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“The report makes it very clear that there’s constraints to reaching the goal by 2050,” said Mayor Michael Fougere. “Legislative changes are required.”

SaskPower’s Power Generation Partner Program (PGPP) allows customers to develop power generation projects to sell electricity to SaskPower, but projects are approved and prioritized based on location to a substation with enough capacity.

When the city applied for permission to install a second landfill gas-to-energy system, it was denied approval because SaskPower did not have adequate grid capacity in the area.

“The Crowns must change the way they allow us to do that,” Fougere said after Monday night’s city council meeting. “I think it’s important that they would allow innovation.”

Photo by BRANDON HARDER / Regina Leader-Post

But that’s not a simple request, says SaskPower spokesperson Joel Cherry.

“I think the city’s goal is commendable and we do want to support them, but ourselves as a company we’re looking at the entire province,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “We want to get more renewables in there, but we have to do it in a way that’s manageable.”

“Partly it’s just a matter of the capacity is what it is,” he added.

Cherry said SaskPower has been in talks with the City of Regina as recently as last month, and that SaskPower is committed to working with its costumers that want to generate their own renewable energy.

But city administration is proposing a different approach.

“While the City has limited ability to affect the renewability of energy sources, it does have a greater ability to affect how much energy it consumes and how efficiently energy is consumed,” said the report.