SaskPower since 1929 has been the principal supplier of electricity in Saskatchewan, Canada, serving more than 451,000 customers and managing $4.5 billion in assets. SaskPower is a major employer in the province with almost 2,500 permanent full-time staff located in 71 communities.

SaskPower was founded as the Saskatchewan Power Commission in 1929, becoming the Saskatchewan Power Corporation in 1949. The abbreviated name SaskPower was officially adopted in 1987.

Owned by the government through its holding company, the Crown Investments Corporation, SaskPower is governed by a Board of Directors who are accountable to the government Minister responsible for SaskPower.

SaskPower has the exclusive right and the exclusive obligation to supply electricity in the province, except in the city of Swift Current and most of the city of Saskatoon. The Swift Current Department of Light and Power provides electrical services within the municiapal bounday of Swift Current.^[1] Saskatoon Light & Power provides service to the customers within the 1958 boundaries of Saskatoon while SaskPower has responsibility for areas annexed after 1958.^[2]

SaskPower serves over 451,000 customers through more than 154,000 kilometres of power lines throughout the province and covers a service territory of over 526,600 square kilometres. This relatively low customer density means that while most North American electrical utilities supply an average of 12 customers per circuit kilometre, SaskPower supplies about three. In fiscal year 2006, total electricity revenue was $1,456 million (Canadian) on sales of 17.4 terawatthours of electricity.

SaskPower has a generating capacity of 3,371 megawatts (MW) from 17 generating facilities, including three coal-fired base load facilities, five natural gas-fired facilities, seven hydroelectric facilities, and two wind power facilities. SaskPower also buys power from the SunBridge Wind Power Project, Meridian Cogeneration Station, Cory Cogeneration Station, and NRGreen Kerrobert, Loreburn, Estlin and Alameda Heat Recovery Projects. SaskPower's total available generation capacity was 3,840 MW at the end of 2009.

The Saskpower transmission system utilizes lines carrying 230,000 volts and 138,000 volts. These lines also interconnect SaskPower's grid with utilities in the United States and with Atco Electric in Alberta and with Manitoba Hydro in Manitoba.

Incorporated under The Power Corporation Act (1949), SaskPower purchased the majority of the province’s small, independent municipal electrical utilities and integrated them into a province-wide grid. It was also responsible under The Rural Electrification Act (1949) for the electrification of the province’s rural areas, bringing electricity to over 66,000 farms between 1949 and 1966. To manage the high costs of electrifying the province’s sparsely populated rural areas, SaskPower used a large-scale implementation of a single wire ground return distribution system, claimed to be a pioneering effort (although some utilities in the USA had been using such a system on its rural lines). It was at the time one of the largest such systems in the world. One of the last cities in the province added to SaskPower's system was North Portal in 1971 (which had been served up to this point from Montana-Dakota Utilities' distribution system in Portal, ND just across the border).

• NorthPoint Energy Solutions Inc., located in Regina, Saskatchewan is a wholly owned subsidiary of SaskPower and is SaskPower's wholesale energy marketing agent. NorthPoint began operation on November 1, 2001. NorthPoint handles the export of power on the North American Market.

• SaskPower International Inc. was established in 1994 as a wholly owned subsidiary of SaskPower. SaskPower International investing in power projects and selling flyash.

• SaskPower Shand Greenhouse is a wholly owned subsidiary of SaskPower located near the Shand coal-fired plant. The greenhouse was built in 1991 to offset the environmental impact of burning coal. Using waste heat produced by the power plant, it grows 500,000 trees, shrubs and native plants a year that are distributed throughout the province.

All of SaskPower's generating facilities are located within Saskatchewan, with the exception of MRM. SaskPower either owns the facilities directly or through SaskPower International Inc. SaskPower International Inc. also has two joint ventures Cory (50% split with ATCO Power) and the MRM ( 30% SaskPower International Inc. and 70% ATCO Power).

SaskPower has also entered into long-term power purchase agreements from privately owned facilities in the province.

