna capture this CO2, use it for something. There is a marketable use for it. And it’s not just about, you know, supposedly saving the planet. One of the things that I like to talk about, I don’t have it in front of me here, but I have a map from a sketch and geological survey, which shows the recession of the continental glaciers. And the ice over Estevan, where I live, retreated about 15,000 years ago. It started retreating 20,000 ago. And by 8,000, years ago, that ice, which was. Up to three kilometers thick in the northern parts, up to two kilometers thick where I live, it all melted by about 8,000 years ago. Now, was it my gas guzzling pickup truck or the two coal fire power plants beside my house that caused that ice to melt? And every time I mention that, I get exactly the reaction that Dave is, you know, kind of chuckling because people realize, well, blah. So I mean, if- If you can make a continental ice sheet go away and increase the ocean level by 400 feet in a space of 12,000 years, which is exactly what happened, the Hibernia oil platform, which is 200 miles off the shore of Newfoundland, that was dry land, 20,000 20,00 years ago, because it was dryland covered in ice, but it was not ocean, it was that continental shelf. Including all the continental shelf around, you know, Texas and Florida, that was all dry land, 400.
Tammy Nemeth [00:28:15] The English Channel was dry land.
Brian Zinchuk [00:28:18] The UK was not an island.
Stuart Turley [00:28:21] And most of the U.S. Politicians were there personally to witness that.
Brian Zinchuk [00:28:26] Oh, exactly. I don’t know what you have, uh, you know, electing people that are one step out of the grave. I that’s just an American thing, I think.
David Blackmon [00:28:35] It certainly is.
Stuart Turley [00:28:37] it’s disgusting
Tammy Nemeth [00:28:39] David, I wanted to bring you in here because, you know, the way Alberta has done their grid and retiring coal and doing whatever is very similar to what was happening in Texas. And what Albert has seen and what Brian has written about so extensively and so well is about how the more wind and solar that was brought on the grid, the more expensive everything became and the prices went up for consumers. Did you see the same thing in in Texas?
David Blackmon [00:29:09] Yeah. I mean, our, our power rates here in Texas have increased 50% since 2019. Um, and that’s all that’s during the time when we’ve had the big solar boom and continuing build out of wind. Uh, but when the big storm hit in 2021, a winter storm, Yuri, the first two power sources to drop off the grid and, uh, Baker Institute at Rice proved this. Where wind and solar immediately dropped off the grid, just fell completely to zero. And then ERCOT comes in and cuts the power to a bunch of gas fields and gas pipelines, compressor stations coming in from the Permian Basin and they freeze up. And so suddenly the gas starts dropping off the grade and we end up killing 300 Texans because of all this, because we didn’t have, we had all the capital that should have gone to building more dispatchable natural gas and coal plants. In the warmer parts of Texas, near the demand centers, had gone to building wind and solar, which were the first to drop off the grid. And so 300 Texans died as a result. And luckily, since then, we’ve made some pretty significant reforms to the grid, how it functions and how ERCOP functions. And hopefully that won’t happen again the next time we have a major winter storm, but it was a hard lesson to learn for a lot of families in our state.
Stuart Turley [00:30:35] Sorry, Brian, the one thing math thing up is not mapping up. I did go to Oklahoma state and I’ve got my wonderful Oklahoma state Jersey on today, but the math doesn’t math up and we barely have crayons at Oklahoma state and that is.
David Blackmon [00:30:48] The big fat ones are the big fat one’s in a big.
Stuart Turley [00:30:50] The big fat ones and a big chief tablet, you know, and, and Oklahoma state in Urquhart has 181 gigawatts of nameplate capacity on the grid. The highest and most we’ve used in Texas this year is 82 gigawattes of power. How much have we overpaid for the wrong types of asynchronous versus D.C. It is a big overpayment that we have paid.
Brian Zinchuk [00:31:25] So, you know, the Texas experience that kind of opened up some eyes here in Saskatchewan. This is right around the time that I started writing about this sort of stuff. And I would often include references to that in my stories as well as what not to do. Well, actually, what I would do is that and it’s probably what makes part of what some of the difference is that Whenever I had a particular story like this, oh, look, wind went to zero in Alberta, I would email it directly to cabinet ministers, foregoing all their staff, going straight to their personal stuff because I’ve had good relations with these people and say, hey, guess what? We could have hundreds of people dying here and the reality is if we had, what Texas had, something like that, in minus 37 weather, which is minus 40 is the same in Fahrenheit and Celsius. You know, it wouldn’t be 300 people dead, it would be 3000 or more.
