ESTEVAN - Unit 4 at SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Power Station is scheduled to be retired on Dec. 1, and decommissioning work is slated for next year.
As part of the terms of the equivalency agreement between SaskPower and the federal government, reached in late 2018, Unit 4 would have to be retired by Dec. 31 of this year, and Unit 5 will need to follow suit three years later.
But SaskPower said Unit 4 has to be shut down a few weeks prior to Dec. 31, so Dec. 1 was the chosen date.
“When you shut a unit like this down, there is a lot of work to do when it comes off, draining things, getting things prepped, so you’re not going to run it right to midnight on December 31st. It’s not a wise thing to do. So you’ll bring it off a little bit earlier,” said Howard Matthews, SaskPower’s vice-president of power production.
Crews will have to drain the boiler and other equipment. It’s not something they want to do on Jan. 1, with the cold weeks of January ahead.
Since the process of decommissioning won’t begin until next spring, likely April, Unit 4 would actually be available to be restarted, if necessary, should SaskPower wind up in a short supply situation during the winter.
“We would actually be able to restart it for a short period of time,” said Matthews. “We wouldn’t expect to, but you never know what happens in Saskatchewan winters. You’re never sure what the weather’s going to hold.”
If Unit 4 were to be brought back online temporarily, it would take a few days to fire up again.
Other work that has to be done before decommissioning begins would be to take care of the coal pulverisers, which are used to grind up the coal to burn in the boiler. They are large pieces of equipment with large amounts of oil in them.
“When you come offline with the pulveriser, you want to drain the oil while it’s warm,” said Matthews, who compared it to changing the oil in a vehicle; it’s best to do it when the engine is warm.
Electrical pieces of equipment will need to be isolated, since there is no need to have some of that equipment at that point.
The decommissioning work is expected to take a few months. Units 1 and 2 were decommissioned nearly a decade ago, but a lot of equipment is still in place.
“Depending on what you do with the plant, there’s no reason to remove a lot of this equipment until you make other decisions, and that will be the case for BD4 as well. In a few months time, after April of next year, it will look very similar to Boundary Dam 1 and 2,” said Matthews.
“To an outside observer, it would just look like the equipment is turned off and sitting there. They wouldn’t understand all of the work that’s gone on in the background to drain things and isolate equipment and those sorts of things.”
Matthews didn’t have an estimate on how much it would cost to decommission Unit 4.
Nor does SaskPower track how many employees work at the unit. Maintenance staff goes from one unit to another, while operating crews, such as those in the control room, run Units 3 and 4. Those operators will continue to monitor Unit 3.
SaskPower has stated previously that nobody would lose their job because Unit 4 is shut down, but there would be a reduction in employees at Boundary Dam. Any reduction in jobs would come through attrition.
“Nobody would be required to move to other locations,” said Matthews.
Employees would have the option to move to the Shand Power Station or other locations, but that would be a personal decision rather than a corporate one.
Unit 4 has served the province for over 50 years, he said, with 150 megawatts of reliable, baseload power.
SaskPower announced in July 2018 that it would retire Units 4 and 5, rather than retrofit them with carbon capture and storage technology. If it weren’t for the equivalency agreement reached a few months later, the two units would have had to be retired at the end of 2019.
A decision has not been made on the future of Unit 6 at Boundary Dam, which is the most powerful unit at Boundary Dam, or the Shand Power Station. If they are not retrofitted with carbon capture and storage technology, similar to what happened with Unit 3 at Boundary Dam, then Unit 6 and Shand will eventually also be retired.
Matthews also offered an explanation for why SaskPower sent out an email to its employees at Boundary Dam and the Shand Power Station, discussing the potential for a gas plant. Matthews said a decision has not been made on the future of power production in Estevan as the Crown corporation moves towards a much lower carbon footprint and net-zero emissions by 2050.
“We’re a long ways away from making decision, but we’re always looking at options,” said Matthews.
The email was sent out because Matthews said SaskPower wants to keep employees informed about different options the corporation is exploring across the province. He hopes the email didn’t cause alarm to employees or affect morale.
“To me it’s not much more than just keeping people informed that the company is looking at all of these different options that we have across the entire fleet here,” said Matthews.