In May, 2010 SaskPower entered into an agreement with Brookfield Renewable Power, James Smith First Nation, Peter Chapman Cree Nation, Chakastapaysin Band of the Cree and Kiewit Corporation to conduct a feasibility study on construction of the Pehonan Hydroelectric Project; a 250 MW run-of-river generating station.^[5]

SaskPower was founded by an Act of the provincial legislature as the Saskatchewan Power Commission in 1929. The purpose of the Commission was to research how best to create a provincial power system which would provide the province’s residents with safe, reliable electric service.

A provincial power system was desirable for many reasons. In the early days of electricity in the province of Saskatchewan, electricity was largely unavailable outside of larger centres. Most electrical utilities were owned either privately or by municipalities, and none of them were interconnected. Because each utility operated independently, rates often varied significantly between communities – anywhere from 4^[6] to 45^[7] cents per kilowatt hour in the mid 1920s. The rapid growth in the province’s population in the first decades of the century – from 91,279 to 757,510 within 20 years – had led to a sharp increase in the demand for electricity. Finally, the provincial government had determined that the lack of inexpensive power was hampering the development of industry in the province (Ref).

While the Commission began purchasing independently owned electrical utilities with the goal of interconnecting them, the economic situation of the 1930s and the labour shortage caused by the Second World War delayed the creation of a provincial power system for nearly two decades.

By 1948, the Commission operated 35 generating stations and more than 8,800 km of transmission lines. However, most farm families who had electricity generated it themselves using battery systems charged by wind turbines or gasoline- or diesel-powered generators. Across the province, only 1,500 farms were connected to the electrical grid, most of them because of their proximity to the lines that linked cities and larger towns.^[8]

In 1949, by an Act of the Provincial Legislature, the Commission became the Saskatchewan Power Corporation. The first task of the new Corporation was to purchase what remained of the province’s small, independent electrical utilities and to begin integrating them into a province-wide electrical grid.

The final step in creating a truly province-wide grid was to electrify the province’s vast rural areas. The primary hurdle to rural electrification was the very low customer density in the province – approximately one farm customer per network mile (1.6 km) – and the extremely high cost of a network of the scale required by the vast distances between customers. After much study, the Corporation adopted a single wire ground return distribution scheme, which lowered the cost of rural electrification significantly.^[9]

The first year of the program set the goal of connecting 1200 rural customers to the network. The experience gained during the first years led to an increased rate of connections every year, leading to a peak yearly connection rate in 1956 of 7,800 customers. By 1961, 58,000 farms were connected, and by 1966 when the program concluded, the Corporation had provided power to a total of 66,000 rural customers. In addition, hundreds of schools, churches and community halls received electrical service during this period.^[10]

SaskPower has studied a "clean coal project". The intention would be to build a coal-fired plant that would effectively capture all carbon dioxide emissions.^[11] An oxyfuel system was considered but rejected due to capital cost and uncertainty of the economic value of CO2 reduction. SaskPower announced in 2011 that it would construct a CDN $1.2 billion carbon capture facility at its Boundary Dam generating station. Part of the construction cost will be offset by revenue from sale of carbon dioxide.^[12][13]

SaskPower is governed by a Board of Directors. Current directors of the corporation include: Joel Teal (Chair), Bill Wheatley (Vice-Chair), Ian Coutts, Judy Harwood, Mitchell Holash, Nick Kaufman, Bryan Leverick, Mick MacBean, Lorne Mysko, Tammy Cook-Searson, Andy McCreath, and Wendy Dean (Acting Corporate Secretary).

• IBEW Local 2067
• CEP Local 649

Print:

• Anderson, Dave. To Get the Lights: A Memoir about Farm Electrification in Saskatchewan. Victoria: Trafford, 2005.
• White, Clinton O. Power for a Province: A History of Saskatchewan Power. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1976.

Online:

• Bassendowski, Sandra. The Power of Electricity to Change Women’s Work in Post-War Saskatchewan.
• Champ, Joan. Rural Electrification in Saskatchewan during the 1950s.

• SaskPower
• Clean Coal Project
• NorthPoint Energy
• SaskPower International
• Shand Greenhouse
• Generating Facilities
• Corporate Profile
• Air Liquide Canada
• Hitachi Canada
• Marubeni
• Babcock & Wilcox Canada
• Neill and Gunter
• Esask.ureinga.ca, Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan
• The Saskatchewan Railway Museum houses the one of a kind Sask Power Rail Car