Stuart Turley [00:32:28] And let me ask this, sorry, sorry. I just want to cut, cut in on, on this. Britain’s wind boom. This is from Felicity Bradstock. And I saw this one and threw up yesterday and, uh, how Britain’s wind boom has slashed energy bills. Holy smoke. Again, this goes back to math. Ain’t math thing up. Let’s be drinking some good scotch. Oh, absolutely. That you get the most expensive uh, energy in the world and you write this article, the numbers don’t make it sense. She may be a nice person.
Tammy Nemeth [00:33:07] I feel like this was written from like a news release from the UK government or something. Or
David Blackmon [00:33:14] from Climate Insight. Climate news.
Brian Zinchuk [00:33:15] You wonder why Trump says fake news.
Stuart Turley [00:33:18] Yeah, I was like, you know, and Felicity, I’d love to interview you on the energy news beat podcast because my crayon broke when I was laughing so hard. So sorry about that.
Brian Zinchuk [00:33:33] The reality is that, you know, Alberta, which I said doubled their wind and solar in the last few years, in that same time, they shut down their coal fleet, converted some to natural gas, but not all of it. But they’ve added so much wind and soil that when it does hit minus 30, as it did in January, I think a year or two ago, for four days, they had grid alerts four days in a row. And it got to the point where their dispatchable contingency reserve went to zero. At which point you start having exactly what happened in Texas where when your demand outstrips supply, you start to having a drop in frequency and they’ve had more grid alerts in the last three years. They’ve had in the previous 20 to that. And what changed? Oh, we got rid of the dispatchable base load as Susie mentioned and Dave as well. And we added unreliable and not only just unreliability, When it’s minus 30. They have to shut down wind turbines because they can shatter from cold, brittle behavior. One, one thing, one of the first things I learned in my, uh, spent a few years flunking out of mechanical engineering was cold, brittle behavior and, uh. The reality is that turbines have to shutdown. So in Alberta, that’s 5,680 megawatts and Saskatchewan’s 817 megawats. Sorry. On the day you absolutely need it the most when people are turning on space heaters and everything else that, you know, get a little bit warmer, you don’t have it. And that almost always happens when it’s dark. So you have no solar either. And like I said, I’ll burn up to 94% of their power is natural gas.
David Blackmon [00:35:15] Well, it leads you to the, the inevitable conclusion that the most predictable thing about wind and solar is that they aren’t going to be there when you need them, right? They’re going to fail in any major weather event where the grid’s under stress, they’re going be the first to fail. You can present it’s not just predictable. It’s a certainty that that’s going to happen. But we could build out the storage without adequate capacity ought to be prosecuted.
Brian Zinchuk [00:35:51] Let’s talk about storage for a second. Now, the reason I talk so much about Alberta is that they publish every generator, every facility in the entire grid, minute by minute data, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And there’s a website that logs it and you can data mine that to your heart’s content, which I frequently do. Saskatchewan puts out one 23,000th the amount of data points. And I know because I’ve done the calculation. So because it’s a closed market, they don’t wanna put that information out. But The stuff that they do put out is because I kept beating them over the head that they finally put out something. Anyhow, my point of this is that one of the interesting things is Alberta has built 10 grid scale BESS Tesla pack batteries. For almost all of them, for the last few years, they typically produce power to the grid on average three times per unit for seven to 21 minutes at a time. The most capacity they have is running full out, supplying the grid for one hour before they’re depleted. So that’s 190 megawatts of capacity that they can produce for one our, and that’s it on a grid that generally needs 10,000 megawatths every minute of a day. So the reality is that people are spent, and we built one of these in Saskatchewan, I don’t have data on it, but I do know that it was announced at $26 million and came in at $36 million.
Brian Zinchuk [00:37:22] 20 megawatt capacity that can output that for one hour.
Irina Slav [00:37:28] I just thought about storage today, but about Germany, they don’t have a lot of battery storage. In fact, they have a lot less. I’m sorry, I seem to be frozen.
David Blackmon [00:37:37] The video is frozen, yes.
Stuart Turley [00:37:40] I was going to say, you look nice, you sound great.
Irina Slav [00:37:44] In a very bad position anyway and the reason they don’t have storage which is never mentioned is that it’s too expensive and it takes up a lot of space and and their batteries the batteries they have less than three gigawatts for utility scale backup they can only discharge electricity for a period of one hour but next year from next year all new battery capacity will be discharging for a maximum of two hours which is great but the spanish blackout lasted for 10 hours so what are you going to do if this happens in germany
David Blackmon [00:38:25] Right. And winter storm, Yuri lasted for four days, four days. Oh, or how you is that?
Brian Zinchuk [00:38:32] We had seven days in January of, I think it was 23 or 24, SAS Power Report, seven days of no appreciable wind at all in January.
Tammy Nemeth [00:38:42] You get those systems in the wintertime and it’s just still, it’s just still and it, and that happens in Europe as well. That you get these particular weather systems and it is, everything’s calm. So it’s like, well, how does wind work then? And it tends to be not necessarily sunny in the wintertime, so you’re certainly not going to be getting the solar, so, you know, then it’s like, will you end up having to create too? This is what we’ve been talking about a lot on the podcast is that you have to have two separate grids. Or three, you know, you have a reliable one and then you have the one that isn’t reliable and you use the unreliable one when you can, but ultimately you’re paying for both. You’re paying for them. And then they want to say that, you, know, the wind and solar makes everything cheaper. Well, no, because you have to build two grids in order to have power when you need it.
Brian Zinchuk [00:39:33] So this is, I follow you guys. I watch almost every episode, even if I don’t watch it live, so I’m not a morning person, but you know, you guys discuss this a lot. I guess what I really want to bring to this discussion here is that these are things that we know because we, the five of us talk about this on a daily basis. But the fact that Saskatchewan has gone and you know said, we shall not do this. See ya. We actually made a law called the Saskatchewan First Act, which reasserted our constitutional right into constitution. It actually says that the provincial governments have sole jurisdiction on electrical power generation. And we’ve said we’re gonna do that. We don’t care what the feds are gonna tell us. The feds asserting a carbon tax. We wrote a law that says carbon tax cannot be applied to SAS power or crown utility or to the people, it all goes to one person, the SAS Power Minister, who was on stage in Estvan two weeks ago, joking that he has $261 million in carbon tax bills sitting on his fridge, so his kid can’t get a PlayStation. You know, but I mean, what’s really important here, though, is that we are the finger in the dike. We are the ones who are saying… Is far no further. We are done with this. We are going to fight back. We are not throwing, and it was one of the things I’d often said in my emails. Why are we throwing away what we know works for what we absolutely does not work?
Tammy Nemeth [00:41:12] Exactly.
Brian Zinchuk [00:41:13] And you know, it’s finally registered. We’re going to keep doing coal for another generation. And if we put carbon capture on it, honestly, there’s no reason to shut down coal ever if you have carbon capture on it because almost all your emissions are captured. Yeah. You’ve captured your CO2, 80, 90% of it. You’ve also captured almost all of your socks and knocks. So, you know maybe some mercury, but compared to everything else. That’s pretty clean stuff. And at that point you can continue to produce oil for fuel and for everything else you use oil for. And I think that Saskatchewan’s taken a while to get here, but I think we are leading the charge on this. And I understand there’s some remorse in Alberta that maybe they shouldn’t have shut down their coal fleet.
Tammy Nemeth [00:42:11] Yeah, but I mean, I think that was really outside of the current government’s hands. I mean the fact that the NDP rushed through with that, the socialist government, and then to reverse it again, because they paid out a whole lot of money.
Brian Zinchuk [00:42:25] Well, they’re paying that in those power bills. One of the things that you guys talked about for price, Dave, you talked about how price fluctuations. So Alberta, the Alberta Electric System Operator has, it has limits for high and low price. So the price can go to zero, which it often does when there’s too much wind and go to a thousand dollars Canadian per megawatt hour, when there is, you almost always, when there was no wind, the only time that happens is when it bottoms out and it happens. Quite a bit. So they’re currently restructuring the market under a conservative government and they’re going to increase that to negative 100 and positive 3,000. And I did a story analyzing that. Now this is utterly abysmal because just the integral under the curve, if anyone remembers calculus, you know how many hours do you need at $3,000 per megawatt to equal your usual $20 per megawatt. It is astounding how bad of an idea that is, and yet that’s what the Alberta government is doing under a conservative government.
Tammy Nemeth [00:43:33] I don’t know. That’s just crazy. I don’t t know why they’re doing that. But the other element is the way that this is being pushed in Canada is that there’s hydro resources in other provinces, which makes the 80 percent of the Canadian grid so-called clean, right? So we have lots of hydro in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, some of the Maritimes, and then there’s the nuclear power. And so that puts Canada at this 80 percent whatever clean number. But Alberta, Saskatchewan, we don’t have that much hydro. And I know Saskatchewan does have a dam of Lake Diefenbaker and so they’re able to generate a little bit of hydropower, but we just don’t have the water. Don’t have the the water to do it. And so just let me finish here. One of the things that they’re saying is that we’re going to have all these connections. And so we’re going to build these mega offshore wind farms. In the Maritimes and then send that electricity through high voltage lines to Saskatchewan so then Saskatchewan won’t have to rely on its coal. And I think this is the sort of pitch that they’re making with Wind West, which is this ridiculous idea, and all of this sort of interconnection transmission stuff that they are proposing.
Brian Zinchuk [00:44:54] I know this culture has this idea that they’re going. You know, to use a Southern American term, God bless them. They got a premier who thinks he’s gonna make Nova Scotia into an energy superpower. And the one thing he is gonna do is gonna restart gas drilling offshore, which is good. But, you know he plans on building massively something like 60 gigawatts worth of wind generation capacity off of Nova Scotian. It’s just utterly insane. Like you say, he wants to supply into Canada. Well, on normal AC transmission lines, what’s the line loss? What, 1%?
David Blackmon [00:45:35] That’s what I was about to ask. That’s a long, long trip.
Brian Zinchuk [00:45:40] Yeah, so, you know, that’s, I mean, yeah, you can go high voltage DC, but you know the reality is that the practicality of it is next to impossible. And one, one thing to remember about wind, I had this epiphany the other day, because I was out once when they were constructing a wind turbine facility near Cinnabar, Saskatchewan. And I realized that when you assemble these things and the crane’s out there and it’s lifting a great big nacelle and whatnot, they have to do it on a when it’s calm. Which means every single place that a wind turbine is assembled has calm days. Otherwise they could have never assembled it in the first place. So it’s just utterly ridiculous.
David Blackmon [00:46:24] Well, and on those high voltage power lines, there’s a, you know, Texas again, provides a, an object lesson, uh, and a word of warning in that when we built our, uh initial high, high power lines from the Permian basin where the first wind installations were going in and fan handle, uh to the market centers in Dallas and Houston, the, the wind people said, Oh, you know, the total costs all ends are going to be a billion dollars in the legislature. 2001 choked and said, okay, we’ll subsidize that. 10 years later, the final tab was $7 billion. Okay. 700% cost overrun. And that’s what’s going to happen with those lines too. It happens every time it’s done. It’s going be an enormous cost over run. The initial estimates are lies. They’re outright lies just designed to get the government to say, okay. We’ll move ahead.
Brian Zinchuk [00:47:20] So now apply that, okay, so the government of Canada through its federal budgets and through various different things has frequently said the Canadian grid is expected to double in the next 24 years. Yeah. Double. So what that means is that imagine, I’ve used this example, they were twinning the highway where they have initial two lanes and they add another two lanes to make a four lane highway south of Regina. They did 10 kilometers. And they, it took two years to do that. And, you know, it costs a fair bit of money to do that and I need another 10 kilometers here. You know, that’s six miles a chunk. Now do that for every single highway, road, street, alleyway in the entire nation in 24 years, one month and 21 days. Okay. Because that is what doubling the grid is. Everywhere you see one transmission line, you need two transmission lines. Everywhere you see one generating station. You need two everywhere you see one, uh, you know, power line running down your back alley, you need two of them. That is the reality of doubling the grid. And where are you going to get all the material? Where are you gonna get the copper, the aluminum, the steel, the workers, the construction crews to do all this, the, uh you know the right of way access for all this stuff is utterly unbelievable. And yet this is the mantra. Not only have the Canadian government here coming out of the United States as well. We’re going to double the grid. Well, if we can’t build, you know, there’s that one transmission line or having issues with in the Southern States. Uh, I think it’s, oh, uh, Oh, it’s I think smoke a home with some of that area there. Steve might know about it. One that they couldn’t get built. Oh, the one on the reservation. Yes. Uh.
Brian Zinchuk [00:49:10] So now multiply that times the entire country. We’re going to double the grid and we’re going to do it in 20 years. Good luck with that.
Tammy Nemeth [00:49:21] Especially with distributed power. I mean, it makes no sense.
Stuart Turley [00:49:25] The quiet part nobody’s talking about is the fact that China and India are building coal plants, like you won’t believe we lost, we’ve lost the war. Clean coal Brian, as you bring out as absolutely a phenomenal technology using CO2 capture to enhance oil makes a lot of sense to me. That is absolutely wonderful. Capturing the particulate matter out of a coal plant to turn it to clean coal is feasible. What we’re facing is a total marketing machine that has been built around wealth transfer. It is absolutely a mind boggling event. And when we see, I want to just before we run out of time, I do want to bring this up. Um, Gavin Newsome absolutely is pathetic. Um, all America’s all in and great job sharing this, Tammy. Um, uh, I don’t want you being picked up in the UK for putting out something true and funny, by the way. So, um, governors, uh. You know, we don’t have a delegate going to cop 30, but yet we have several governors going to COP 30, trying to say that they know what’s best for the United States. When America is very much looking at a national security risk caused by Gavin Newsom as he has devastated and eviscerated the oil and gas, he’s losing the state in California. We have a pipeline in California that is losing $2 million a month and they actually You’re having some Huge problems keeping that thing open and he’s now allowing Kern County Anyway, he can’t govern his own bathroom, let alone his state Anyway, sorry
Tammy Nemeth [00:51:32] That’s part of the we mean business coalition, which has I was originally set up by Mike Bloomberg, and now it’s like this other thing. And if you look at who their partners are, the climate disclosure projects series, the Climate Group, the B team, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which is also affiliated with the World Economic Forum. And so they did this last time Trump was in power, where they had a different thing called the we’re still in or whatever. Um that we’re still in coalition to say that even though trump was pulling out of paris they were still in and they were going to do everything through the cities and the states in order to have climate progress and so on and so what you showed up there on the screen stew was just the the group rebranding a little bit for the new trump uh administration and pulling out of Paris, but. They’re still doing the same thing, right? Where you’ve got the blue states who are pushing forward and all the climate stuff, you have the cities still doing it. In Canada, you have Mark Carney, who just signed on the weekend to this new carbon market initiative with China and the EU. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next little while because we have the Trump effect, which is trying, you know, really hard to have an energy realist position and to have a strong energy secure future. And then we have, the EU still doing its thing with the UK and Canada and all these other coalition groups or whatever that want to have the carbon border adjustment mechanism. They want to have carbon markets. They want to do all of this ESG stuff. So I don’t know what the future holds for what Saskatchewan’s doing with a Mark Carney government that is still pursuing these things, even though some climate activists say he’s not pursuing it hard enough.
Brian Zinchuk [00:53:25] Well, the carbon tax, you’re right. They did double down on that in the budget. Scatch and government, when it looked like Conservatives were going to win the federal government election a few months ago, they said, we’re not a federal industrial carbon tax. We’re not going to collect it anymore. 80% of it was collected by our crown power utility. That was SAS Power Anyhow. So we said we’re just not going do it anymore So what’s going to happen with that? I’m not sure. It is one thing I did want to talk about that you kind of alluded to here, Tammy, in that if the world is concerned about emissions, and I’m, not, but if it is, we have to go nuclear. And there was a big announcement that came out a week ago that came up after that conference I attended in which Cameco, which I mentioned previously, based in Saskatchewan, and Brookfield, which was formerly headed by Mark Carney. As well as Westinghouse, which they now own, signed a deal with the United States government for the development of $80 billion US of AP-1000 reactors. Sounds like it’s looking like between eight to 10, I think 10 reactors is the number I saw mentioned. Now that does two things. One, it puts a price on them, which is actually pretty reasonable price compared to what Vogel cost three and four.
Brian Zinchuk [00:54:46] They’re into the kind, you know, so that Saskatchewan is looking at building two of them, Alberta is looking and building four, there could be four going into Ontario, possibly eight into Ontario is being considered. The reality is, is that if you put that into perspective, Trump just recently sent the USS Gerald Ford to go spank Venezuela, the next few days, they’re going to probably are bombing Venezuela. The Ford is the newest nuclear aircraft carrier. It was by far the most expensive, cost $14.4 billion. The scale of that deal that Cameco, Wessinghouse and Brookfield signed of US government was equal to five Ford carriers, five and a half, which is basically half the American aircraft carrier fleet. That’s the dollars we’re talking about for nuclear deployment here. It is absolutely massive. If anything actually comes of it, it’s gonna have huge impacts. And Saskatchewan will be the one producing the uranium for all that.
Tammy Nemeth [00:55:51] We need to have a refining or a processing facility as well.
Brian Zinchuk [00:55:56] That would be nice.
Tammy Nemeth [00:55:57] That would be nice. But I noticed that also in the Saskatchewan Energy Security Plan, they’re also enhancing education. Because all of these different facilities require people who can run them. And they put forward different things reaching out to the Polytechnique institutes and whatnot in order to train the future workers at these facilities, which is good.
Brian Zinchuk [00:56:23] The very difficult thing for that is how do you convince a young person like my son, who is 18 years old, who is going into the trades, who will either become an electrician or a millwright and he’s working in the con corporation already, which is spectacular. But how do he convince his friends to go into trades, to build these nuclear things until we have a decision saying, absolutely construction starts on this day and we need that trade, you know, how to make that bet for your career if you don’t know for certain construction will start on X day and you can get hired on there. Now that is the biggest conundrum, and yeah, they are making some efforts, but they really need to add a zero to all of those things. The amount of people they’re trying to reach.
Stuart Turley [00:57:06] And I think you bring up a fantastic point and we need to get micro on the thing But I’ll tell you AI is a game changer for a lot of employees and if you don’t Understand AI or use AI you will be unemployed
Brian Zinchuk [00:57:31] My daughter’s a heavy duty mechanic apprentice. My son’s gonna be a mill raker electrician for that exact reason. I told him job that can be replaced. By a robot
Stuart Turley [00:57:42] Exactly and that’s exactly where i’m going and irena for the authors that are out there that are being replaced by ai ai is replacing a lot of writers and you look at the writers that are out there uh felicity is one of them that should be replaced um but you take a look at how AI is going to be replacing a lot of jobs for those people that keep their jobs. They’re going to need to know how to use it for me. I’m 65, but I’m learning how to weld.
Brian Zinchuk [00:58:19] I can activate it later too, Stu, if you have instructions for your backhoe.
Stuart Turley [00:58:24] Exactly!
Tammy Nemeth [00:58:31] Well, I think we’re pretty much out of time, we didn’t get to the stories today, but just to wrap up, I’d like everyone just to say where people can find them. Brian, where can people find you?
Brian Zinchuk [00:58:41] Pipelineonline.ca
Tammy Nemeth [00:58:44] Okay everybody, that’s pipelineonline.ca. If you want more information about what’s happening in Saskatchewan, you can follow Brian and you’ll see what’s in nuclear, mining, all kinds of things. David, where can we people find you?
David Blackmon [00:58:59] Blackmon.substack.com
Tammy Nemeth [00:59:02] and he’s on the Energy Editions now. He’s given up on the absurdities. I guess we’ll have to wait for another Democrat.
David Blackmon [00:59:11] There’s no transition going on.
Tammy Nemeth [00:59:14] Yeah, no transition.
David Blackmon [00:59:15] I just had to drop that part.
Tammy Nemeth [00:59:17] And Irina, where can people find you?
Irina Slav [00:59:19] At Irina Slav on Energy. For now, I’m still thinking about rebranding, but I haven’t settled on a new brand yet. So for now, it’s Irina Slav on Energy. Okay.
Tammy Nemeth [00:59:32] Oh, but it’s good. It’s just a point. And I loved your piece about the pets on the on the weekend. That made me angry. It made me agree to what they’re trying to do so bad. And Stu, where can people find you?
Stuart Turley [00:59:51] Hey, you can also find me at energynewsbeat.co and I just interviewed Lars and Irina, he said to say hi. So he you’ve got a far reach out there. He is a cool cat. He wrote the book the unpopular truth that’ll be coming out friday So you can also find me on energynewsbeat.co or dot com and my Substack. So brian, I really appreciate you and everything that you’re doing And I love all of your comments and heckling when you do get out of bed and join But you are a you are true treasure for for the energy industry. Thank you
Tammy Nemeth [01:00:30] Thank you, Brian. Thanks everyone. Have a great week.
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